The annual Grace Hopper Conference is the world’s largest gathering of women technologists. Held this year in Houston, Texas, Wellesley was well represented by students and alums.
Category: Conferences (Page 1 of 2)
According to the SRC website:
“Held every spring, SURA’s annual conference serves as a forum where undergraduates from all over the country can present their work, connect with other researchers, and hear from distinguished leaders in the research community. Students who share their findings accordingly will receive valuable feedback from the students, alumni, and faculty members in attendance—feedback that will help them develop their interests further or redirect their efforts altogether. Students currently not participating in research may find a project that inspires them to explore an idea of their own. In this fashion, the conference will facilitate the exchange of information that is necessary for intellectual advancement in today’s highly interconnected society.”
This year about 10% of the posters at the conference won that award. We are very pleased to have Hannah’s poster picked out of about 100 posters this year!
Ada presented their recent paper, “Rewriting History: Changing the Archived Web from the Present” at ACM CCS 2017 in Dallas, TX in early November. In this paper, Ada studied web archives, which are websites such as the Wayback Machine that allow anyone on the web to time travel and see what the web looked like decades ago. Through analysis of the design of web archives and their interactions with other web technologies, this paper demonstrated a number of techniques by which malicious parties could modify the web of the past, injecting their own deceptive content so that anyone visiting a web archive will see not the historical contents of the pages they view, but an attacker’s deceptive content. The work was performed with attention to ethics, and the results were disclosed to the staff at the Wayback Machine, who quickly deployed several effective defenses against the vulnerabilities discovered, giving this paper real world impact.
The website of Wellesley College Circa 2000. You can visit it live at: http://web.archive.org/web/20000304134343/http://www.wellesley.edu:80/
Valerie Zhao ’18 and Ben Wood participated in SPLASH 2017, the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Systems, Programming Languages, Applications: Software for Humanity, in Vancouver, BC, in late October. SPLASH is an umbrella for several conferences and workshops in the area of programming languages.
Valerie won 3rd prize in the undergraduate category of the Student Research Competition, where she presented a poster and talk on her summer research work, Abstracting Resource Effects, undertaken at Carnegie Mellon University with Darya Melicher, Jonathan Aldrich, and Alex Potanin. Valerie’s collaborator Darya Melicher, a PhD student at CMU, presented more of their work at the OCAP workshop. Their work introduces a novel effect system that supports rigorous checking of how programs use system resources in a security-focused programming language.
Ben gave a talk on his OOPSLA paper, Instrumentation Bias for Dynamic Data Race Detection, with collaborators from Google, The Ohio State University, and the University of Washington. Their work introduced a software system for accurately detecting data races, a problematic type of concurrent programming error. The analysis helps eliminate a source of performance overhead in error detection by exploiting properties of common program patterns.
Earlier in October, Ben’s collaborator gave a talk on their paper, PARSNIP: Performant Architecture for Race Safety with No Impact on Precision, at the 50th ACM/IEEE Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), in Cambridge. This work, with collaborators at U. Penn, designed efficient hardware support for data race detection that, combined with software techniques, could eventually provide always-on concurrency error detection much like modern memory-safe languages provide explicit runtime exceptions for null dereferences or array bounds errors.
Wellesley is well represented at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Orlando.
Several members of the Wellesley community traveled to Denver in May for ACM CHI 2017. The Wellesley HCI Lab presented several papers, including:
- Communicating Personal Genomic Information to Non-experts: A New Frontier for Human-Computer Interaction.
- Designing for Uncertainty in HCI: When Does Uncertainty Help?
- Understanding Gaming Perceptions and Experiences in a Women’s College Community
Wellesley participants included HCI Lab director Orit Shaer, HCI research programmer Lauren Westendorf ’15 (pictured presenting), alumnae Johanna Okerlund ’14 (now a grad student at University of North Carolina Charlotte) and Veronica Lin ’15 (now a grad student at Stanford), professor Takis Metaxas, and others.
A new interactive website developed by CS major Andrea Jackson ’18 enables interactive exploration and analysis of data about 20 years of Ruhlman Conferences and was featured in the announcement of this year’s Ruhlman Conference. Andrea’s work is based on foundations developed by students in Eni Mustafaraj’s Data Analysis and Visualization course and students in Orit Shaer’s HCI Lab. Eni’s students presented results from a class project last year at Ruhlman 2016.
Andrea carried the work further during the 2016 Summer Research Program with advisor Eni Mustafaraj. She presented work on the website at Tanner 2016 and launched it ahead of Ruhlman 2017.
Congrats on the launch!
Members of the Wellesley HCI Lab traveled to Yokohama, Japan, in March for the 2017 International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interactions. They presented:
- A paper on BacPack: Exploring the Role of Tangibles in a Museum Exhibit for Bio-Design
- A demo of HoloMuse: Enhancing engagement with Archaeological Artifacts through Gesture-Based Interaction with Holograms
Clara Sorenson ’18, Anne Schwartz ’18, and Eni Mustafaraj traveled to Niagara Falls in November, where Clara and Anne presented a poster on their work on Habitat Explorer at the ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces. Habitat Explorer is a collaborative educational game for large-screen multi-touch displays that introduces children to basic concepts of data collection and data science. Clara and Anne developed the game for the MultiTaction displays in the Wellesley HCI Lab during the 2016 Summer Research Program.
Several Wellesley students, alums, and faculty converged in October for the 2016 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Jenny Wang ’17 also caught up with C of CLRS.
