What comes to mind when you think of computer science? Kasey Chuang and Gayatri Subramaniam, community outreach co-chairs of UCI’s Women in Information and Computer Sciences (WICS) organization, want to make sure young girls are aware of all the different opportunities available through this field of study. “When a person says, ‘computer science,’ a lot of people think it’s all math and programing,” they say, “but it’s so much more than that!”
Continue readingDuring Women’s History Month this March, ACM is encouraging computing professionals and students to use the hashtag #SheIsWhyICode to share stories of women in computing who have inspired them at any point in their career or education. The stories might range in topic from your earliest introduction to computer science to overcoming a recent professional obstacle, and the technical women could vary from luminaries of the computing field to your high school CS teacher or current boss.
Read the full story at ACM.
During a recent panel discussion in honor of Black History Month, UCI alumnus Anthony Mays talked about his journey from Compton to Google and how, back in high school, it was a computer lab instructor who suggested he turn his passion for technology into a career. Such moments can be pivotal, especially in the lives of underrepresented youth, but is there a way to capture these encounters and scale them for greater impact?
Two new projects in UCI’s Connected Learning Lab are exploring this and other questions, such as how does playing a board game lead a young girl to consider an engineering degree, or how are online learning programs exposing students to a more diverse set of career options?
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Earlier this month, Anteater basketball came to an end just one win shy of March Madness. So what is UCI’s sophomore player Jeron Artest doing now that he’s no longer hitting three pointers to help his team get to the Big West Tournament championship game, or guarding the defensive player of the year during that game? The computer game science major has returned to his other passion — video game development. His interest in games dates back to his childhood, and by his sophomore year in high school, Artest had already developed his first game, “Jeronimo.”
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When Leysia Palen first came to UC San Diego in the 1980s to study engineering, the first-generation college student knew nothing of interdisciplinary research. That changed when she switched majors to join the newly formed and pioneering Department of Cognitive Science, where she started productively questioning the relationship between social and computer sciences. After earning her B.S., she continued her inquiries, exploring human-computer interaction in the context of safety critical and complex systems at Boeing. After a couple of years, she returned to academia, earning her M.S. and Ph.D. from UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) — though before it was even a School.
Continue readingTo all the aspiring women in STEM out there, know that there is a group of alumni from UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) who have your back. On March 5, 2021, in recognition of International Women’s Day on March 8, the ICS Alumni Chapter curated a diverse panel of ambitious, trailblazing women from a variety of industries to have a dialogue about inclusivity, respect and gender equality in computer science-related fields. Chapter president Pooja Lohia moderated the online panel, “Her-story: Women Superstars in ICS,” which featured the following six superstars:
Continue readingWhat happens instead when we try to multitask, says Gloria Mark, Ph.D., is that our brains switch among tasks, requiring more brain fuel than staying with one task at a time.
Read the full story at NPR.
Amanda Cullen, a PhD candidate in informatics at the University of California, Irvine, wanted to do work that had an impact outside of academia — she found an ideal opportunity at Twitch.
Read the full story at Amazon Science.
The ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT) announced in February that Informatics Ph.D. Candidate Sumaya Almanee is the recipient of the 2021 Frank Anger Memorial Award.
“I was working on an extended version of the proposal I submitted to SIGSOFT when I received the news about winning the award,” says Almanee. “Needless to say, I was thrilled!” Almanee will be recognized at an awards ceremony at the ACM Conference on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE). “This definitely gave me the motivation and validation I needed to continue working on my paper and submit it to ESEC/FSE 2021.”
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Animation Career Review (ACR) has released its 2021 Game Design School Rankings, and UCI is ranked fifth best for game design in California, sixth best on the West Coast, seventh best (top 15%) among U.S. public schools and colleges, and 21st best (top 15%) in the nation. UCI also ranked 14th best in the nation among schools offering a games-related B.S. degree program.
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