Five women students from the Department of Computer Science (CS) will travel across the country to participate in mentoring and learning opportunities thanks to several funding awards.

The first group of women CS students will travel to the 2014 CRA-Women Graduate Cohort Workshop taking place April 11-12, 2014 in Santa Clara, California. The workshop is the cornerstone of CRA-W’s efforts to increase the ranks of senior women in computing by building and mentoring nationwide communities and they received over 500 applications for the award.  

Recognizing their academic accomplishments, CRA-W provided funding for SBU CS graduate students Samhitha Kuduvalli Vasudeva Murthy and Jesmin Jahan Tithi to attend the conference. The Department of Computer Science also acknowledged the accomplishments of Anchal Agarwal, Aakrati Talati, and Jayashree Divakara Reddy, and awarded travel funding to them as well.

 The CRA-W workshops are extremely well received by women participants, with 302 women attendees last year. The 2014 Grad Cohort Workshop is sponsored by Microsoft Research, ACM SIG Special Project Fund, Computing Research Association, Google, ACM SIGPLAN, ACM SIGSOFT, Yahoo!, IEEE-CS, Two Sigma, IBM and others.

In addition to the CR-W funding award, Jesmin Jahan Tithi was awarded several other funding awards. She will use an ACM-W Scholarship and IEEE TCPP grant to attend IPDPS in Phoenix, Arizona, May 19-23, 2014. “Every year only 20 awards are made worldwide by ACM, this is a great honor for Jesmin”, according to Prof. Rezaul Chowdhury, Assistant Professor of Computer Science. IPDPS is an international forum for scientists to present their latest parallel computation research. National Science Foundation also awarded Tithi a grant to attend ISPASS 2014 in Monterey, CA. The 2014 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS) was held in March.

About the Department
The Department of Computer Science at SBU is ranked among the top 20 computer science departments in the nation. Interdisciplinary collaboration and research recognition elevates and attracts internationally renowned faculty who have made significant contributions in visual computing, networking, computer systems, cybersecurity, algorithms, verification, and intelligent computing.

Pictured above: Aakrati Talati, Samhitha Kuduvalli Vasudeva Murthy, Jayashree Divakara Reddy, Jesmin Jahan Tithi, and Anchal Agarwal.