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Berkeley Lab Well-Represented at Tapia Diversity in Computing Conference

March 4, 2015

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Panelists field questions during the "Multidisciplinary Computer Science: Solving the Important Questions of Today & Tomorrow" session at the Tapia conference. Left to right (seated), Elizabeth Bautista, Berkeley Lab; Jesse Lopez, Oregon Health and Science University; Silvia Crivelli, Berkeley Lab; and Kevin Carter, MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

At the ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference, held February 18-21 in Boston, staff from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (Berkeley Lab) Computing Sciences organization delivered talks, participated in mentoring and did recruiting. And for the ninth consecutive conference, Berkeley Lab was a contributing supporter.

The Tapia conference honors the significant contributions of Richard A. Tapia, a mathematician and professor in the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and a national leader in education and outreach programs.

Despite the blizzards battering Boston, this year’s conference attracted more than 800 attendees, including more than 500 students, of whom 373 were undergraduates. Here are some of the activities Berkeley Lab staff participated in:

  • Elizabeth Bautista of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, in collaboration with staff from Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge national laboratories, led a mentoring breakfast sponsored by the Department of Energy’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research office. About 130 graduate students attended the session. Bautista also presented at two professional development workshops.
  • Berkeley Lab staff Silvia Crivelli of the Computational Research Division and Sowmya Balasubramanian of the ESnet participated on the panel “Multidisciplinary Computer Science: Solving the Important Questions of Today and Tomorrow” and the Birds of a Feather (BoF) session “Exploring Cybersecurity Experimentation with Linux and DETER.” The BoF was in preparation for the security code-a-thon workshop “Exploring Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS).”
  • Computing Sciences recruiter Jeff Todd staffed a table, talking with attendees about student and career opportunities at Berkeley Lab.

The Tapia Conferences are organized by the Coalition to Diversify Computing, sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery and presented by the Center for Minorities and People with Disabilities in Information Technology. The conferences are held in cooperation with the Computing Research Association and the IEEE Computer Society.


About Computing Sciences at Berkeley Lab

High performance computing plays a critical role in scientific discovery. Researchers increasingly rely on advances in computer science, mathematics, computational science, data science, and large-scale computing and networking to increase our understanding of ourselves, our planet, and our universe. Berkeley Lab’s Computing Sciences Area researches, develops, and deploys new foundations, tools, and technologies to meet these needs and to advance research across a broad range of scientific disciplines.