Grace Hopper Celebration 2010 - View from the Program Chairs - by Wendy Rannenberg

You might not realize it, but we started planning for this spectacular conference in July 2009. For us, it is wonderful to see the schedule come together, the letters of acceptance go out to the hundreds of presenters, the keynotes lined up, all just in time for us to start work on next year's conference.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. This year's conference theme, Collaborating Across Boundaries, highlights collaboration across boundaries of: academics, industry and government; international borders; multidisciplinary aspects of computer science; K-12 and higher education. There are probably more but you get the gist. It is a very broad set of topics.

This is a milestone conference. Not only is this the 10th celebration, it is the largest and we have responded to your input by adding new tracks, new collaborations, all at an exciting venue. This year the program committee saw an increase in the number of papers, panels and workshops that were submitted for review. Wow. So many great ideas. We have seen an increased interest in the conference from both academia and industry, here in the US and abroad. We are truly getting noticed.

Here, in this first article in our "View from the Program Chairs" series we take a look at many of the conference features and a closer look at a new event, the new Career Fair, and the Open Source track as well as the Technical Papers track.

In response to requests from our industry partners, the committee has added a Career Fair to be held on Tuesday (Note that is a day earlier than usual! Be sure to mark your calendars.) The Career Fair will have simultaneous tracks where you can meet up with our many sponsors who are hiring and also where you can work on your resume. In addition to the Career Fair and Resume Clinic there will be a Women of Color Workshop on Tuesday.

On Wednesday we will have the Phd Forum and New Investigator talks, and lots of career development workshops for both industry and academia. These will be followed by the poster session and opening reception.

After that great start the conference will have 10 tracks for you to ponder on both Thursday and Friday. (remember, it is the10th anniversary). We highly recommend you attend the Newcomers session on Wednesday to get tips for selecting from the wide variety of choices. The tracks are focused on Academia, Industry, Technical, Student, Career, our Theme track, Invited Technical Speakers, a special Steering Committee track, an Open Source track and an HCI track. There are Executive Forums, Leadership workshops and more.

The Open Source technical track is being designed specifically for the conference by a team of women who are dedicated to increasing the number of women involved in the open source community. A series of talks and hands on exercises will lead you through the process of getting started and understanding the tools out there.

In addition to the Open Source track we will be presenting a special track on Human Computer Interaction (HCI). This will be highlighted in our next article, along with some of the other special topics and presenters that we have lined up.

All in all this is going to be a very exciting conference!


Wendy Rannenberg is the Grace Hopper 2010 Program Co-Chair