PORTLAND, Ore., March 19 -- The technical program for the 2009 Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference, including papers, papers, panels, workshops, posters, Birds-of-a-Feather sessions, a Doctoral Consortium, and a Robotics Competition, is the strongest in the conference series history, according to Ron Metoyer, Oregon State University, and Manuel Perez, Virginia Tech, co-chairs of the technical program. The 2009 event, the fifth in the series, will take place April 1-4, 2009, at the Portland Oregon Marriott Downtown Waterfront.

"All of the aspects of the technical program reflect the conference theme of 'Intellect, Initiative, Insight, and Innovation,'" said Metoyer. "The submissions we received were extremely strong, and the final choices for the program reflect the diversity of topics we want to see for this conference," said Perez. The technical program includes:

• The Doctoral Consortium, which provides Ph.D. candidates with feedback on their research and this year includes presentations on simulation models, wireless privacy, and pattern recognition, as well as issues relevant to obtaining a doctoral degree.
   
• Technical papers on security, data mining, machine learning, diversity, human-computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, biological systems, wireless networking, parallel computing, and grid computing.
   
• Panels and workshops that focus on roles for department chairs in broadening participation in computing, industry as a change agent, petascale computing, resume building, and projects with societal impact.
   
• Birds-of-a-Feather sessions on virtual worlds, accessibility issues, the use of technology to address social issues, and the new image of computing.
   
• The poster competition, part of the ACM Student Research Competition (SRC). The top three posters in the graduate and undergraduate student categories will advance to the ACM SRC Grand Finals.
   
• A robotics competition that tests students' skills in building and programming robots to operate both in virtual and real-world environments.

For complete conference information, including a schedule and information on all of the invited talks and the technical program, see http://tapiaconference.org/2009/prog_sched.html.

Conference and hotel registration information can be found at http://tapiaconference.org/2009/travel.html. Hotel rooms are limited; contact Ewa at tapia@cteusa.com for assistance. Conference registration is open up to and during the conference.

About the Tapia Conference

The Tapia Celebration is organized by the Coalition to Diversify Computing (CDC), and sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in cooperation with the Computing Research Association (CRA) and the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE-CS). The CDC (http://www.cdc-computing.org/) is a joint organization of the ACM, CRA, and IEEE-CS.

The conference honors the significant contributions of Dr. Richard A. Tapia, University Professor and Maxfield-Oshman Professor in Engineering in the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics and Director of the Center for Excellence and Equity in Education at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

The Tapia 2009 Celebration is made possible by the financial support of a number of academic, research, and business organizations at several levels, including:

• Gold Supporters: Empowering Leadership Alliance, Rice-Houston Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate.
   
• Silver Supporters: Google, Microsoft, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Virginia Tech University.
   
• Bronze Supporters: Georgetown University, Harvey Mudd College, IBM Corporation, Indiana University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, University of Notre Dame, Oregon State University, Rochester Institute of Technology, Symantec Corporation, Tufts University.
   
• Contributors: Anita Borg Institute, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, National Center for Women & Information Technology, University of Texas at Austin.

Organizations interested in supporting the conference should write to funding@tapiaconference.org. Benefits for supporters at several levels are posted on the conference Web site.

-----

Source: www.richardtapia.org