ACM WOMEN’S DAY

A one day program on The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) - Women’s Day was organized at Dogra Hall, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IITD) on 14th February, 2014. This event was organized by ACM in association with IIT Delhi and was sponsored by Adobe, Google, Microsoft Research, NEC, TATA Consultancy Services, IBM, Opera Solution, and Persistent Inc. Ms. Bhanu Bhardwaj, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Dronacharya Group of Institutions, Greater Noida was delegated to attend the event.

The first technical session was delivered by Dr. Radia Perlman, Software designer and Network Engineer, Intel. She is most famous for her invention of the Spanning-Tree Protocol (STP) which is fundamental to the operation of network bridges. She focused the session on Protocols, people and Plexiglass.

Ms. Ritu Anand, IIT Delhi delivered the next session with highly informative talks on Aspirational Deficit or Growth Barriers in the Human Resources. Her talk focused on the human side of women and the leadership gap that exists in Corporate India. She emphasized that despite technology companies being in the forefront of hiring and number of women in the engineering institutes at an all-time high, the leadership gap still persists.

The next speaker of the day was Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaarguru, Assistant Professor, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Delhi and Ph.D., School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He delivered an interesting perspective on Privacy and Security in Online Social Media. With increase in usage of the internet, there has been an exponential increase in the use of online Social Media on the Internet, websites such as Facebook, Google+, You Tube, Orkut, Twitter and Flickr have changed the way Internet is being used. He informed the audience about the dangers and precautions needed while surfing social media sites.

Dr. Laura Haas, IBM Fellow Director for Technology and Operations of IBM Research’s Accelerated Discovery Lab which is creating a plug-and-play environment to facilitate deriving insight from data delivered the next technical session. Dr. Haas was the Director of Computer Science at IBM Almaden Research Center from 2005-2011 and had worldwide responsibility for IBM Research’s exploratory science program from 2009 through 2013. She focused her talk on integrating Information to enable the benefits of Big Data. She shared with the audience that data volumes are sky-rocketing and new sources and type of information are proliferating; we can track and obtain data faster than ever before. New models, analytics, system and tools are enabling this wealth of data to be used to save lives, optimize businesses and accelerate discoveries in many fields.

The last session of the day was on Sexual Harassment at Workplace. It was a panel discussion and the Panel Coordinators included Ms. Ravinder Kaur from IIT - Delhi, Ayesh Kidwai, Jawahar Lal University, Ms. Sudha Komat from JNU, Ms. Sudeshna Sarkar from IIT - Kharagpur and Mr. Mrinal Satish from National Law University, Delhi. The session provided very useful insights on the definition and legal provisions of the contemporary topic.

The proceedings of the day ended with a Vote of Thanks delivered by Ms. Ritu Anand.