The CAHSI’s 3rd Annual Meeting, January 15-18, 2009! We were pleased to be meeting this year for CAHSI's 3rd Annual Meeting, January 15th-18th, 2009 at the Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California. The theme of this year’s meeting was: Developing the Next Generation of Leaders through Mentoring. 

 CAHSI: Developing Leaders Through Mentoring

 By BJ Wishinsky, Communities Program Manager

Last week I was privileged to participate in the annual meeting of the Computing Alliance for Hispanic-Serving Institutions (CAHSI), a consortium of universities working to increase the number of Hispanic students who pursue and complete degrees in Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering (CISE). CAHSI’s annual meeting..read more.

Workshop One: Applying to Graduate School and Scholarships

Speaker: Michael Lezama, Executive Director of the National GEM Consortium; Jacqueline Thomas, National Recruiter for the National GEM Consortium Paco Flores, Program Coordinator for Promotion and Outreach at the Hispanic Scholarship Fund (HSF) The National GEM Consortium and the Hispanic Scholarship Fund are sponsoring a workshop designed to excite and encourage promising undergraduate engineering and science students to consider master and PhD technical research programs. The workshop will encourage students’ consideration of graduate engineering school by delivering vital information on the importance of research and innovation, the process of choosing a graduate program and preparing an application. The workshop will end with a discussion of applying for scholarships through the GEM Consortium and the Hispanic Scholarship Fund.

Workshop Two: Algorithm Partitioning for Distributed Hardware Architectures

Speaker: Rafael Arce-Nazario, University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras Target audience: Graduate Students and Faculty Tools and methodologies that assist in mapping to distributed architectures are of paramount importance in helping programmers and scientists take full advantage of the available hardware technology. This workshop will present methods and tools for mapping algorithms to distributed hardware architectures such as the evolving multicore systems. The workshop will address issues such as the development of objective functions for partitioning optimization and performance estimation and the design of heuristics for algebraic-level exploration.

Workshop Three: Becoming a CAHSI Advocate

Make an impact by becoming a CAHSI advocate! This interactive workshop will prepare students and faculty in becoming an advocate. Student advocates work with students at their home institutions by encouraging and facilitating student participation in REU opportunities, seminars, workshops, and internships. Working with faculty, they involve students in activities that assist them in preparing competitive applications to local and external programs and scholarships. The role of faculty advocates is to promote Hispanic faculty and young professionals into leadership roles. This includes award nominations and making recommendations for key committee positions, panels, and other positions that build leadership.

Workshop Four: Selling Yourself and Your Ideas

Speaker: Cecilia Aragón, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Dr. Dilma da Silva, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center Dr. Gilda Garreton, Sun Microsystems Dr. Nayda Santiago, University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez Target audience: Students and Faculty A panel of researchers and program managers from academia, government, and industry will discuss what works and what does not work in obtaining funding for research. Panelists will represent the three perspectives on funding: • Industry: patents, white papers, internal funding; the "patent vs. publish vs. trade secret" decision • Government: proposals, living on soft money, publications • Academic: proposals (research, education, equipment)