Pictured above: UMD Students Manikya Swathi, Rushmeet Bahra, Arshia Hassan, Arshia Khan, Kun Li, Janna Madden, Xinru Yan, Xue Moua and Yichen Wei
Eight female Computer Science students from the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) attended the MinneWIC Conference at the McNamara Alumni Center in Minneapolis in spring 2017. And UMD walked away with three of the five awards given out. MinneWIC is the ACM-W Celebration of Women in Computing for the Upper MidWest.
UMD Graduate student, Xue Gao, won the Graduate Student Poster Honorable Prize Award for her poster, "Effective User Interface With HoloLens For Group Decision Making." In addition, undergraduate students Janna Madden and Kun Li also won awards.
Madden won the Best Undergraduate Poster Prize for her poster, “Telemedicine adaption in rural hospitals and the national impact of telemedicine in rural care delivery." Li won the Undergraduate Student Poster Honorable Prize with her poster, “Mobile autism application: informing care decisions and aiding children with autism in understanding emotions"; Other graduate and undergraduate students who attended the event and presented their posters were Xinru Yan, Xue Gao, Rushmeet Bahra, and Yichen Wei.
Arshia Khan is one of the organizers of this event and an Associate Professor in Computer Science. “It’s important to engage women in the world of computer science. The goal of the conference was to provide an opportunity for young women to explore career opportunities in computing, and to network with women from academia, industry and government. We’re all making an effort to address the decline of women in computer science professions.”
Dr. Khan is looking forward to hosting the MinneWIC event at UMD in 2019.