Since 2013, each year, ECE has provided partial support for eight of our undergraduate and graduate students to attend the national Grace Hopper Conference. This year we are happy to announce the students awarded ECE support, and those selected to present at the 2019 Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing Conference (GHC19). GHC is one of the largest technical and professional events offering opportunities for our students to present their research, search for internships/employment, engage in professional development workshops, and see notable keynote speakers. The conference is produced by AnitaB.org and presented in partnership with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). GHC19 will be held Oct. 1–4 in Orlando, FL.
A record number of four ECE women were selected to present at GHC19. Although one student can no longer make it to the event, the other three will receive funding from ECE, with some presenters being awarded travel grants through the Graduate School and/or GPSS.
Niveditha Kalavakonda
Ph.D. student Niveditha Kalavakonda, advised by Blake Hannaford, is working at the BioRobotics Lab in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Her research projects have been in the fields of virtual/augmented reality, computer vision, robotics and haptics applied to the field of surgery, and additionally in brain-computer interfaces. Kalavakonda is actively developing a surgical robotic system that collaboratively assists a neurosurgeon in a surgical workspace. Her research includes security while using surgical robotic systems, maintaining the privacy of patient data, and algorithmic bias and interpretability for work in computer vision and machine learning. Her GHC19 presentation is titled “Role of Computer Vision in Revolutionizing Computer-Assisted Surgery.”
Zerina Kapetanovic
Ph.D. student Zerina Kapetanovic, advised by Josh Smith, is a member of the Sensor Systems lab where she works on research involving wireless technology. Specifically focusing on battery-free sensing, low-cost low-power communication, and IoT systems. In 2015, Zerina also joined the Microsoft FarmBeats team to work on hardware research and IoT system deployments. Her GHC19 presentation is titled “FarmBeats: AI and IoT for Agriculture.”
Shuowei Li
Lastly, Ph.D. student Shuowei Li, advised by Eric Klavins, researches Bayesian inference, statistical modeling, optimal design, and algorithm design. She concurrently completed core curriculum of the MBA degree for the Technology Entrepreneurship Certificate at the University of Washington. Her GHC19 presentation is titled “BERE: Bayesian Quality-Estimator for Reproducible Biological Experiments.”
The following group of students were awarded ECE departmental support to attend the conference: Trang Tran (Ph.D.), Atinuke Abolaji Ademolaidowu (Ph.D.), Forum Vinod (MSEE), Yue Wang (MSEE), Morgan McCandless (BSEE).
