Bangladeshi Women at the Grace Hopper Celebration 2014

“Congratulations!”

Who does not like an email starting with that word, especially when it's from the scholarship board of the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC)? Yes, this year I was part of the fortunate 26% of the scholarship applicants who were honored with a scholarship grant. This came as a big surprise to me since no undergraduate student from Bangladesh had ever been given this grant before.

For those of us who do not know what GHC is, The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing or GHC is a conference held every year with the purpose of bringing the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront. It is presented by the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and the Association for Computing Machinery. Attending GHC 2014 has inspired me greatly and changed my view in many ways. I am now more motivated to to pursue my dreams as a young computer scientist and I know that I can do it. I have seen that there are unlimited opportunities available in computer science.

I made my introduction to research with a technical poster presentation at GHC. The poster, titled “Transportation; Tracking and Preventing Accidents”, was on a research I am currently conducting on on the prevention of road accidents. It combines a basic stand alone object-detection method and a method involving vehicle-to-vehicle communication to predict and avoid collisions. Besides getting an International audience to present my research work to, I also received some great feedback that will take my research further.

I must say I was very nervous at first. As it was, although I had spent quite some time preparing the poster itself, I had next to no preparation for the presentation. I was far from happy with result of the couple of times I did get to practice presenting it. I had spoken to my peers and scribbled some advice in my notebook before attending the conference. However, while presenting at the conference none of it would register. I observed my audience and emphasized on the parts that caught their attention. But who knew that I could have my audience absorbed in what I had to say just like that! I marvelled at the response I received. Those in academia told me how happy they would be to have me join them and take my research further. Others from the industry exchanged cards and asked me to visit their companies as they felt they might need someone like me onboard. I had never imagined that I would be presenting my research work to people from prestigious institutions and companies and actually have them intrigued!

This year GHC opened its door to 8000 attendees all over the world. Attendees came from Nigeria, Tanzania, India, America, Sri Lanka, China, Uganda and many more. Talk about diversity! Interacting with so many different nations really changed my perspective. I made friends and learnt about the background, culture and stories of various countries. It was not just foreigners that I connected with. This year there were twenty eight attendees with Bangladeshi origins, the highest in its history. We scheduled to meet up and got to know each other. Contact information was exchanged to ensure our friendships lasted long after we left the conference.

These treasured connections are some of the best takeaways from GHC.

(The writer is a 3rd year student of CSE from BUET and the participant of Grace Hopper Celebration 2014)