The University of Chicago’s Department of Computer Science is a proud sponsor of the Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing.
The Masters Program in Computer Science (MPCS) sent two students to attend the conference this year, Bruno Felalaga and Geno Lewis. Bruno and Geno joined roughly 1800 attendees at the Tapia Conference in San Diego, California – 65% of attendees who were also students from over 200 universities.
Once back on campus in Chicago, when asked about their favorite moments, experiences, and sessions from Tapia, Geno shared that “I enjoyed networking with students from other universities and connecting with recruiters in a focused, professional setting. The session I found most valuable was a presentation by a Google Product Manager, who shared detailed insights into the process of developing and launching products. As someone interested in product management, it was inspiring to see such a fascinating presentation.”
Bruno shared, “I particularly enjoyed attending the workshop on Decolonizing tech and investigating the impact of Generative AI on BIPOC communities. This was interesting because I knew about how training of such models tends to be skewed towards data that is available in masses and also representative of the people doing the training but I was not aware of the far reaching implications of such disparities. The risk of building such general models is that they perform very well on inputs that match what the models have been trained on and for those that seem to not fall in categories that the model is well aware of in training the results can be very misleading and reducing. We took looks at certain inputs and what results they gave and some were jarring.
Another workshop was the one on creating accessible web applications which took us through how to integrate accessibility in all steps of software development. We got sometechnical introduction to frontend tools and how they can be used to make user experience better as well as to make software accessible to all. The idea that accessibility should not be an afterthought but one that is involved in design, creation and development cycles from the onset. For most of the programming experience I have it has always seemed that functionality is what is most important but it is important to me to realize that functional tools that are not accessible to most people are not achieving their fullest potential since usually those who need such tools are those who tend to need catered access. “
To learn more about the Tapia Celebration of Diversity and Computing you can visit their website. The MPCS looks forward to attend the conference next year in Dallas, Texas!