Research Opportunities

Grants for female programmers to attend Hacker School
Etsy is sponsoring grants for female programmers to attend Hacker School.
Hacker School is a New York-based project described by its founders (David Albert, Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock, and Sonali Sridhar) as “a three-month, immersive school for becoming a better programmer. It’s like a writers’ retreat for hackers.”
Today, in conjunction with Hacker School, Etsy is announcing a new scholarship and sponsorship program for women in technology: we’ll be hosting the summer 2012 session of Hacker School in the Etsy headquarters, and we’re providing ten Etsy Hacker Grants of $5,000 each — a total of $50,000 — to women who want to join but need financial support to do so. Our goal is to bring 20 women to New York to participate, and we hope this will be the first of many steps to encourage more women into engineering at Etsy and across the industry.

CRA's URO Zone Connects Students with Opportunities for Undergraduate Research
The Computing Research Association (CRA) recently launched a website to help undergraduate students identify computing research opportunities. The site—URO Zone, for Undergraduate Research Opportunities—provides links to a range of summer undergraduate research resources. It also posts profiles of undergraduates and details their recent computing research projects. URO Zone offers guidelines to help discover research opportunities in a variety of areas, from applied to theoretical computer science. It also defines specific research fields, describes CRA and ACM undergraduate awards programs, and lists links for finding computing research opportunities.

ACM-W Student Scholarships for Attendance at Research Conferences
The ACM Women's Council (ACM-W), with funding from Wipro Technologies, provides support for women undergraduate or graduate students in computer science and related programs who wish to attend research conferences. The student does not have to present a paper at the conference she attends. High school students will also be considered for conference support. As of 2011, 20 ACM-W/Wipro scholarships are funded annually: 10 scholarships of up to $600 will be awarded for intra-continental conference travel, and 10 scholarships of up to $1,200 will be awarded for intercontinental conference travel. ACM-W encourages the student's home department to match the scholarship award and recognize the student's achievement locally within her department. In addition, if the award is for attendance at one of several ACM special interest group conferences (SIGACCESS, SIGACT, SIGARCH, SIGCOMM, SIGCSE, SIGDA, SIGECOM, SIGSOFT, SIGGRAPH, SIGITE, SIGOPS, and SIGPLAN), the SIG will provide complementary conference registration and a mentor during the conference. Applications are evaluated in six groups each year, in order to distribute awards across a range of conferences. For application form, notification dates and more information, please visit the scholarships page.