Conference website can be found here: init(together) Southern California Women in Computing Conference.
Forbes Article: Women in Tech: We're Init(Together)
I founded and organized the first init(together) Southern California Women in Computing Conference, which hosted over 300 female college students in computing from universities, colleges, and community/junior colleges across Southern California. I raised over $17,000 in sponsorships, assembled a career fair featuring Google, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, startups, and numerous others. I assembled speakers and panels on topics ranging from leading tech startups to research in computing, and organized a mentorship event hosting more than fifty industry and academic mentors. On April 14th 2013, we hosted the first init(together) with a waitlist approaching 50 people. In our post-conference survey, the majority of attendees agreed that attending init(together) increased their commitment to their technology careers (80%), confidence in their ability to pursue technology careers (86%), and commitment to be involved in their community (87%). Illuminatingly, most attendees (57%) had never attended a conference before. These results confirmed the necessity of init(together) and programs of its kind for increasing diversity in STEM fields. As a result of my work on init(together), the conference chair for the Celebration of Women in Computing Southern California 2014 (CWIC-SoCal) invited me to be on the Program Committee alongside faculty and industry professionals in computing.
Our team is in the process of registering init(together) as a non-profit in order to host the conference again in future years, and to start fundraising to host and build an online tool to help women and minorities understand their career options in technology.
/r/GirlGamers (January 2010 - ongoing)
I am interested in exploring feminism in technology, and am involved in getting women involved in technology and its related subcultures. I founded and currently moderate the online and offline community: /r/GirlGamers on Reddit. /r/GirlGamers is a female-oriented gaming community that focuses on the support of isolated female gamers and promotes critical discussion of women in gaming and technology culture. This subreddit currently approaches 31,000 subscribers, along with a "Steam" gaming group of approx. 1,300 members, and a Facebook group of approx. 500 members. Through this community I am exploring the ways online communities can maintain marginal ideologies and challenge mainstream values in a largely hostile culture. /r/GirlGamers serves both as a community for marginalized genders and a center from which to politicize the values dominating recreational technology culture.
Technology Career Visualization and Mentorship Tool (December 2013 - ongoing)
My experiences mentoring women struggling to identify with careers in computing motivate my enthusiasm for the development of tools to augment social diversity through practices of reflective design. I am currently designing and seek to implement a collaboratively-edited encyclopedia explicating the myriad careers and varieties of work done in technology fields. The encyclopedia will map users' interests and skills to corresponding types of work, allowing users to visually navigate jobs via commonalities between careers. The purpose of this tool is to make technical work accessible and appealing for underrepresented groups by dispelling misconceptions and illuminating career-paths. My hope is to thereby grant students more agency in determining their futures. Moreover, I want to facilitate interdisciplinary discourse by lowering barriers to understanding the nature of work in technology fields, and thus encourage the intermingling of ideologies from professionals who might otherwise remain disengaged from one another. I want to use this tool to help undergraduate students in all majors as well as high school students, in particular to help students in non-technical fields understand how they can use technology in their work and to assist students in computing majors in better seeking out mentors, choosing classes, and pursuing internships that reflect what interests them.
Aural Apocalypse Interactive Music Game (March 2012)
I used Max/MSP to explore interactive aural-visual experiences in a tongue-in-cheek open-ended game, playing on zombie/pandemic themes through harmony, dissonance, timbre, color, and some amount of cartoonishness.
Program can be downloaded here. In order to run this program, download Max Runtime 6 here, unzip "DotProject.zip", and open the "OpenMeDotSimulation.maxpat" file.
Musical Ecosystem (June 2012)
This project expands on the dot environment experimenting with proximity to cursor, user's voice, and numerous other factors. Dot behaviors are more sophisticated; dots coordinate rhythms and harmonies based on proximity to each other and create a visual web delineating their relationships to one another. Volume is correlated with cursor proximity to dots, the user can choose to passively observe dot interactions or 'herd' them with the cursor to create different harmonies. Users can decide how much they affect the music and how they experience it through both visual and aural cues as they interact with the dot 'communities.'
Pictures and .maxpat file forthcoming.