On April 19th, our department hosted a viewing and panel discussion of the film entitled, "She++ the Documentary" which addressed women's representation in computer science. Panelists included CS Professors Dr. Hwa and Dr. Litman, Professor Jean Carr, head of Pitt's Women's Studies Department, Theresa Dean, Engineering Director of KIT Solutions, and Julie Pagano, Co-Founder of Girl Develop It Pittsburgh.[April 2013]

Graduate student Timothy Luciani, Astronomy graduate student Brian Cherinka, CS alumni student Boyu Sun, undergraduate student Sean Myers, Astronomy Professor Michael Wood-Vasey,Professor Alex Labrinidis, and Professor G. Elisabeta Marai have received an Honorable Mention for their paper "Panning and Zooming the Observable Universe with Prefix-Matching Indices and Pixel-Based Overlays" at the IEEE Visualization 2012, Large-Scale Data Analysis and Visualization Symposium, held in Seattle, WA in October 2012.[October 2012]

CS alumni Lindsay Bieda and Julie Pagano founded the nonprofit Pittsburgh chapter of Girl Develop It, an organization that encourages women to consider careers in software development. The Tribune Review wrote an article entitled Girls Urged to Pursue Careers Involving Computer Software. The department's diversity initiatives are also included in the article. CS is a founding organizer and sponsor of this org.[September 2012]

As an initiative to increase diversity in our department, we are proud to be a bronze sponsor of the 2012 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women and Computing.[June 2012]

We are pleased to announce that our department is now an Academic Alliance member of the National Center for Women & Information Technology, a coalition that works to increase diversity in IT and computing. The Academic Alliance consists of over 400 distinguished representatives from the computer science and IT departments of nearly 200 colleges and universities across the country.[May 2012]

On March 29. 2012, the Obama Administration unveiled its $200M Big Data R&D Initiative. Associate Professor Alexandros Labrinidis was part of a team of leading data management researchers across the United States who co-wrote a community white paper on the Challenges and Opportunities with Big Data.The white paper, published earlier in March, will be discussed at a panel during the VLDB 2012 International Conference from August 27-31 in Istanbul. [May 2012]

The Computing Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women (CRA-W) and the Coalition to Diversify Computing (CDC), chose graduate student Chelsea Mafrica to attend the 3rd summer school workshop on Computer Architecture. Let's offer her a big congratulations! For more information on the workshop, visit: Summer School workshop on Computer Architecture. [April 2012]

Graduate student PJ Dillon has been selected to participate in the 2012 NYC Turing Fellows Summer Internship Program and matched with Sulia, a New York City company focusing on content organization. Let's offer him a big congratulations!You can find more information on the program at: Turing Fellows Summer Internship Program. [April 2012]

CS Alum, Tawfig Al Rabiah (MS'96, PhD'99), appointed Minister of Commerce and Industry in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Ministry of Commerce and Industry develops and expands domestic and foreign trade and adopts initiatives fostering the role of the private sector.[January 2012]