The Rocky Mountain Celebration of Women in Computing (RMCWiC) is the new name for the Colorado Celebration of Women in Computing (CCWIC). The name has changed to reflect the broad regional participation that occurred during CCWIC 2008 and 2010. The goal of RMCWiC is to encourage the career interests of local women in computing. CCWIC 2008 and CCWIC 2010 hosted 87 and 101 computer science undergradute and graduate students, respectively, as well as employees and researchers from local industry and labs and faculty from local universities. Attendees reported that the conference provided social support, facilitated networking with other computing professionals, and exposed them to a variety of social and technological advances in the field. RMCWiC (previously CCWIC) offers an opportunity for students to present their research and to network with leaders from academia, government, and industry. In this way, RMCWiC provides a unique opportunity for technical women from Colorado and neighboring states to come together to share experiences and strategies for success.

Event details for the RMCWiC 2012 Conference

Mariana Vertenstein, head of the CESM Software Engineering Group at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.  

Mariana Vertenstein is the head of the Community Earth System Model (CESM) Software Engineering Group. CESM is one of the world's largest and most complex climate models and provides state-of-the-art computer simulations of the earth's past, present, and future climate states. CESM is in addition a community model and is a product of one of the world’s largest collaborations of climate researchers. Mariana was the recipient of the 2010 CESM Distinguished Achievement Award, is a member of the CESM Scientific Steering Committee, a co-chair of the CESM Software Engineering Working Group and is on the change review board for the Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF).  She was also a co-editor of a special issue of the International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications dedicated to CESM computational milestones.
Mariana began her career at MIT, where she earned a BS and MS in Chemical Engineering. She went on to receive her Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry from Harvard University in 1989. Mariana was drawn to climate modeling because of the complex, yet also highly relevant, nature of the problems it presented. She has been a member of the CESM Software Engineering Group (CSEG) since its inception and has led and managed the team since 2004.  Since then she has instigated and overseen significant improvements to the model's infrastructure capabilities that permit addressing many of the challenges involved in earth system modeling. She was instrumental in overseeing the release of CESM to the community in June 2010, and currently coordinates bi-annual releases containing model improvements. Mariana will talk about software engineering challenges of the CESM, her career path and why she still finds science and engineering exciting after nearly 25 years in the field.

Adele Howe, professor of computer science at Colorado State University and a 2010 College of Natural Sciences Professor Laureate.

Adele Howe is a professor in the Computer Science Department at Colorado State University.  She earned her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Massachusetts in 1993. She is best known for her research in the area of artificial intelligence, specifically in planning, data mining, agents and information retrieval. She received a CAREER award from NSF for research on evaluating AI agents, a 2009 CSU College of Natural Sciences award for excellence in undergraduate teaching and designation as Professor Laureate for the college in 2010.  She was also selected to be a member of the highly competitive Defense Science Study Group 2000-2001 and recently was a member of a Defense Science Board Task Study on Autonomy.  She is on the advisory board for the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (one of the first electronic scientific journals to publish peer-reviewed research articles), a member of the Executive Council for the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and was Program Co-Chair of the Twenty-Second Conference on Artificial Intelligence in 2007, the top annual general conference in artificial intelligence.

RMCWiC is hosted by the National Center of Atmospheric Research, Colorado State University, the Colorado School of Mines, and the University of Colorado Boulder.

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