1. SOUTHEAST WOMEN
IN COMPUTING
CONFERENCE
This presentation is brought
to you by the one and only and most
fabulous person in the room right now
Elaina Cole

2. Day 1
Arrive in HOTLANTA
Ate at a place
called Noodle
for dinner!!!

3. Day 2
Keynote:
• Finding Your Why with Nancy Cox
Panel:
• What Is This Graduate School Thing? with Miranda Parker, Kayla
Desportes, Vivian Chu, Brianna Tomlinson, Tesca Fitzgerald and
Samantha Lo (Georgia Tech), Ewa Deelman (USC-ISI), and Suju Rajan
(Yahoo!)
Research Talks:
• Accessible Design with Amber Wagner (Kennesaw State University) and
Jeff Gray (University of Alabama)
• Silky and Rough: Understanding and Designing for Ambiguous
Topics with Anamary Leal and Steve Harrison (Virginia Tech)

4. Finding Your Why
Nancy Cox is the Senior Vice President and Chief
Technology Officer of Worldpay
Books she mentioned:
• Climb: Leading Women in
Technology Share Their Stories
by Bonnie Bajorek Daneker and
Sandra Coffey Hofmann
• Drive by Daniel Pink
• Start with Why by Simon Sinek

5. The Science of Motivation
3 factors that lead to better performance and personal
satisfaction
1.Autonomy
2.Mastery
3.Purpose
Now I CAN get
satisfaction!!!

6. Working in Technology
Programming Business Analytics
Design Testing
UX
Infrastructure Engineering
TECH FIELD IS UBIQUITOUS

7. Lessons Learned
• Competence matters
• You are smart
• Learn and adapt
• Make relationships a priority
• Have fun and keep a sense of humor

8. What is this Grad School Thing?

9. Masters vs. PhD
• To have professor title, really need that PhD
• Masters shorter but you don’t get as much funding
• Masters = less requirements BUT without a PhD it’s
harder to choose your own research

10. Accessible Design
• Speaker Amber Wagner is an Assistant Professor at Kennesaw
State University
• Myna: Empowering Motorically Challenged Students to
Program by Voice
• Influenced by drag and drop languages and voice recognition
programming languages
• VUI = Vocal User Interface

11. Understanding and Designing for
Ambiguous Topics
• Anamary Leal is a doctoral candidate at Virginia Tech
(http://people.cs.vt.edu/leal/)
• Words point to the thing but are not the thing
• Don’t solve ambiguities. Embrace them.
• Words can have the same property on a different
spectrum and a cultural context and influence

12. UNREALIZED POWER OF DATA
• Speaker Jay Natarajan who works for Microsoft
Consulting Services
• Jay.Natarajan@Microsoft.com

13. From Data to Decisions
• What should I do? Prescriptive
• What will happen? Predictive
• Why did it happen? Diagnostic
• What happened? Descriptive

14. Day 3
• Keynote: Dr. Ayanna Howard, “Breaking the Glass Ceiling:
Lessons Learned Traversing Through the Robotics World”
• Coca-cola factory

17. THE END