1. Women in CS, IITM club : co­founder
WiCS­IITM (Women in CS at IITM)​ ​is a new initiative by Pranali and Aditi who are final
year undergraduates in CS department, IITM. They recently received ​The Google Anita
Borg Memorial Scholarship​ which is an honor awarded by Google to women for
excellence in Computer Science, Leadership and Passion for Technology.
WiCS­IITM aims to serve as a community dedicated to girls which will serve as a platform
for them to discuss, feel oneness and drive each other into exploring more of CS.
Why do we need such a club​? The percentage of women in CS has always been
extremely low despite the fact that a lot of initial CS engineers were women. Anita Borg
was a pioneering American scientist who dreamt of eradicating this gender disparity by
promoting women participation. She started the Grace Hopper conference for women in
CS and leadership, with merely 8­10 initial participants. Over the years, the stats have
shown great improvements, unfortunately not enough reach a 50­50 ratio. To present a
daunting figure, we still stand at only 15­20% representation of women in the CS
community. We hope this initiative contributes to Google’s endeavour in taking us a step
closer to realising Anita Borg’s dream of having equal representation of women in CS and
leadership by 2020.
Activities
To introduce you to our club, we are mainly focussed on 3 branches :
● Research & Higher Studies in CS
● Competitive Programming, Open Source Development and Placement Preparation
● Web Operations.
Please refer to the following docs for more information.
Research & Higher Studies in CS
Competitive Programming, Open Source Development and Placement Preparation
Web Operations
We look forward to an enthusiastic response and seek everyone’s contribution in making
this initiative a success. We would also like to thank Ajay Krishna, Kunal Grover, Abhishek
Shandilya, Yash Murty and Google for their invaluable support.

2. References
Anita Borg Institute​ ​Grace Hopper Conference​ ​WiCS Stanford
Women in Tech Leadership roles​ ​Women in CS Industry
Contact
Aditi Raghunathan (CS12B059) : aditir1994@gmail.com
Pranali Yawalkar (CS11B046) : ​pranali.yawalkar@gmail.com
Activities conducted in March­May 2016
Organisers :
1. Aditi Raghunathan
2. Pranali Yawalkar
1. Session 1 : Introduction to CS
a. Date : 1st March 2016
b. Agenda :
■ Explain the initiative to people
■ Spread word about the group
■ Learn about registered participants’ expectations from the club
■ Arrive at a tentative plan and schedule for the events
c. Participants : 20
2. Session 2 : Open Source Development 101
a. Date : 6th March 2016
b. Agenda :
■ To get started with knowing about Open Source development
■ Know more about ​GSoC​ and ​Outreach​y programs
1. application process
2. this year's deadlines
3. essential takeaways
4. deliverables
5. timeline
6. perks
7. any other questions regarding these two programs
■ Get to know about the speaker’s experience in this area

3. c. Speaker Bio :
■ Kunal Grover is a fourth year B.Tech Mechanical engineering student.
He started working with Wikimedia Foundation in his 2nd year. He has
worked with Language engineering team at GSoc and also mentored
at Google code in and Hackfest Shaastra. Kunal will be joining the
Software R&D at Fuji Xerox in 2016.
d. Feedback :
■ Good start to face the mountain of not knowing how to start
■ People could get in touch with other interested women from different
disciplines
■ Avenues for group projects were opened up
■ Some participants became keen to take part in GSoC and continued
to correspond with the speaker
3. Session 3 : Research and Higher Studies in CS 101
a. Date : 6th April 2016
b. Agenda:
● To get to know more about the areas in research; promising, prolific,
interesting, ground­breaking, challenging ones
● To get to understand the process of application; timeline,
recommendations, importance of projects, etc
● To get to know about the universities which are doing kick­ass work;
professors too
● Alumnus Kartik Gupta (research fellow at MSR India) joined us on
Skype for Q&A session where you can clear all your doubts such as
you ever had; be it dilemma, or how to make the right choice about
field, university, professor, importance of internship experience,
importance of cg, etc
c. Speaker bio :
Aditi Raghunathan is a fourth year undergraduate in Computer Science and
Engineering at IIT Madras. Her research interests are in Machine Learning,
Optimization, Algorithms and Complexity Theory. She is currently working
with Professor Rajsekar Manokaran in CS Department, IIT Madras. She has
previously interned at Stanford University and Xerox Research Center. She is
now going to pursue a PhD at Stanford and has received admits from
Stanford, MIT, CMU, Princeton, U Washington and UT Austin.
d. Number of participants : 30
e. Feedback :
■ Very useful session for second and third year undergraduates as they
learnt about opportunities available for research and can develop a
strong application early on
■ Current PhD students benefitted from speaking about their research to
a general audience

4. ■ Established a channel to provide important advice on SoPs and other
research­related requirements
4. Session 4 : ​Android App Development hands­on session ­ 101
a. Date : 9th April 2016
b. Agenda :
■ To get a​ ​hands­on​ experience in Android App Development
■ To be able to successfully launch ​your app on your phone
■ To get acquainted with the ​recent advancements​ ​in this space, eg,
material design, etc
■ Discuss and share the feasibility of any app ideas you ever had
c. Speaker Bio :
■ ​Yash Murty is a fifth year dual degree student from Aerospace
engineering. He took up webops as a hobby from the middle of his
second semester and went on to head the Institute Webops team and
later the IAR Webops team. His keen interest in webops and the
associated perks keep him going! He is the co­founder of a startup
called​ ​Blaffer​.
d. Number of participants : 15
e. Feedback :
■ Hands­on session was very well received ­ people wanted more such
sessions in the future
■ This was an intro session and several participants had no prior
experience ­ this was a good start for them
■ Provided good footing for interested participants to use various online
sources and build up their skills
5. Session 5 ­ Competitive Programming and Placements
Session
a. Date : 23rd April 2016
b. Agenda :
■ To know what it takes to become good at competitive programming
■ Various online sources for the right sort of problems that can allow you
to start solving first at your comfort level and improving gradually
■ A brief introduction to some select algorithms and data structures and
programming ideas that can both demonstrate the flavour of thinking
and serve as a good foundation to build up on.
■ A small hands­on component of getting started with solving problems
(simple problems that participants solved collectively)
c. Number of participants : 10
d. Feedback :

5. ■ Good introduction with lot of information for first­timers
■ Collective thinking was considered a fun exercise and we were asked
to hold more such sessions in the next chapter of WiCS
■ Proximity to end semester exams was the reason for poor turnout
6. Coding Hackathon
a. Date : 13th May 2016
b. Details :
■ 1.5 hour hackathon
■ 4 problems
■ 18 participants ­ All get a WiCS IITM T shirt
■ 3 prize winners announced ­ they’ll receive Google goodies
7. Miscellaneous
a. Link to the document that we floated around when we formed the club :
■ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UAJAaqNhxrpGAiOtlHuVyFAut
onK5rB­flKNJMYi4dc/edit?usp=sharing
b. Worked with Abhijit CS to design a WiCS T Shirt with active participation from
all registered participants ­ We’ll distribute them once college resumes in
August
c. Selected coordinators for the next chapter of WiCS after going through
applications and interviews