Our

Mission

Women in Computer Architecture (WICARCH) is designed to create a community for women studying and working in the field of computer architecture. Our goal is to promote women in computer architecture and increase visibility for their research and development contributions. We welcome participation from all women including students, post docs, industry researchers and developers and faculty members. To be listed in our directory, please click here.

Profiles of WICArch

The mission of this section is to profile women in computer architecture across many walks of our field, from [junior, senior] x [industry, academia].

If you would like to be profiled, would like to nominate someone to be profiled, or would like to write a profile, please let us know by wicarch-chair@acm.org

Mengjia Yan

Dr. Mengjia Yan is undoubtedly one of the most delightful people you will ever meet – smart, positive, exceedingly wise beyond her years, and the kind of person who can turn a frown upside down.  She was paired with me as a mentee at ISCA 2018, but I genuinely think that it is I who have benefited from the relationship.  These days, she is a new assistant professor at MIT, having recently completed her PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2019.

Read more...

WICArch Directory

We actively maintain a list of women working in the field of computer architecture.  The goal of this list is many-fold.  First, the list services as a resource for program chairs and conference organizers to identify women to serve in key technical roles such as keynote, panels and program committees.  Second, the list is designed to foster community and help women connect with other women in computer architecture.  This list can be used by current and potential graduate students to find advisors and mentors. Four profiles, selected randomly, are shown below.  We encourage you to browse the full directory.

Picture of Toluwanimi Odemuyiwa

Toluwanimi Odemuyiwa

PhD Candidate
University of California, Davis
Personal URL

Research Statement

Interests

Architectural Support For Programming Languages Or Software Development, Architecture Modeling and Simulation Methodologies
Picture of Angeles G. Navarro

Angeles G. Navarro

Professor
University of Malaga
(No URL)

Research Statement

Angeles G. Navarro received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Malaga (Spain) in 2000. She is a Professor in the Department of Computer Architecture at the University of Malaga. She has been a Research Visiting Scholar in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Technical University of Munich, the EPCC at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Bristol, and a Research Visitor in IBM T.J. Watson Research Center at New York and in Cray Inc at Seattle. She is the author or co-author of more than 80 papers and has served as a program committee member for several High Performance Computing related conferences. Her research interests are in parallel programming models and compilation techniques for heterogeneous and reconfigurable architectures.

Dr. Navarro has been involved in many initiatives to promote women in Computer Science. She is the co-founder of WSARTECO (Women in SARTECO), a community that is part of the Spanish Computer Architecture Scientific Society, which encourages junior and senior women working in the area to increase visibility and to develop a supporting network.

Interests

Accelerator-Based, Application-Specific and Reconfigurable Architecture, Architectural Support For Programming Languages Or Software Development
Picture of Gnanambikai Krishnakumar

Gnanambikai Krishnakumar

Ph.D. candidate
Indian Institute of Technology, Madras
(No URL)

Research Statement

I'm a Ph.D. candidate at Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, advised by Prof. Chester Rebeiro. My research interests are broadly in the area of secure systems design, with a specific focus on micro-architecture level solutions against various attacks against cryptographic implementations, such as cache side-channel attacks. I'm also interested in exploring the applications of AI to help in building a more secure framework. I was one among the 12 candidates across the world to present my research at Lenovo AI Innovation Challenge Event at SuperComputing Conference 2017, Denver, Colorado. I was also one of the three-member team from IIT Madras that won the First Place in the CSAW Embedded Security Challenge 2016. We designed a secure implementation of an OpenRISC processor to detect and prevent buffer overflow attacks.

Interests

Architectural Support For Security Or Virtualization, Processor, Memory, and Storage Systems Architecture
Picture of Aishwarya Nagarajan

Aishwarya Nagarajan

Product Manager
Google
Personal URL

Research Statement

I’m currently a Product Manager at Google Cloud AI. Previously, I was the lead Product Manager for systems and software at Cerebras Systems, where we built the industry's fastest Deep Learning acceleration solution.

I have an MBA from the University of Texas-McCombs School of Business, where I was a Venture Fellow at BuildGroup and Mercury Fund; here I gained hands-on experience in developing investment themes, conducting due diligence, valuation, and assisting portfolio companies, and worked with internal data science teams to conceive and deploy machine learning projects at scale.

Prior to my MBA, I received a Masters' in Computer Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and held leadership positions within product and research groups within the smartphone industry (Qualcomm, Samsung R&D) as a computer architect.

I was fortunate to witness the explosive growth of the smartphone and tablet markets first-hand and was a member of high visibility + growth teams that collectively delivered over 1 Billion chips to users.

Interests

Accelerator-Based, Application-Specific and Reconfigurable Architecture, Architectural Support For Programming Languages Or Software Development, Architectural Support For Security Or Virtualization, Architecture For Emerging Technologies and Applications, Architecture Modeling and Simulation Methodologies, Datacenter-Scale Computing, Evaluation and Measurement Of Real Systems, Instruction, Thread and Data-Level Parallelism, Interconnection Network, Router and Network Interface Architecture, Iot, Mobile and Embedded Architecture, Multiprocessor Systems, Processor, Memory, and Storage Systems Architecture
We regularly organize a social gathering of women at the start of major architecture conferences (ISCA, HPCA, ASPLOS and MICRO).  These meet ups help newcomers to our conferences become better integrated in the community and reduce some of the pressure and intimidation they might feel at their first conference.  They provide great networking opportunities.  We hope to see you at the next one!
Would you like to attend a SIGARCH-sponsored event, but cannot because the cost of child-care is prohibitive? SIGARCH provides funds for a limited number of grants that support child care for members that would like to participate in a SIGARCH-sponsored event but are unable to do so without this support. SIGARCH provides financial assistance to subsidize a variety of child-care options. View details here.
Annually, we provide a brochure of upcoming female graduates in computer architecture. The goal of this brochure is to bring greater visibility to women on the job market and to celebrate their success as PhD students.

2018-2019 Candidates
2019 Candidates

Check out our WICARCH YouTube channel which features recorded technical talks by members of the WICARCH community.

Initiatives

We organize various initiatives to better connect women in computer architecture.

Join Our Mailing List

Our mailing list is maintained through ACM.  You can join in 3 easy steps:

1. Join SIGARCH/SIGMICRO (you don’t need to be a full ACM member — you can join a SIG only which is pretty cheap!)

SIGARCH   |   SIGMICRO

2. Update your gender in your myACM account (create/activate account as needed)

Student members: if you log into myACM, you should see a “My Student Profile” on the left menu.  This is where you can specify gender.
Professional members: if you log into myACM, you should see a “My Professional and Technical Interest Profile” on the left menu you.  This is where you can specify gender.
3. Accept to receive emails from ACM:
In myACM, under “My Contact Information”, “Email Policy”, “Current preference” should have the box “Please send me ACM Announcements via email” checked.

Join Our Slack Channel

We offer an informal mentoring program through our slack channel (wicarch.slack.com).  Women at all career stages are encouraged to join.  The mentoring program provides an easy way to connect with other women and receive advice on a wide range of career and personal issues.

If you need assistance in joining our mailing list or slack channel, please send email to wicarch-chair@acm.org.

This website serves women in the field of computer architecture.
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