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 Margaret Martonosi

Margaret Martonosi

Professor
Princeton University
Personal URL

Research Statement

For decades, Moore’s Law and its partner Dennard Scaling have driven technology trends that have enabled exponential performance improvements in computer systems at manageable power dissipation. With the slowing of Moore/Dennard improvements, designers have turned to a range of approaches for extending scaling of computer systems performance and power efficiency. Unfortunately, these scaling gains come at the expense of degraded hardware-software abstraction layers, increased complexity at the hardware-software interface, and increased challenges for software reliability, interoperability, and performance portability. My work explores the way forward for computer systems designers in this “Post-ISA” era of shifting abstractions. My group looks hardware and software design issues for specialization/heterogeneity and methods for formal verification. We are also increasingly focused on the hardware/software systems issues of Quantum Computing.

Interests

Accelerator-Based, Application-Specific and Reconfigurable Architecture, Effects Of Circuits Or Technology On Architecture, Multiprocessor Systems, Processor, Memory, and Storage Systems Architecture
Picture of Darya

Darya

Graduate Student
Univeristy of Rochester
(No URL)

Research Statement

Darya Mikhailenko is pursuing a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Rochester under the supervision of Prof. Engin Ipek. Her interests cover areas of energy-efficient computer architectures, machine learning for computer vision applications, memory management, accelerators, and architecture modeling for emerging technologies. Darya worked as a research assistant at Nanoelectronics Research Laboratory (Purdue University, U.S.A.) and Bioinspired Microelectronics Systems Laboratory (Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan) on the implementation of brain-computer architecture to actualize deep neural networks. Her recent work was dedicated to techniques to minimize data movement energy by exploiting asymmetric on- and off-chip interconnects. Currently, she researches microarchitecture level optimizations for AR/VR applications.

Darya is looking for internships in the field of AR/VR related but not limited to computer architecture and machine learning algorithms.

Interests

Architecture For Emerging Technologies and Applications, Effects Of Circuits Or Technology On Architecture, Instruction, Thread and Data-Level Parallelism, Interconnection Network, Router and Network Interface Architecture, Iot, Mobile and Embedded Architecture, Processor, Memory, and Storage Systems Architecture
Placeholder. No Picture provided by Charu

Charu

PhD Candidate
Northeastern University
Personal URL

Research Statement

Charu Kalra is a PhD student in the Computer Engineering Department at Northeastern University. She is part of the Northeastern University Computer Architecture Research (NUCAR) group under the direction of Prof. David Kaeli. Her research interests include GPU compilers, software reliability, machine learning, workload characterization, and performance evaluation of GPU systems. Her PhD thesis focuses on design and evaluation of compiler-based techniques to predict and improve reliability of GPU applications. In 2014, Charu was featured on NVIDIA's 'Women Who CUDA' list. She has also pursued internships at AMD and AMD Research in the past.

Interests

Accelerator-Based, Application-Specific and Reconfigurable Architecture, Dependable Architecture, Instruction, Thread and Data-Level Parallelism
Placeholder. No Picture provided by Atefeh Mehrabi

Atefeh Mehrabi

PhD Student
Duke University
(No URL)

Research Statement

Atefeh Mehrabi is a PhD student at ECE department of Duke University. She is co-advised by Prof. Sorin and Prof. Lee. Her research focuses in the area of computer architecture. More specifically, she is exploring and trying to tackle challenges of emerging reconfigurable accelerators. She got her B.Sc degree from University of Tehran in 2016 in Electrical Engineering and her M.Sc degree in Computer Engineering from Duke in 2018.

Interests

Accelerator-Based, Application-Specific and Reconfigurable Architecture, Datacenter-Scale Computing
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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