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 Lishan Yang

Lishan Yang

Assistant Professor
George Mason University, Department of Computer Science
Personal URL

Research Statement

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University. My research interest mainly falls in system reliability and GPU architecture, including the reliable operation of GPUs, non-conventional sensors, autonomous driving systems, and neural networks.

Interests

Dependable Architecture
Picture of Helena Caminal

Helena Caminal

Ph.D. student
Cornell University
Personal URL

Research Statement

Helena Caminal is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Computer Systems Lab at Cornell University, advised by Prof. José F. Martínez. She is generally interested in computer architecture and systems, with a focus on processing-in-memory.

Interests

Accelerator-Based, Application-Specific and Reconfigurable Architecture, Architecture For Emerging Technologies and Applications, Processor, Memory, and Storage Systems Architecture
Picture of Vivienne Sze

Vivienne Sze

Associate Professor
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Personal URL

Research Statement

Vivienne Sze is an Associate Professor at MIT in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. Her research interests include energy-aware signal processing algorithms, and low-power circuit and system design for portable multimedia applications, including computer vision, deep learning, autonomous navigation, and video coding. Prior to joining MIT, she was a Member of Technical Staff in the R&D Center at TI, where she designed low-power algorithms and architectures for video coding. She also represented TI in the JCT-VC committee during the development of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), which received a Primetime Emmy Engineering Award. She is a co-editor of the book entitled “High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC): Algorithms and Architectures” (Springer, 2014).

Prof. Sze is a recipient or co-recipient of the 2011 Jin-Au Kong Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Prize in Electrical Engineering at MIT, the 2017 CICC Outstanding Invited Paper Award, the 2017 Qualcomm Faculty Award, the 2016 IEEE Micro Top Picks Award, the 2016 Google Faculty Research Award, the 2016 AFOSR Young Investigator Award, the 2016 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, the 2014 DARPA Young Faculty Award, the 2008 A-SSCC Outstanding Design Award and the 2007 DAC/ISSCC Student Design Contest Award.

Interests

Accelerator-Based, Application-Specific and Reconfigurable Architecture, Iot, Mobile and Embedded Architecture
Picture of Sally A McKee

Sally A McKee

Associate Professor
Clemson University
Personal URL

Research Statement

McKee received her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Yale University, master’s from Princeton University, and doctorate from the University of Virginia. Her dissertation advisor was Bill Wulf, with whom she worked on memory systems architecture. Together they coined the now-common term the “memory wall” to describe a situation in which processors are always waiting on memory, and CPU performance is therefore entirely limited by memory performance.

Before graduate school, McKee worked for Digital Equipment Corporation and Microsoft Corporation. She has also held internships at Digital Equipment Corporation’s Systems Research Center (now HP Labs) and the former AT&T Bell Labs. McKee worked as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the University of Virginia Computer Science Department for a year after graduating (waiting for the chip to come back from fab) and as a Computer Architect at Intel’s Microcomputer Research Lab in Oregon for the next two years. During her time at Intel, she also taught at the Oregon Graduate Institute and Reed College. McKee was a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Utah’s School of Computing from 1998 to 2002, where she worked on the Impulse Adaptable Memory Controller project. She joined Cornell University’s Computer Systems Lab within the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2002. She moved to the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology in 2008, and she became the C. Tycho Howle endowed chair within the Holcombe Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clemson University in 2018. She spent the 2017 calendar year on sabbatical at Rambus Labs in Sunnyvale, CA.

Her research has historically focused mainly on analyzing application memory behavior and designing more efficient memory systems together with the software to exploit them. Achieving this broad objective requires developing new underpinnings for system understanding, and thus she and her students and collaborators have developed new approaches to performance analysis; built scalable tools for application analysis and system modeling; designed architectures to enable more comprehensive system introspection and analyses; designed efficient memory systems for HPC and embedded platforms; and automated memory optimizations for HPC applications.

 

Interests

Accelerator-Based, Application-Specific and Reconfigurable Architecture, Architectural Support For Programming Languages Or Software Development, Architectural Support For Security Or Virtualization, Architecture Modeling and Simulation Methodologies, Datacenter-Scale Computing, Evaluation and Measurement Of Real 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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