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 Samira Khan

Samira Khan

Assistent Professor
University of Virginia
Personal URL

Research Statement

Samira Khan is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on Computer Architecture and Computer systems, especially building new systems by rethinking the traditional abstractions and redesigning system layers to adopt new technologies and enable future applications. Her group, Shiftlab thrives for "Paradigm Shift", and named after Thomas Kuhn's famous book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".

Interests

Architecture For Emerging Technologies and Applications, Processor, Memory, and Storage Systems Architecture
Picture of Amila Akagic

Amila Akagic

Assistant Professor
University of Sarajevo
Personal URL

Research Statement

Amila received her Bachelor's and Master's Degrees from the University of Sarajevo in Electrical Engineering within Computer Science and Informatics Department in 2006, 2009, respectively. In academic year 2007/2008 she received Fulbright Visiting Student Award and joined Embedded Systems and Architectures Lab at University California, Riverside as Junior Researcher. In 2010, she spent 1 month at Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana as a visiting academic. Then, she received MEXT scholarship in 2010 and spend 3 and half years in beautiful Tokyo, where she completed her Ph.D. at Keio University in 2013.

Her primary area of interest is Computer Architecture, including Reconfigurable Architectures, High Performance Computing and Heterogeneous Computing. Her past research mainly focused on finding new ways to accelerate compute-intensive parts of an algorithm by means of offloading it to an FPGA. The challenge is to take advantage of knowledge about an architecture and adapt the algorithm to the architecture rather than the other way around. Her PhD research focused on developing architectures and methodologies that help to reduce the execution time of Cyclic Redundancy Check algorithms, particularly those implemented using FPGAs, and iSCSI protocol implementation.

In recent years, she has expanded her research to include Digital Signal Processing, Computer Vision, Image Segmentation, Machine Learning to name a few.

Interests

Accelerator-Based, Application-Specific and Reconfigurable Architecture, Evaluation and Measurement Of Real Systems, Instruction, Thread and Data-Level Parallelism, Iot, Mobile and Embedded Architecture, Multiprocessor Systems, Processor, Memory, and Storage Systems Architecture
Picture of Lizy Kurian John

Lizy Kurian John

Professor
UT Austin
Personal URL

Research Statement

Lizy Kurian John is B. N. Gafford Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering at UT Austin. She received her Ph. D in Computer Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests include workload characterization, performance evaluation, architectures with emerging memory technologies such as die-stacked DRAM, and high performance processor architectures for emerging workloads. She is recipient of NSF CAREER award, UT Austin Engineering Foundation Faculty Award, Halliburton, Brown and Root Engineering Foundation Young Faculty Award 2001, University of Texas Alumni Association (Texas Exes) Teaching Award 2004, The Pennsylvania State University Outstanding Engineering Alumnus 2011, etc. She has coauthored a book on Digital Systems Design using VHDL (Cengage Publishers, 2007, 2017), a book on Digital Systems Design using Verilog (Cengage Publishers, 2014) and has edited 4 books including a book on Computer Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking. She is in ISCA and HPCA Hall of Fame, holds 10 US patents and is a Fellow of IEEE.

Interests

Accelerator-Based, Application-Specific and Reconfigurable Architecture, Architecture For Emerging Technologies and Applications, Architecture Modeling and Simulation Methodologies, Datacenter-Scale Computing, Effects Of Circuits Or Technology On Architecture, Evaluation and Measurement Of Real Systems, Instruction, Thread and Data-Level Parallelism, Processor, Memory, and Storage Systems Architecture
Picture of Neethu Bal

Neethu Bal

PhD Student
Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
Personal URL

Research Statement

I'm a doctoral student at the Chalmers University of Technology advised by Prof. Ioannis Sourdis. Formerly, I was a Researcher advised by Prof. Onur Mutlu at ETH Zürich, and Research Assistant to Prof. Trevor E. Carlson at the National University of Singapore. I obtained my engineering master's and bachelor's degrees in 2015 and 2013 respectively from BITS Pilani.

My recent work focuses on exploring near-data computing in the context of GPGPUs and 3D-DRAM architectures. Previously, I have worked on designing and building simulation infrastructures, energy-efficient cache memory architectures, and cache coherence protocols.

Interests

Architecture Modeling and Simulation Methodologies, 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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