More Updates!

Life is a bit hectic at the moment. I should remember to take more time out to blog about all the cool things happening around me!

Here's a short update of stuff I've been up to recently:

• Showing friends from Canada here for the CRA-W Grad Cohort around Seattle
• Judging a student competition at Microsoft
• Won SFU's internal competition for the nomination for a national award, and am now preparing the official proposal for the external competition
  
• Working on cool stuff at work (yep, I know that's vague, but trust me, it's cool)
  
• Oh yeah, and my trip to Paris in a week and a half for a two-week holiday. ;)

Like I said, busy!

Progress & Updates

2008 just flew by and given my crazy schedule over the past few months, I've been neglecting my blog a little. At any rate, I wanted to summarize my progress over the past year. Some neat things happened, including:

• being awarded a NSERC/MITACS Industrial Postgraduate Scholarship
• completing three interesting projects during my internship
• getting two papers published, one of which is in a top database conference
• working on a patent application
• being invited to the 2008 Google Workshop for Women Engineers in San Jose
• winning a Google Global Community Scholarship in recognition of my service work in the School of Computing Science/WICS

So what's in store for me this year? Well, I've already blogged a little about my thesis. I'm working hard on that now, but I will also take one course (CMPT 881, Algorithms for Large Datasets). I'm wrapping up my internship and getting ready to graduate...and thinking a lot about What Comes Next.

End of Semester Updates

I have had a very busy month. I recently started working at my internship full-time, but am also working on my thesis project - a good chunk of which I've managed to finish on evenings, weekends, and lunches, over the past 3 weeks. So, I haven't had much time to update recently. But that's not to say nothing's been happening!

Yesterday we held our "End of Semester" Beach BBQ and Fireworks Event (for WICS). The day started around 2:30, when we met up at SFU. That morning, I had been to several different stores looking for a bocce set, with no luck, so we first set out to find one. So began the Great Bocce Hunt. We went to Lougheed Mall, where a search of Wallmart was fruitless. We moved on to Sport Chek, which wanted $70 for a set! Angelica found the number for Canadian Tire and we decided to head there next. Luckily, we managed to find a nice set for around $20, and then we were off to the beach.

After some adventures in BBQ lighting:


we finally got started with the cooking, in between several rounds of bocce:


While we were doing this, someone from a fellow group of barbeque-ers approached us asking for something to light their BBQ with. We gave them some of our matches, and thought that was the end of it. But after finishing our food (or so we thought), he came back with two large packages of meat. Apparently they couldn't finish them and wanted to thank us for the matches. They wouldn't take no for an answer, and so we cooked both packages, one of which turned out to be some fairly prime cuts of pork (pre-marinated and everything!).



No sooner than had we finished cooking this free meat, a group of guys came running up to check out all our food. We couldn't eat it all so we gave them some, at which point the last member of their party came running up. I'm sure he didn't know about the food, but it seemed like he had some kind of built-in radar because he made a beeline straight for us. This was, as his friends called him, "The Olumpian" (apparently, a former Olympic swimmer?). He is a little lumpy for an athlete I guess, hence the new nickname. They invited us to their party a few blocks away, but we didn't take them up on it. And that rounds out the day - first we were given free meat, and then it was taken away.

In other news, I have a few exciting things to announce about this year's Grace Hopper Conference! First, I am going to blog about my experience there for the conference (officially!), and second, I won a Google Global Community Scholarship, which should fully cover my trip to Colorado in October! I can't tell you how exciting this is. Over 600 people applied and I really had no expectation of winning. It is an honour and I am really looking forward to going. :D

Official Google Blog: Congratulations to our U.S. and Canadian Anita Borg Scholars

Congratulations Ming and Angelica! :D

Google Girls — FAS

Here we are! That's so cool, thanks Barry for writing such a nice article about us.

Richard Tapia Robotics Competition

The team from SFU that I am a member of, Nexus 6, submitted materials for the qualifying stage of the Richard Tapia Conference Robotics Competition on August 24th, and today were notified that the code we designed passed the trials it was put through for this stage. This means that we have been invited to the on-site competition in Orlando, Florida, this October. We are all very excited!

In other news, my has NSERC has ended - but the research continues! I will be taking CMPT 415: Special Research Topics, with Dr. Pei this fall in order to keep working on our projects.

Funding Update

A while back I won a scholarship from studentawards.com - a site I have been a member of for almost 10 years but have never won anything from until recently. For that award I wrote a proposal for a social networking site geared at connecting students with leaders in their fields. You can read a summary they've posted here.

NSERC Work, Conference and Scholarship Upates

I am currently doing research for my NSERC award and working in the Data Mining Lab. I am also applying to attend the Grace Hopper Conference and to receive a John Gyles Scholarship.

Funding Update

I won a scholarship from Studentawards.ca, called the Canadian Student Network Contest. The requirement was to submit an idea for a student-centered site. I proposed a site that connected students with mentors from their academic discipline. The mentor could be a senior undergraduate student, graduate student, or even a professor or experienced professional in the field. Students would get useful career advice, while mentors would be able to use the time spent on the site as volunteer work, which in turn helps them when applying for scholarships or demonstrating community service. The amount awarded was $500 CDN.

NSERC/Scholarship News

Update: I have won an NSERC Award for the summer semester. :D More detials as I get them.