The 2019 Explore CSR Workshop was a 3-day workshop for undergraduates from underrepresented groups to explore research and graduate school opportunities in computer science. The workshop was for anyone with some coding experience. The workshop was held April 5-7, 2019 at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, which is located in the northwestern part of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Women and minorities were encouraged to apply.

Workshop Dates: April 5-7, 2019 at Michigan Tech

Learn about Graduate School and Experience Research

  • Learn about Graduate School, applications and admissions
  • Discover career opportunities with advanced degrees
  • Network with other CS undergraduates
  • Talk with current graduate students about their experiences and research projects
  • Experience working on a research problem with CS faculty and other attendees

Keynote Speaker

Robin Hunicke

Robin Hunicke is the Co-Founder and CEO of the independent game studio Funomena, which creates experimental games for Console, PC, VR & AR platforms including the award-winning, IGF-Nominated VR fairytale Luna, and the highly anticipated collaboration with Keita Takahashi, Wattam. She has been designing, making and teaching about games for over 15 years (Journey, Boom Blox, MySims, TheSims2), and was named as one of the top ten most influential Women in Games this year by PC Magazine.

Robin is an outspoken evangelist for increasing the participation of women and under-represented minorities within the Arts, Games & Tech. In addition to her foundational work on the Indie Game Jam, the Global Game Jam and the IGDA Education SIG, Robin volunteers in support of Amplifying New Voices, PlaySFMOMA, Google Made with Code, Girls Make Games, just to name a few. She is also tenured at UC Santa Cruz, where she directs the Art, Games & Playable Media BA , and the Digital Art and New Media MFA program.

Speakers

Anja Gruenheid, is a software engineer in the Data Infrastructure and Analysis team in Madison, WI. Before joining DIA, she worked with the Structured Data Group in Google Research’s New York office. Her research interests are in the broader field of database systems. Over the last years, she has worked on topics in data integration, data management, and data summarization. Prior to joining Google, she was a PhD student in the Systems Group at ETH Zurich. She defended in September ’16, her thesis was supervised by Donald Kossmann and is titled ‘Data Integration with Dynamic Data Sources’. She also holds Master’s degrees from both the Technical University of Munich and the Georgia Institute of Technology.



Niloofar Gheissari, is a senior software engineer at Google. She has spent 7 years in academia and 7 years in industry – after her PhD in model based segmentation of visual data. Her main interest in computer science, is computer vision whose goal is to give computers the ability to “see” and “understand” their environment (based on images and videos taken by cameras). She loves computer vision because it is a very fun mixture of algebra, statistics, machine learning and signal processing. She also likes art, literature and poetry and writes short stories about teddy bears. If she did not study computer vision, she would study maths or become a poet or a chocolate maker. She spent years of her career teaching computer science and computer vision and what she loved about it was mentoring students. She has written many papers about different topics in computer vision and has helped with creating a number of products including handwriting recognition feature on Apple watch. Currently she works on computer vision projects at Google. She hopes to see more women in computer science , in academia and in industry.