On November 8th and 9th, the ACM Canadian Celebration of Women in Computing (CAN-CWIC) https://www.can-cwic.ca/ held its 9th annual event. The inaugural event (the ACM Ontario Celebration of Women in Computing) was organized by Professor Wendy Powley and the Women in the School of Computing group in 2010. CAN-CWIC 2019 was the biggest year to date with approximately 750 attendees from 34 post-secondary schools, 39 companies/ organizations, and 12 secondary school and was once again organized by the School of Computing.
Professor Wendy Powley served as General Chair, Dr. Amber Simpson served as Program Chair and Dr. Nafiseh Kahani served as the Poster Session Chair. Many School of Computing alumni, now working at tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, TD, Connected etc were presenters at the conference or were on hand to recruit for their companies at the career fair.
The conference welcomes women in technology for networking, learning, and mentoring. Highlights from the weekend included a presentation on Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning and Computer Science for Everyone, Panel sessions on Imposter Syndrome and Implicit Bias, a Graduate Forum, an Inclusive Teaching for Computer Science workshop and a Career Fair featuring all our sponsor representatives.
For the first year at CAN-CWIC, we recognized 9th-12th-grade students who self-identify as women, genderqueer, or non-binary for their computing-related achievements and interests with the NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing. This is the first time that these prestigious awards have been held outside of the US.
More than 80 School of Computing students, staff and faculty attended CAN-CWIC, making us the largest represented group in attendance.
Thanks to all who contributed to make CAN-CWIC 2019 a huge success. Special thanks to Wendy Powley for her many years of hard work in making CAN-CWIC a major national event.