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2023 Program Overview

We are excited to once again offer our 6-week Google exploreCSR series this coming Spring to give students underrepresented in computer science research an opportunity to connect with one another, with ASU faculty, and with the SolarSPELL initiative. This year’s series will look at computing for good through the lens of machine learning, with an emphasis on leveraging the conference experience for future pursuits.

Apply today to:

Learn about machine learning-related challenges that the SolarSPELL initiative faces; brainstorm solutions to those; and pitch your team’s proposed solution to receive feedback from a panel of guests from Google. 

ASU students who complete the series will be eligible for summer fellowships to develop solutions proposed in the workshop. Two positions will be open for application after the end of the series. Fellows will receive a stipend at the end of the summer.

A week-by-week summary appears below; we hope this extended format will allow deeper development of ideas and engagement with peers, faculty, and other guests.

Schedule

Week 1, 3/13-17 (day/time TBD): Introduction to SolarSPELL

Week 2, 3/20-24 (day/time TBD): Graduate Programs and Research

Week 3, 3/27-31 (day/time TBD): Guest Speakers: Google

Week 4, 4/3-7 (day/time TBD): Challenge Reveal

Week 5, 4/10-14 (day/time TBD): Team Time: Proposal Development

Week 6, 4/17-21 (day/time TBD): Final Panel + Closing

Challenges

Students will be broken into small teams in order to brainstorm a solution around one tech-related challenge the SolarSPELL initiative faces. Examples of challenges include, but are not limited to:

  • Integrating Machine Learning Algorithms in SolarSENSE Project
  • AI-Powered Search for SolarSPELL’s Digital Library

Further details for each will be provided in week 4, in addition to guidelines for developing your team’s proposal.

Guest Panelists

Miriam Redi is a Research Manager at the Wikimedia Foundation and Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London. Formerly, she worked as a Research Scientist at Yahoo Labs in Barcelona and Nokia Bell Labs in Cambridge. She received her Ph.D. from EURECOM, Sophia Antipolis. She conducts research in social multimedia computing,  working on fair, interpretable, multimodal machine-learning solutions to improve knowledge equity.

Title of her talk:
The Science of Knowledge Equity – Research at Wikimedia

2022 Program Overview

In 2022, we expanded our inaugural 2021 Google exploreCSR (computer science research) workshop from one weekend into a 6-week series at the second half of the spring term to give students underrepresented in computer science research an opportunity to connect with one another, with ASU faculty, and with the SolarSPELL initiative. Last year’s series looked at computing for good through the lens of machine learning.

Students joined to:

Learn about machine learning-related challenges that the SolarSPELL initiative faces; brainstorm solutions to those; and pitch your team’s proposed solution to receive feedback from a panel of guests from Google. 

As with the 2021 program, two ASU students who completed the series earned a paid summer fellowship with SolarSPELL to develop solutions proposed in the workshop.

2021 Program Overview

In 2021, SolarSPELL launched our inaugural exploreCSR: Computing for Good workshop. A dozen students from programs at ASU and other local colleges convened for a weekend over Zoom to meet graduate school program chairs as well as guest speakers from Google. The students also pitched their brainstormed solutions to computing challenges the SolarSPELL staff presented to them. Two of these students continued on with SolarSPELL with a summer fellowship. They implemented the ideas generated in the workshop in order to develop a usage data analysis tool for our staff to use to understand how library users end up using the resources on their digital libraries. One student, Suzan, stayed on through the fall semester to continue honing the tool. She details her experience here

Participation

Undergraduate students at Arizona State University enrolled in a computer science degree or interested in pursuing computer science are encouraged to apply. This is a broadening participation initiative, so students from backgrounds underrepresented in computer science (including, but not limited to: racial and ethnic minorities, women, LGBTQIA individuals, first-generation students, and individuals with disabilities) are encouraged to apply. If you have questions about your participation, please contact the SolarSPELL team. If you have any concerns or accommodations for your participation in the event, please contact the SolarSPELL team. You can contact us at [email protected]

Apply now!