[Online Edit-A-Thon] Ada Lovelace Day !

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day to celebrate the achievements of women in Science, Technology and Math.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day to all the women in STEM fields :)

If you interested in editing Wikipedia, consider participating in the Ada Lovelace Day edit-a-thon! I am participating in it, remotely !

You are also very welcome to participate remotely: all you have to do is to create or expand articles related to Indian women on Wikipedia.

Weblink: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Bangalore/Ada_Lovelace_Edit-a-thon_2014

Step 1: Make a wikipedia account

Step 2: Read Guidelines for making/editing a page

Step 3: Select from the Target List of Women Scientist

Step 4:Learn more about them from the online/offline resources.

Step 5: Start typing :D

Dont worry if you come across this post after Ada Lovelace Day ! You can still edit, contribute and make wiki more better :)

If you have queries, you can comment below !

 

Google and Me

As  a reader, a layman, a user you would definitely agree - "Google is omnipresent". A day without using Google products is hard to imagine. May it be Google search, Google+, G-mail, Hangouts, advertising service, news, Keep, Blogger, Calender, Drive, Docs, Picasa, Maps, Google earth, Analytics and the list goes on and on...

This post is my interactions - personally with Google. I always had first experience of everything with an opportunity from Google, setting the bar high.

• Google Summer of Code Student. - This was one of the first ever internship I had. Awesome months of my life ! And not to mention, I had my first income in dollars :D
• Google Code-In Mentor - This gave me an opportunity to introduce 13-17 years kids all over the globe to the world of open source and make their first contributions. The next generation kids are so smart !
• Google Glass Hackathon, finalist - An exciting feeling when you work with developers' version of Google Glass, hack it and make an app in 2 days !
• Google Women Techmaker Event, Speaker - I feel so privileged to be invited as a Speaker to deliver 2 talks to only-woman audience, that too on International Women's Day!
• Google Anita Borg Asia Pacific Memorial Scholarship 2014 - This was the highest honor I recently received. Meeting, interacting and discussions with women all over India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, SriLanka, S.Korea, Korea, Japan and Australia who have incredible leadership skills, community involvement and research/projects in Tokyo and promoting Women in Technology and related fields.
• Google Internship Interview, Ireland - I never had an interview experience 1 year ago, and when I was contacted by Google , Ireland (yes, I hadn't even applied) that they would like to interview me, I was so glad and excited ! This was my first interview, which was 2+2 telephonic rounds !
• Google Onsite Interview, India - 6 students from DAIICT were called Bangalore for next rounds of onsite interview. I was lucky to be one of them. I loved the hospitality from Google ;)
• Google Business Group, Women grp, Ahmedabad - Recently, I have been involved with GBG women group and we have plans to engage and involve more women and encourage them to be entrepreneurs and help them in their startup technically as well as otherwise.
• Google Doc Camp - BRLCAD, the community with which I was GSoC student, GCI mentor and content creator was selected as one of the 3 open source orgs for Doc Camp. Sadly, my passport still had to be renewed at that time and I couldn't apply for it :(
• Lastly, I hadn't been a core-member for GDG, GSC but attended some of their events which contributed in some way to where I am today ! One of the memorable events was the live telecast of Google IO 2014. I wish I can attend Google IO in person some day !

This was all Google and Me uptil now. I would like to thank Google for everything I am. I am looking forward to get more involved with Google and its activities in future. :)

PS: Coz of Google, I have got many nicknames in college like Googlebai, Googly girl, Billi borg (bb) ,etc :P

[WWCode Gujarat] Blast Your Creativity ! - A Successful launch

Event announcement - Blast Your Creativity ! 

Check out the Video here ! 

"Woman Who Code, Gujarat" organized its launch meet up where in students were asked to showcase their creativity. The event was held at 19 August,14' Tuesday at 10 pm in Women HOR of DA-IICT. It was an informal meet where interaction, exchange of ideas and knowledge was witnessed on a great scale.

 

Around 30 girls showed up, who enthusiastically talked about technology, their interpretation and views, career, goals and their ambitions. We also had a competition wherein they were asked to express their views on the topic 'Women in engineering'. They came up with some wonderful ideas and presented posters, articles, slogans and their own views in the form of short-talks and debates.

The main motto of WWC was to, and has always been to actively encourage woman to code. When asked, they responded saying that they would all like to be a part of WWC. They wanted to make significant contributions to this community and promote it. Refreshments were also provided.

Towards the end of the event, 5 winners were declared and they, along with all others promised to expand the community and attend the future events.

All in all it was indeed a successful event and WWC looks forward to host more such events.

Kuddos to Nidhi Vyas, community manager for contributing to WWC-Gujarat and making this event a success ! :)

[ACM DAIICT] The Logical Thinking Workshop

The DAIICT Student Chapter of ACM organized its very first event on 15th September 2014. It was a workshop on logical thinking. Basically it was a session where students got together and solved logic puzzles. For the B. Tech freshers, who are relatively new to the world of algorithmic problem solving, it was an opportunity to get acquainted with what computational problems are typically like, and for the masters freshers, a chance to exercise their grey cells. As this chapter aims at promoting a passionate interest in computational sciences, a logical thinking workshop was quite an apt first event.

Some of the problems covered were classic mathematical strategy-games like Nim game; quintessential logic puzzles where either there’s a sort of misleading detail that has nothing to do with the solution of the problem, or there’s irrelevant-looking information that’s actually very crucial; and the kind of questions popular with placement interviewers. Although the chapter’s aim is to promote an interest in programming too, since most of the attendees were freshers, we did not discuss how those solutions to the problems could be coded. To make the problem statements clear and the problem more intuitive, we actually played the games that the problems asked winning strategies for. (We used matchsticks, hats and the closest thing to stones that we could find.) And as in most workshops, there were prizes for the most optimal approaches. Also, during the workshop, the chapter officers Mr. Ganesh Iyer and Mr. Niyam Chhaya familiarized everyone with what ACM really is, and shared some details regarding the prestigious programming contest, ACM – ICPC.

The response that the event received from the student community was amazing. Not only did people turn up in large numbers, they stayed right till the end without getting bored (At least they said they had a good time :D). Most even remained behind for the small session on advanced problems that followed. They participated in the discussions, were sporting enough to volunteer when the coordinators needed people to demonstrate the situation in the problem, and were smart too. Only a handful could give actual solutions to problems, because the problems weren’t too easy, but they all made sincere attempts and came close to the solution of at least some or the other puzzle.

Most importantly, everybody got to learn something. You have lectures in college where you learn subjects, but learning something from a workshop like this is somehow equally enriching, if not more so. Isn’t it a wonderful idea, a bunch of people getting together and spending two hours getting better at something they really like to do, honing a skill they’re going to make a career out of? The opportunity to interact with and learn from people who share your interests is one of the most wonderful things university life has to offer. And one should make the most of it. That’s what college is supposed to be about – exchanging ideas, sharing knowledge, learning together. You gain so much more out of your student life when everybody around you simply loves what they’re studying, everybody’s learning from each other, everybody’s getting motivated by each other. That is the kind of environment ACM DA has a vision of creating. This workshop was a reasonably successful first step towards it. All in all, it was an enriching experience, both for the coordinators and for everybody who attended it.

Source: http://daiict.acm.org/events/the-logical-thinking-workshop/