Our Chapter Chair, Dr. Mersni and chapter Member Denis Suljakovic, visited Cyprus for 9th ACM Celebration of Women in Computing
womENcourage.
The topic of the conference was Drawing New Lines in Science, and it is safe to say that many dots have
been connected by drawing those lines. Kicking off with Hackathon and idea presentations, the first
activity foreshadowed a very interesting and knowledgeful three days for the participants.
ACM-W Sarajevo team presented their poster and the work they did (Mersni A., Buyukdagli O., Copra S.,
Khatib C. CML – Simulation-based software: an effective educational tool for distance learning. ACM
womENcourage 2022. P. 1.). The presentation was done during the poster sessions, where all attendees
could visit and hear about the concept behind the work.
The event hosted two keynotes, one of which talked about Emotion detection from social media,
presented by Dr. Sophia Ananiadou from The University of Manchester. The keynote showcased different
approaches to emotion recognition and the way in which it holds the key to several NLP applications.
Another activity was a panel discussion on Perspectives of Success in Technology, which hosted 5 very
successful women from both academia and the industry, sharing their stories with the audience. The talk
focused on perspectives when it comes to women on their career path: how others see them, how they
see themselves, and what can potentially be done to improve both of the previous.
The participants had the pleasure of attending many workshops during the event, with topics ranging
from Ethics and Equity in AI and inspiring women to pursue a career in IT, all the way to Visual art and
Algorithms. A very interesting workshop talked about Skills for STEAM Entrepreneurship. Participants
were divided into groups and expected to do an Elevator pitch on a specific business idea they had to
come up with during the activity. Some very interesting ideas popped up, for which we hope to see come
to life!
Lastly, there was a very nice closing ceremony, with prizes and an announcement of the topic and location
for the next celebration, which will be taking place in Trondheim, Norway in 2023. We also used the
opportunity to promote our upcoming international event, which will be hosted in spring of 2023.