The conferences come to an end; development begins again!

Hello all,

Saying that we have been busy lately would be an understatement! We have spent the last three weeks preparing and presenting our poster at both the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference and the Posters on the Hill Conference (sponsored by the CUR).

Posters on the Hill
We have just returned from Posters on the Hill, and it was an amazing experience. The conference took place at Capitol Hill in Washington DC, and was certainly different than your 'typical' conference. In addition to presenting our poster, we were also able to schedule meetings with legislative assistants of several of our congressional representatives; we presented our poster to the legislative assistants who we spoke with. There was a great deal of interest and positive feedback about Access Lecture from a wide spanning audience; this included congressional representatives, faculty, other poster presenters, and representatives from both the American Chemical Society and CUR.

Our poster was one of 74 which were chosen from an applicant pool of 700+ posters; it is a great feeling to know that our work was chosen to represent the importance of domestic undergraduate research. In addition, getting to go to the National Zoo was not a bad deal either!

Tapia Conference
Just one week prior to attending Posters on the Hill, we attended the Richard Tapia Conference in San Francisco. We were chosen as both scholarship recipients and poster presenters, which meant that we got to attend the conference for all three days and present our work, all free of charge! The conference consisted of talks from distinguished speakers, panels that provided students with information on how to succeed in various aspects of computing, company poster presentations (with companies including Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, Intel, Symantec, NetApp, and Amazon), professional networking opportunities with companies and academics, and a student poster session.

The Tapia Conference provided valuable experience and exposure to professional networking and student research environments, as well as the opportunity to speak personally with representatives from the companies listed above (and many others). The poster presentation session was excellent; those who saw the poster raised points or gave us ideas which we had not considered before; the poster session also helped us realize what we need to clarify about Access Lecture, and what common questions and misconceptions may be.

Oh yeah, we got to stay at the wonderful Fairmont hotel...free of charge. I think that I am now inspired to become rich, simply so I can live there permanently. We didn't have much downtime, but we did manage to explore San Francisco (getting lost for two hours in the process, thanks to a 'questionable' GPS) and find some great places to eat! It was a sad day when we had to return to the East Coast, where we were immediately greeted by chilly weather and rain.

Conclusion
The past three weeks have been hectic, but very worthwhile. We have tons of photos, but I do not think that they will be needed; these experiences will certainly remain in memory for life! Work on Access Lecture will now resume as normal, with the next step being to further analyze our usability test data and refine our prototype.

Until next time...
- Alex