Better reporting in 2021

 I am truly appalling at reporting the work I have done. So my new year's resolution is to improve (at least a little) on that. 

 

I have been working since 2015 in the Scholarship Committee of the ACM-W, when I was invited to join by Adriana Compagnoni. I have mixed feelings about the organization (I have mixed feelings about all the professional organization societies nowadays!) but I do believe that giving young students some money to attend computing conferences is a good thing.

Now work in the Scholarship Committee, like all other voluntary work, is heavier than it looks. So you join thinking, it's only some 2 hours times 6 a year, I can do that. But then the hours multiply themselves and things get to be much more work than you thought it would be and mostly it needs to happen (Murphy's Law) when you actually have a very hard time to do it! But this is life.

So I first worked for the Scholarship Committee as a judge of awards. But I hated the job, as the criteria are not so clear, there's an awful lot of scope for people gaming the system and I hated not doing a proper job. So I've asked to be only a writer for the committee and now I only describe what what people have judged. But  then the corona virus hit. And things got complicated. I think we need to take the opportunity to make things better, if we can. But who knows whether we can or not?

Meanwhile, this was my December 2020 note for the Scholarship, apart from the boilerplate that we have in every newsletter, of course.

   This month, almost nine months into the COVID-19 pandemic, with many conferences postponed, cancelled or transformed into online events, fewer people are submitting applications. Thus, we decided that this was a convenient time to write about our Scholarship Committee, some about our origins, and motivations, some about the people that keep it running. 

We first had short interviews with the Chairs of the Scholarship Committee, professors Elaine Weyuker and Viviana Bono, in previous editions of the newsletter. But it also seemed appropriate to ask the members of our committee about their personal histories. Of course, as you may have noticed yourself,  working from home has not made life easier for researchers and professors. Everyone who teaches  has had to adapt to the new conditions. For many, this has proved a very difficult journey to digital teaching, without any time for learning or preparation. Still, everyone in academia is l trying to cope with the new reality of the pandemic as best as they can, and we are not an exception.

This seems a good time to tell you a bit about why we run the Scholarship Committee the way we do and also a bit about the stories of the people behind the scenes. And we’re glad to start off with a  researcher who was an alumna of the program herself, only a few years back. Yelena Mejova is a Senior Research Scientist at the ISI Foundation in Turin, Italy, a part of the Digital Epidemiology Group. Her research concerns the use of social media in health informatics, as well as tracking political speech and other cultural phenomena. (To read the interview with Prof Mejova head to https://women.acm.org/updates-on-acm-w-scholarship-for-attendance-of-research-conferences)

The A