Once again, I was awarded a Tapia Scholarship to participate in the 2018  Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Student Research Competition (SRC) at the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference (Sept. 19-22, Orlando, FL). In this competition, I presented my work titled “Towards personalized gamification to promote physical activity.” In this work, we presented a machine learning method that utilizes facial keypoint and heart rate data of users to predict their performance in physical gamified tasks.

This years conference was an extraordinary experience. I had the honor to meet the man of the hour, Dr. Richard Tapia. I was able to personally thank him for all his work on promoting and advocating for diversity in the STEM fields and making the ACM Tapia conference a reality, which each year keeps on growing. Here are just a few pictures of the conference and Dr. Richard Tapia. (more pictures to come…)