I was honored to be a Tapia NSF Scholar (#CNS-1733570) and be part of the 2017 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference( Sept. -20-23, Atlanta, GA). For 16 years, this conference has been the premier venue to acknowledge, to promote and to celebrate diversity in computing. This year I was selected for the ACM Student Research Competition (SRC), in which I presented the work done in collaboration with Dr Conrad S. Tucker titled: “Towards Personalized Performance Feedback by Mining the Dynamics of Facial Keypoint Data”. Moreover, I was selected to present in the second round of the Student Research Competition and was one of the finalists in this year’s conference.

The ACM Tapia Conference was a great opportunity to present our research, as well as to network with other peers in the field, and participate in great workshops regarding Innovation and Big Data, like the ones given by MIT Lincoln Laboratories and Microsoft. However, one of the most memorable moments of the conference was the keynote speaker at the conference banquet Dr Randal Pinkett, and his message of “Success is a standard, but greatness is the goal.”

Here are just a few pictures of the conference, the Student Research Competition, and the keynote speaker.