Attention ISSA members:

The Richard Tapia Conference is in Portland this year, and we want to send you! ISSA will pick up the registration fee. All you have to do is submit an email to issa@pdx.edu with your email address, phone number, name, and Student ID. The Conference is April 1-4, so the deadline to sign up is end of business day on March 17, 2009. For more information about the conference please visit their website at: http://tapiaconference.org/2009/index.html


The Tapia 2009 Conference is aimed at providing a supportive networking environment for under-represented groups across the broad range of computing and information technology, from science to business to the arts to infrastructure.

The Tapia 2009 Conference will include several successful aspects of past events, such as:

-A robust technical program, which includes papers, workshops, panels, and birds-of-a-feather sessions.

-Invited plenary talks that feature the voices of our community who have excelled across different benchmarks and will discuss how they have organized their scientific and non-scientific ideas to find their niche and become successful.

-A dynamic poster session, focused on students, providing a place to present new, exciting research in a relatively informal, supportive setting. The top three posters in the graduate and undergraduate student categories will advance to the ACM Student Research Competition Grand Finals.

-The Doctorial Consortium, a full-day sounding board to guide and encourage students working on their Ph.D.s.

-A Robotics Competition, which will test the skills of student teams in building and programming robots to operate both in virtual and real-world environments.

-Several opportunities to network, including the posters reception, breaks, and the gala awards banquet.


As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to email issa@pdx.edu