Saturday, October 07, 2006

Partied out without even partying

Here I am, poolside, after the biggest party of computer science women EVER. The turquoise water still pulsates under the glow of Microsoft's rose-coloured soiree, the grand flower centrepiece still floating in the middle of the pool. Earlier in the evening, CS gals flowed in, scooping up red glitter t-shirts and mysterious red boxes containing make-up+chocolate. We even got our picture taken and printed in under 2 mins.

Up on the 9th floor of the Regency Towers, Google held up it's name for being Party Central. Neon-bright Googletinis graced the packed dancefloor during sessions of let-loose YMCA, and everyone wanted a blinky Google pin. Or three.

IBM chose to keep the fluorescent lights on and have an "educationally fun" party with demos and door prizes. HP gave out reaaally cute shrek ears to reflect their Movie Night madness. My volunteer pardner got a free Shrek dvd, too.

So Eva and I actually lucked out and were assigned the "roving volunteers" task. We stamped treasure hunt cards till our arms hurt and admired the spanish guitar, accordian, jazz, and hawaiian music players (not in the same soundspace, luckily).

<geekout>
Eva told me she also wanted to go into HCI, and told me that UBC had a good program. She had thought about going there.

Speaking of HCI, two other gals are doing some non-traditional PhD program at Georgia Tech called "Human Centered Computing" where no one seems to do anything similar to other grad students, it's so diverse... and an IBM gal named Tessa told me how she did her masters at U Dub in Washington on AI/HCI stuff, and a San Diego master's student was in speech analysis, but for dolphins :P
</geekout>

Edit: Tessa Lau from IBM is the chair for a conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI), the marriage of AI and Human Computer Interaction. I'm just flabbergasted with delight, quite honestly. THAT'S WHAT I WANT TO DO.

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