Organised by the Indian Women Scientists’ Association, Vashi, Navi Mumbai, to give a glimpse of exciting world of computers and chart its course to the present world dominated by Alexa and Cortana who can tell us everything from the temperature today to the traffic conditions and so on.

Indian Women Scientists’ Association is an NGO, nonpolitical, working on no-profit, no loss basis. It was started in1973 by 12 women scientists and non-scientists interested in science, with a clear mandate of developing scientific temper in society, take science to masses, in short, be a representative body of women in science. In 1990s, the winds of change were felt in the computer world. It was conquering all fields and thus it gave rise to the need of computer trained persons. So we felt that we should have a computer centre at IWSA where we can offer training at affordable fees.

The founding team of computer scientists (most of them working in the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Trombay, Mumbai) started Computer Centre with a generous donation from Virginia Gildersleeve Foundation and from blue Star company. It started on a modest note with 5 computers and steered the centre to its present capacity of 12 PCs with 8 MB RAM, Windows 10 OS.

In the initial years our focus was school students from neighborhood institutions, training for teachers, then making the centre compliant for MS-CIT. Recent past activities took a quantum leap to organizing trainings on high throughput sequencing data analysis, simulation for protein interactions to machine learning. The next level of upliftment would be upgrading the centre for data science.

We are arranging this webinar for celebrating completion of 30 years journey in the Computer science. It is in two parts. In the first part, we have arranged lectures from Computer stalwarts whose words will guide young minds to get a clear picture of fascinating world of computers. Well known professors from Academia and Industry from India and abroad, will be giving lectures on —
1. Quantum Computing
2. Software Freedom Respecting Architecture
3. Cloud computing changing the norms of computing
4. Impact of Virtual World in Education
5. Edge Computing

The second part is a panel discussion about “Women in Computer Science- Then and Now”. Here the panelists will recount their experiences of spending a lifetime in the computer fields, brickbats and bouquets received by them. This will be very interesting to know how the women progressed and the society’s views changed towards working women.

We feel that young persons will benefit from this feast in knowledge and experiences of the Digital World. So we appeal that all of you should register to make this webinar a grand success.

Date: September 26, 2021, Sunday
Time: 9.00 am – 1 pm
Virtual Platform: ZOOM
Contact: iwsa.computercentre@gmail.com