ORLANDO, Fla.. – Advance registration at a $75 savings from the regular fees closes Friday, Sept. 7, for the 2007 Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference to be held October 14-17, 2007, in Orlando, Florida.
            Conference registration information can be found at: http://www.regonline.com/Tapia07..
            While Tapia 2007 is centered on a three-day technical program, the conference also provides 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. Tapia 2007 is organized by the Coalition to Diversify Computing and co-sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE Computer Society, in cooperation with the Computing Research Association.
In addition to technical papers, student posters and panel discussions, Tapia 2007 features a strong lineup of invited speakers of international prominence.
            Manuela M. Veloso, the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, will give the first Ken Kennedy Distinguished Lecture on Tuesday, Oct. 16, a tribute to Rice University Professor Ken Kennedy, one of the world's foremost experts on high-performance computing who passed away earlier this year.
            Veloso, who has won awards in a number of international robotics competitions, is interested in the effective construction of autonomous agents where cognition, perception, and action are combined to address planning, execution, and learning tasks. “My vision is that multiple intelligent robots with different sets of complementary capabilities will provide a seamless synergy of intelligence,” Veloso writes.
On the afternoon following Veloso’s talk, Tapia 2007 is hosting the first Robotics Competition, in which teams of students will field specially programmed robotics competing in simulated “search and rescue” missions.
            Other invited speakers who will be participating in Tapia 2007 are Norman L. Johnson of Referentia Systems, John Leslie King of the University of Michigan, Maria Klawe of Harvey Mudd College and Shirley Malcom of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

About the Tapia Conference
           The Tapia conference series honors the significant contributions of Dr. Richard A. Tapia, University Professor and Maxfield-Oshman Professor in Engineering in the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He is internationally known for his research in computational and mathematical sciences and is a national leader in education and outreach programs. Tapia has authored or co-authored two books and more than 100 mathematical research papers. In addition to his academic positions, he is also Director of Rice's Center for Excellence and Equity in Education. This year’s conference theme is “Passion in Computing, Diversity in Innovation.”

        The Tapia 2007 Conference enjoys the financial support of a number of academic, research and business organizations at several levels:

            * Gold Supporters: AMD, Google, Microsoft, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and the Rice-Houston Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate;
            * Silver Supporters: the Empowering Leadership: Computing Scholars of Tomorrow Alliance, Georgia Institute of Technology, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Computer Science Department at Texas A&M University, the University of California, Berkeley Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, and USENIX;
            * Bronze Supporters: Auburn University, Harvey Mudd College. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, National Center for Women and Information Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Michigan.
            * Contributors: Georgetown University, IBM, Rochester Institute of Technology, and Tufts University.   For more information about the different levels of support and the associated benefits, go to: http://www.richardtapia.org/2007/supporters.php.
           For more information about the Tapia 2007 Conference, visit the Web site at http://www.richardtapia.org/2007/.

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