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on November 13, 2021 at 7:40 am

Anna Fabiszak knew exactly what she wanted to do.

Chemistry had been her favorite class in high school. Shed done well in it, too. She was excited by the ways in which chemicals conspire to create life. And whenever she would picture her future self, it was in a lab coat and goggles.

So when she arrived at Utah State University in 2009, chemistry was the major she wanted to pursue.

By 2010, though, she was majoring in nutrition science. Her love for chemistry had been relegated to a minor.

Shes not alone. Women make up a majority of students at Utah State but a minority of those earning science, technology, engineering and mathematics degrees. Female professors and students in STEM say it wouldnt be that way if women were allowed to have the same unearned confidence that so many men have.

Sexism in STEM programs isnt as prevalent as it used to be. It seems like the men are very accepting and anxious to work with the women, explained Vicki Allan, a computer science professor at USU.

So why arent more women majoring in STEM programs?

What happens is if a guy is getting a C, they just go, I dont care, I love my major and Im staying in it. If a woman is getting a C, theyre going, Oh, everyone told me I couldnt do this, I guess I cant, Allan said.

According to Allan women often self-select so only the ones who get high grades stay in the program. She believes that women are self-selecting for failure likely because of what theyve heard about their chances for success.

Thats what happened to Fabiszak.

Im not the best at math, Fabiszak said. Math was always my weakest subject.

Weak for Fabiszak meant Bs, not As and a challenging time passing a test in an introductory college math class that she took in high school.

Math, of course, is an important part of chemistry. And that alone was enough to push Fabiszak into another major.

But as Fabiszak neared the end of her nutrition degree she realized she had made a mistake.

I remember being at that point in my degree where I was like, I dont want to be a nutritionist, Fabiszak said.

In the fall of 2012, she started taking organic chemistry. It was always kind of in the back of my mind, Fabiszak said.

It was like a switch flipped in her brain she had to switch majors.

Fabiszak immediately scheduled an appointment with her adviser but was discouraged from making the change, which might have pushed back her graduation date.

According to a study from the Girl Scout Research Institute, 74% of girls in middle school say they are interested in studying STEM subjects.

How many stay in those fields through college? Less than 20%, according to the study.

In 2014, Fabiszak graduated USU with a nutrition science degree and a minor in chemistry. She never used her major.

Unlike Fabiszak, Anastasiia Tkachenko started in STEM and is finishing in STEM. Tkachenko is a Ph.D. student from Russia studying computer science at USU.

Early on in her education, Tkachenko was surrounded by women. In high school, she attended classes with 11 girls and one boy. She learned algebra, biology, chemistry and physics surrounded by female peers. Most of Tkachenkos teachers were women, and she recalls that they always supported her choice to go into technology-oriented programs.

After ninth grade, students individually choose to either stay in school or continue in a trade school, where they are educated and work in a career sooner. Even though most men in Russia choose to go to a trade school, Tkachenko noticed a steep drop off of women studying with her as she furthered her education.

Tkachenko said that after her undergrad program, she had fewer female friends.

Most of my classmates just decided to leave education, she said. As her friends began dropping off, so did Tkachenkos female professors.

People attribute the gradual decline of women in STEM fields to different things, but Utah State chemistry professor Kimberly Hageman has a hypothesis.

In her own life, Hageman found that female support and representation got her into chemistry. Because her father was a working chemist, Hageman found herself in chemistry labs at a young age.

Watching women in white lab coats performing experiments and working in chemistry labs gave Hageman the confidence to study chemistry in higher education.

I didnt necessarily think I could be a professor until I saw that there are women professors, Hageman said.

As she watched her female classmates drop out of school, Tkachenko noticed a trend that supports Hagemans hypothesis.

It seems that they kind of choose between education and family, she explained.

Vicki Allan is one of the only female computer science professors Tkachenko has. Like Tkachenko, Allan was encouraged to pursue STEM programs.

My father was actually head of the department at USU in computer science, Allan said. He talked my husband into computer science. Meanwhile, Allan received undergraduate and graduate degrees in mathematics. When it came time to get a job, Allan found herself in a pickle.

If you were a math teacher, they wanted you to coach football, basketball or track, Allan said. The positions were linked.

There were jobs in computer science, but at first Allan didnt feel confident that was the right path for her after all, she only had a minor in that subject, but she ultimately decided to give it a try.

As she taught, she began to realize something.

Im really good and love computer science, Allan said.

At Utah State, Allan says only 12.8% of students in the undergraduate computer science program are women less than the national average. On top of that, in terms of percentage, Allan said the computer science program has more women leaving the field than men.

The stereotypes against women in tech start young and are reinforced by parents and peer groups, Allan said. If young women are not encouraged to pursue tech, they are less likely to do so as they get older.

Freshman year is a formative one. Wide-eyed students are often in a new town, sharing tiny apartments with people theyve never met and going to classes taught by experts in the field. At parties, new students find themselves meeting hundreds of new faces with one question: What is your major?

You kind of gauge the reaction, Allan explained. A woman majoring in elementary education is more likely to be encouraged than the woman majoring in STEM, not because of difficulty levels, but because of stereotypes. Those reactions, Allan says, affect women more than we might think.

Allan wants the stereotypes, statistics and self-selection to change. That change might be slow, but its happening.

Over the summers, USU helps run an App Camp for girls and boys in middle school. In the camp, students learn how to develop apps. This year, Allan had an important question that still needs answering.

If we get females in an all-female class, do they do better? Allan asked.

To find out, App Camp leaders would need to have enough girls to create an all-female session and a combined male and female session. But in what was perhaps a sign that there is still a lot of work to be done, the female sessions didnt fill up all summer.

That didnt prevent the organizers from drawing some important conclusions.

Basically, what we learned is that young women do not need an all-female space to thrive, Allan said. But, what is important is the support of parents in pursuing a non-traditional interest.

Still, women need to feel supported by their peers and according to Tkachenko, clubs are the way to do that.

Vicki Allan sent me an invitation to join the Association for Computing Machinery for women, Tkachenko said. It was really amazing, just because I didnt know that actually, computer science provides such a club.

The club is an organization at USU that promotes computer machinery for women.

Clubs like this help women find support in their STEM majors. Being a part of it is encouraging to Tkachenko.

Fabiszak found her courage and came back to USU in the spring of 2020. She is now studying chemistry.

We still need more women to feel like they can go into STEM, Fabiszak said. A lot of us are gonna open up doors for younger women.

Last summer, Fabiszak worked in the Hageman lab conducting field studies and lab experiments. She now works as a research technician in the biology department, working in a lab coat with goggles.

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The long term effects of sexism on women in STEM - Utahstatesman

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Matthew Johnson-Roberson, an autonomous vehicle and delivery robot developer, will be the new head of Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, the university announced Thursday.

The appointment will see Johnson-Roberson return to the school where he earned a bachelors degree in computer science in 2005. He cited a class with robotics pioneer William Red Whittaker as the origin of his love of robotics.

"It's an honor to come back and work with some of the same people who inspired me," Johnson-Roberson said about returning to CMU. "I couldnt ask to work with a more talented group of roboticists."

Among Johnson-Robersons goals for the institute is bringing in new and diverse voices and ideas. Unique perspectives can generate new ideas about how to solve the worlds problems with robotics, and do it better, he said.

According to Johnson-Roberson, meeting individually with students who havent thought about robotics as a career is one way to achieve that.

[Showing them] you could belong here. Theres a space for you here and when people do show up, making sure they feel supported, he said. Make it a human place. A place where people feel like they have an opportunity to build robots, which is honestly one of the coolest things you could ever hope to do.

Johnson-Roberson, who earned a Ph.D. at the University of Sydney, is currently an associate professor of engineering at the University of Michigan's naval architecture and marine engineering department as well as the electrical engineering and computer science departments.

He co-directs the University of Michigans Ford Center for Autonomous Vehicles and leads the deep robot optical lab. The DROP lab develops underwater robotics for ocean mapping and data collection.

He also co-founded Refraction AI, a delivery robotics company focusing on last-mile logistics. The companys four-foot-tall robots have been delivering food and other goods to customers in Ann Arbor, Mich. since 2019, and deployed in Austin, Texas earlier this year.

Johnson-Robersons appointment to the robotics institute could mean Refractions robots will begin to appear on Pittsburgh streets.

Im really hopeful! he said, laughing. I think that Pittsburgh is an amazing location for those kinds of deployments, because of the variety of weather and terrain.

Carnegie Mellon University officials cited Johnson-Robersons wide-ranging robotics research and impressive resume in the Universitys announcement.

"Matt's expansive background and expertise equip him well to lead the development of robotic systems across RI and SCS," said Martial Hebert, dean of the school of computer science. "The Robotics Institute, the School of Computer Science and the entire Carnegie Mellon community are thrilled to welcome Matt back to campus and excited to work with him."

Johnson-Roberson said the sky is the limit when it comes to what kinds of research he will encourage students to pursue.

"We're at a really important inflection point in the trajectory of robotics," Johnson-Roberson said. "It is a larger field. There are more students interested in robotics, and people are building systems that work. We have an opportunity to determine how we want to deploy robotics in the world and how [we can] use that technology to produce the most good."

Johnson-Roberson will replace Srinivasa Narasimhan. Narasimhan has directed the robotics institute since 2019 after Martial Hebert resigned his post to become dean of the school of computer sciences.

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New CMU Robotics director says diversity is key to the institute's future - 90.5 WESA

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In astrophysics, we have only this one universe which we can observe, Mark Vogelsberger, an MIT physics professor, says. With a computer, we can create different universes, which we can check.

For all its brilliant complexity, the Milky Way is rather unremarkable as galaxies go. At least, thats how Mark Vogelsberger sees it.

Our galaxy has a couple features that might be a bit surprising, like the exact number of structures and satellites around it, Vogelsberger muses. But if you average over a lot of metrics, the Milky Way is actually a rather normal place.

He should know. Vogelsberger, a newly tenured associate professor in MITs Department of Physics, has spent much of his career recreating the birth and evolution of hundreds of thousands of galaxies, starting from the very earliest moments of the universe on up to the present day. By harnessing the power of supercomputers all over the world, he has produced some of the most precise theoretical models of galaxy formation, in mesmerizing detail.

MIT Associate Professor Mark Vogelsberger has spent much of his career recreating the birth and evolution of hundreds of thousands of galaxies, starting from the very earliest moments of the universe, on up to the present day. In this portrait illustration, the background shows the topology of halo-scale gas flows around a single TNG50 system. Credit: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT. Background figure courtesy of IllustrisTNG Collaboration.

His simulations of the universe have shown that galaxies can evolve into a menagerie of shapes, sizes, colors, and clusters, exhibiting a clear diversity in the galaxy population, which matches with what astronomers have observed in the actual universe. Using the simulations as a sort of computational movie reel, scientists can rewind the tape to study in detail the physical processes that underlie galaxy formation, as well as the distribution of dark matter throughout the universe.

At MIT, Vogelsberger is continuing to refine his simulations, pushing them farther back in time and over larger expanses of the universe, to get a picture of what early galaxies may have looked like. With these simuilations, he is helping astronomers determine what sort of structures next-generation telescopes might actually be able to see in the early universe.

Vogelsberger grew up in Hackenheim, a small village of about 2,000 residents in western Germany, where nearly every night was a perfect night for stargazing.

There was very little light pollution, and there was literally a perfect sky, he recalls.

When he was 10, Vogelsbergers parents gave him a childrens book that included facts about the solar system, which he credits with sparking his early interest in astronomy. As a teenager, he and a friend set up a makeshift astronomy laboratory and taught themselves how to set up telescopes and build various instruments, one of which they designed to measure the magnetic field of different regions of the sun.

Germanys university programs offered no astronomy degrees at the time, so he decided to pursue a diploma in computer science, an interest that he had developed in parallel with astronomy. He enrolled at the Kalrsruhe Institute of Technology for two semesters, then decided to pivot to a general physics diploma, which he completed at the University of Mainz.

He then headed to the University of Munich, where he learned to apply computer science techniques to questions of astronomy and astrophysics. His PhD work there, and at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, involved simulating the detailed structure of dark matter and how its distributed at small scales across the universe.

The numerical simulations that he helped to develop showed that, at small scales comparable to the size of the Earth, dark matter can clump and move through the universe in streams, which the researchers were able to quantify for the first time through their simulations.

I always enjoyed looking through a telescope as a hobby, but using a computer to do experiments with the whole universe was just a very exciting thing, Vogelsberger says. In astrophysics, we have only this one universe which we can observe. With a computer, we can create different universes, which we can check (with observations). That was very appealing to me.

In 2010, after earning a PhD in physics, Vogelsberger headed to Harvard University for a postdoc at the Center for Astrophysics. There, he redirected his research to visible matter, and to simulating the formation of galaxies through the universe.

He spent the bulk of his postdoc building what would eventually be Illustris a highly detailed and realistic computer simulation of galaxy formation. The simulation starts by modeling the conditions of the early universe, around 400,000 years after the Big Bang. From there, Illustris simulates the expanding universe over its 13.8-billion-year evolution, exploring the ways in which gas and matter gravitate and condense to form stars, black holes, and galaxies.

If you ran one of these simulations from beginning to end on a desktop computer it would take a couple thousand years, Vogelsberger says. So, we had to split this work among tens of thousands of computers to get to a reasonable run time of around six months.

He and his colleagues ran the simulations on supercomputers in France, Germany, and the United States to reproduce the evolution of galaxies within a cubic volume of the universe measuring 350 million light years across the largest simulation of the universe ever developed at the time.

The initial output from Illustris took the form of numbers. Vogelsberger went a step further to render those numbers into visual form, condensing the enormously complex computations into short, stunning videos of a rotating cube of the early expanding universe, sprouting seeds of swirling galaxies.

Vogelsberger and his colleagues published a paper in Nature in 2014, detailing the simulations output, along with its visualizations. Since then, he has received countless requests for the simulations, from scientists, media outlets, and planetariums, where the visualizations of galaxy formation have been projected onto domes in high definition. The simulations have even been commemorated in the form of a German postal stamp.

In 2013, Vogelsberger joined the physics faculty at MIT, where he remembers having initial doubts over whether he could keep up with the top of the top.

I realized very quickly that people have high expectations, but they also help you to achieve what you need to achieve, and the department is extremely supportive on all levels, he says.

At MIT, he has continued to refine computer simulations for both galaxy formation and dark matter distribution. Recently, his group released Illustris TNG, a larger and more detailed simulation of galaxy formation. They are also working on a new simulation of radiation fields in the early universe, as well as exploring different models for dark matter.

All these simulations start with a uniform universe nothing but helium, hydrogen, and dark matter, Vogelsberger says. And when I watch how everything evolves to resemble something like our universe, it makes me wonder at how far we have gotten with our understanding of physics. Humankind has been around for a short period; nevertheless, weve been able to develop all these theories and technologies to be able to do something like this. Its pretty amazing.

See more here:

Simulating Galaxy Formation in Mesmerizing Detail for Clues to the Universe - SciTechDaily

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Scroll through an app on your phone looking for a song, movie or holiday gift, and an algorithm quietly hums in the background, applying data it'sgathered from you and other users to guess what you like.

But mounting research suggests these systems, known as recommender systems, can be biased in ways that leave out artists and other creators from underrepresented groups, reinforce stereotypes or foster polarization.

Armed with a new $930,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, University of Colorado Boulder Professor Robin Burke is working to change that.

If a system takes the advantage that the winners in society already have and multiplies it, that increases inequality and means we have less diversity in art and music and movie making, said Burke, who is all the chair of the Information Science Department at CU Boulder. We have a lot to lose when recommender systems arent fair.

First developed in the 1990s, these complex machine-learning systems have become ubiquitous, using the digital footprints of what people clicked on, at what time and where to drive what apps like Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, Google News, TikTok and many others recommend to users. In the past decade researchers and activists have raised an array of concerns about the systems. One recent study found that a popular music recommendation algorithm was far more likely to recommend a male artist than a female artist, reinforcing an already biased music ecosystem in which only about a quarter of musicians in the Billboard 100 are women or gender minorities.

If your stuff gets recommended, it gets sold and you make money. If it doesnt you dont. There are important real-world impacts here, said Burke.

Another study found that Facebook showed different job ads to women than men, even when the qualifications were the same, potentially perpetuating gender bias in the workplace.

Meantime, Black creators have criticized TikTok algorithms for suppressing content from people of color.

Professor Robin Burke

And numerous social media platforms have been under fire for making algorithmic recommendations that have spread misinformation or worsened political polarization.If a system only shows us the news stories of one group of people, we begin to think that is the whole universe of news we need to pay attention to, said Burke.

In the coming months, Burke, Associate Professor Amy Voida and colleagues at Tulane University will work alongside the nonprofit Kiva to develop a suite of tools companies and nonprofits across disparate industries can use to create their own customized fairness-aware systems (algorithms with a built-in notion of how to optimize fairness).

Key to the research, they said, is the realization that different stakeholders within an organization have different, and sometimes competing, objectives.

For instance, a platform owner may value profit-making, which mightin and of itselflead an ill-craftedor unfair algorithm to show the most expensive product instead of the one that suits the user best.

An algorithm designed to assure that one underrepresented group of artists or musicians rises higher in a search engine might inadvertently end up making another group pop up less.

Sometimes being fair to one group may mean being unfair to another group, said co-principal investigator Nicholas Mattei, an assistant professor of computer science at Tulane University. The big idea here is to create new systems and algorithms that are able to better balance these multiple and sometimes competing notions of fairness.

In a unique academic-nonprofit partnership, Kivawhich enables users to provide microloans to underserved communities around the globewill serve as co-principal investigator, providing data and the ability to test new algorithms in a live setting.

Researchers, with the help of students in the departments of Information Science and Computer Science, will conduct interviews with stakeholders to identify the organizations fairness objectives, build them into a recommender system, test it in real-timewith a small subset of users and report results.

No one-size-fits-all system will work for every organization, the researchers said.

But ultimately, they hope to provide a concrete set of open-source tools that both companies and nonprofits can use to build their own.

We want to fill the gap between talking about fairness in machine learning and putting it into practice, said Burke.

Link:

Algorithms aren't fair. Robin Burke wants to change that - CU Boulder Today

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