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Title: An Undergraduate Consortium for Addressing the Leaky Pipeline to Computing Research
Despite an increasing number of successful interventions designed to broaden participation in computing research, there is still significant attrition among historically marginalized groups in the computing research pipeline. This experience report describes a first-of-its-kind Undergraduate Consortium (UC; https://aaai-uc.github.io/about) that addresses this challenge by empowering students with a culmination of their undergraduate research in a conference setting. The UC, conducted at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), aims to broaden participation in the AI research community by recruiting students, particularly those from historically marginalized groups, supporting them with mentorship, advising, and networking as an accelerator toward graduate school, AI research, and their scientific identity. This paper presents our program design, inspired by a rich set of evidence-based practices, and a preliminary evaluation of the first years that points to the UC achieving many of its desired outcomes. We conclude by discussing insights to improve our program and expand to other computing communities.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1946637 1651822
PAR ID:
10404885
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
SIGCSE 2023: Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
Volume:
1
Page Range / eLocation ID:
687 to 693
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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