Informatics Ph.D. student Ankita Raturi received an ACM Women in Computing (ACM-W) scholarship to attend the ACM Symposium on Computing for Development (ACM DEV), held at the Queen Mary University of London in December. ACM-W provides scholarships to enable women in computer science to attend research conferences around the world.

At ACM DEV, Raturi will present on a paper she co-authored with current and former UC Irvine faculty Bill Tomlinson, Bonnie Nardi, Donald J. Patterson, Debra Richardson, Jean-Daniel Saphores and Dan Stokols. The paper, “Toward Alternative Decentralized Infrastructures,” looks at how we can build interfaces between infrastructures to improve robustness, reliability and resilience. “Enabling communities to transition to a more resilient configuration of infrastructures is crucial for establishing a distributed portfolio of processes and systems by which human needs may be met,” Raturi says.

This will be Raturi’s first time at the conference, “an ideal venue for this work to be presented,” Raturi says. The conference is a platform for “original and innovative work on the applications, technologies, architectures and protocols for computing in developing regions,” according to the ACM DEV website.

“Having the opportunity to present my work, engage with the community and learn from leading researchers in my field is a major part of my professional growth,” Raturi says. “Discussing our work with experts who have been working on computing for development will be incredibly valuable.”