Caltech CRPC Outreach Programs for Minorities and Women.

In 1992, the National Research Council recommended that the computer science and engineering community should enrich its talent pool by reaching out to women and minorities, both underrepresented in the field. This paper describes four such outreach programs sponsored by the National Science Foundation's Center for Research on Parallel Computation (CRPC) at California Institute of Technology in 1994. One was a minority youth awareness program, a 2-day on-campus event for over 100 visiting Los Angeles County high school students. Its purpose was to expose young scholars to real-world uses of computers, demystifying them and previewing the challenges and rewards of computer-related careers. A summary of activities is provided. Also listed are: the 20 presentations given at the second program, a 5-day workshop for minority high school teachers; the third program consisting of a talk at the annual workshop of the Association of Departments of Computer Information Science and Engineering at Minority Institutions (ADMI), which focused on programming tools, operating systems, and the Internet; and descriptions of summer research projects in concurrent algorithm development, done by eight undergraduate women. (BEW)