The Artemis Project, an outreach program designed to encourage young women from local public schools to pursue careers in computer science, recently received funding from the National Science Foundation.
Founded in 1995, Artemis is a five-week summer program in which its participants - female rising ninth graders - are exposed to the breadth of applications of computer science and are introduced to a variety of the technologies underlying computing. The learning process includes a range of both educational and confidence-building activities.
Participants attend lectures from women scientists and other potential role models from both academia and industry. Artemis is provided at no cost to the participants, who come from predominately low-income, minority households. Artemis was mentioned in a New York Times article on initiatives to increase the number of women in the field of computer science.
Brown undergraduates Tess Avitabile, Adrienne Cohen, Nell Elliott, and Lu Zeng served as coordinators for Artemis 2009 under the supervision of Amy Greenwald and Anna Lysyanskaya.
In recent years, Artemis has also received funding from Adobe, Cisco, the Google RISE Awards program, Goldman Sachs, the Guttag Family Foundation, and Microsoft as well as the CS Department and the Brown University Swearer Center for Public Service.
