| | CAREER OUTLOOK
Aragon, whose father was from Chile and mother from the Philippines, grew up in overwhelmingly white West Lafayette, Indiana. There she felt that teachers were either surprised that she could write well or thought she had help, and graded her down. “In math,” she says, by contrast, “if you got the right answer no one could take it away from you.”
Indeed. Aragon, who became an associate professor in the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington in 2011, matriculated at CalTech. There she became a math major and gained an appreciation for computer science, before graduating with a bachelor of science degree in mathematics cum laude.
Reflecting, she says that her time at CalTech showed her the pure joy writing a program that could solve a mathematical problem and how programming creates power and an ability to supercharge one’s intelligence.
Aragon relates this enhancement to the feeling that she gets in her hobby: acrobatic flying. “It is like strapping on wings and making the human body more that it is. Computing does the same thing for the brain and can make a fundamen- tal difference in the world.”
The idea of affecting change positively, spurs Aragon—bothered by a trend of women not entering the IT or computer science fields—when she speaks to school girls. She says, “I tell them that computer science is interesting and a way to increase their personal influence. It also enhances your ability to collaborate with other people, and the new area of social computing solves problems that are interesting and societally helpful.
As the director of the University of Washington’s Scientific Col- laboration and Creativity Lab, Aragon researches areas includ- ing computer-supported cooperative work, visual analytics, and creativity for scientific collaborations.
She is particularly excited about doing current research on how to automatically recognize emotion in text communica- tions and social media and the link that understanding will have to scientific creativity. A novel text- and symbol-based communication language is evolving globally, driven by young people who use emoticons as speech adding emotion to what older people only see as text messages.
“Kids today are native speakers of that language,” says Aragon, “and they can express all the body language we see in 200 types of emoticons that go beyond emotion- laden words.”
www.womenofcolor.net
Cecilia R. Aragon Associate professor, Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering, University of Washington
The next big thing in computer technology, says Aragon, is here. It is the field of human-computer interaction, which should be of natural interest to women. One of computer science’s challenges is the tremendous speed that computer data that is being produced, while the speed a human brain processes data has not changed.
The human-computer interaction field seeks to connect per- sonal creativity and power of computers in new ways by writ- ing software where the interface is designed to get the most out of human power.
Aragon received her master of science and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of California. In 2012, she won the Best Paper Award, IEEE/IAPR International Confer- ence on Biometrics, 2012. Four year ago, in 2008, the found- ing member of Latinas in Computing won the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest federal honor bestowed on outstanding scientists and engi- neers beginning their independent careers.
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