February 2024 – The STE||AR Group

The STE||AR Group is honored to be selected as one of the 2024 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) mentor organizations! This program, which pays students over the summer to work on open source projects, has been a wonderful experience for students and mentors alike. This is our 10th summer being accepted by the program!

Interested students can find out more about the details of the program on GSoC’s official website. As a mentor organization we have come up with a list of suggested topics for students to work on, however, any student can write a proposal about any topic they are interested. We find that students who engage with us on Discord or via our mailing list hpx-users@stellar-group.org have a better chance of having their proposals accepted and a better understanding of their project scope. Students may also read through our hints for successful proposals.

If you are interested in working with an international team of developers on the cutting edge of C++ parallel, task-based runtime systems please check us out!

Talk title: STEM Careers at the NSA and Quantum Computing

Speaker: Sean Nemetz-MA, National Security Agency

Location: Digital Media Center Theatre

Date: February 08, 2024 – 02:00 pm

The talk was hosted by CCT and sponsored by the Women in Math Society of the National Security Agency. This event promised to be a compelling exploration of the potential STEM careers at NSA agency, quantum computing, and cryptography. During the talk, the speaker discussed opportunities for a STEM career at the agency, followed by a more technical talk about quantum computing, its immediate application in public key cryptography, and the potential impact of quantum computing on the NSA’s mission.

Here you can find more information about Wims, and the speaker.

We have also asked the students to register so we could do some statistics. 28 students registered, but there were more in the room. The majority of students were LSU Computer Science students, and there were also some from the Math Department.

The student attendees were engaged, and the event was well-received. Q&A continued among the speaker and attendees even after the event ended.

Below are graphs some graphs detailing attendee demographic by field and level of study, race/ethnicity, and gender identity.