UC Santa Cruz will host !!Con (pronounced “bang bang con”) West for a second year on Saturday and Sunday, February 29 and March 1. !!Con West is an unconventional computing conference featuring ten-minute talks about the joy, excitement, and surprise of computing.
A total of 28 speakers are lined up for the event, including two keynote speakers: isis agora lovecruft and Erin Rose Glass. Tickets for !!Con West 2020 are sold out, although there is a waitlist on the event’s Eventbrite page in case of cancellations. Tickets are offered on a “pay what you want” basis. (Attendees last year paid anywhere between $1 and $256.)
Lindsey Kuper, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering in the Baskin School of Engineering, was a cofounder of the !!Con conference series in New York City in 2014. She started !!Con West in 2019 after joining the UCSC faculty the previous year.
“Organizing !!Con over the last several years has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career,” Kuper said.
Other members of the organizing team for !!Con West 2020 are CSE graduate student Dev Purandare, Dema Abu Adas, Gargi Sharma, Jeena Lee, Joshua Wise, and Varun Gandhi.
The Baskin School of Engineering and the Computer Science and Engineering Department at UC Santa Cruz have provided generous financial and logistical support for the conference. Other sponsors include LightStep and the Recurse Center.
For additional information, visit the conference website at bangbangcon.com/west.
