Abstract:

While higher education is generally considered a female-friendly environment, Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) in general and in particular Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) have traditionally been male-dominated research and development areas. In university departments specializing in Computer Science and Engineering male students or researchers and faculty members have constantly outnumbered their female colleagues. During the last decades, there has been a persistent global effort to motivate, encourage and support females to more actively involve and thrive in STEM and CSE. Data collection, analysis and visualization on alumni of Computer Engineering and Informatics departments could be exploited as a means for evaluating the efficacy of global efforts towards increasing inclusiveness for females in CSE. Studying alumni data especially for Computer Engineering and Informatics departments of longer history could also significantly help in discovering, understanding or explaining patterns and trends on how education, economy, society and culture have affect over time gender aspects of Computer Science and Engineering.

In this work, we focus on alumni data for our Computer Engineering and Informatics department which was established in 1980 and its first class graduated in 1985. It is worth noting that this particular Computer Engineering and Informatics department of the University of Patras is the first Computer Science and Engineering university department in Greece and is still considered one of the most competitive schools in Greece, both in terms of entrance examination requirements and student profile. Our data set contains approximately 5K entries covering the whole period from 1985 to now, with anonymous data on year of enrollment, year of graduation and GPA, which we further annotated with not-explicitly-included gender information.

Information Visualization (InfoVis) provides techniques for designing visual representations of abstract data to facilitate the increase of knowledge about the internal structure of the data and the causal relationships between them. Thus, InfoVis can significantly help in discovering, understanding or explaining patterns without requiring any strong mathematical background to interpret information. Our online web application enables visitors to submit queries and instantly obtain visualized information (available also in the form of downloadable charts) regarding gender distribution of alumni population as a function of factors like year of graduation, year of enrollment, GPA, duration of studies and various combinations among them. The appilcation, which is responsive and currently available in greek and english, can provide quantitative evidence and qualitative insight for facilitating the study of footprint and, thus, raise awareness about male-female aspects of equity and inclusion in Computer Science and Engineering in Greece.

Keywords:

Online web application, data analysis, Information Visualization, gender aspects of CSE alumni, equity and inclusion in higher education on CSE.