Justine Cassell, director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, will present the keynote address to 85 undergraduate women from across the United States and from several foreign countries who are attending this weekend's OurCS (Opportunities for Undergraduate Research in Computer Science) workshop.

Turing Award winners Barbara Liskov and Fran Allen, originally slated to attend and address the workshop, both were forced to cancel their trips to Pittsburgh this week.

Cassell, honored in 2008 by the Anita Borg Institute as a "Woman of Vision," joined Carnegie Mellon last year, coming to the university from Northwestern University, where she was the founding director of its Center for Technology and Social Behavior. Before that, she was a tenured professor in the MIT Media Lab.

The women attending OurCS will spend the weekend working on research teams with Carnegie Mellon faculty members and other scientists and engineers, getting exposure to the type of research they could expect if they pursue graduate degrees in computer science.

In addition to Cassell, speakers will include Jeannette Wing, chair of the Computer Science Department, and Tracy Camp, interim department head of mathematical and computer sciences at the Colorado School of Mines. For more information, visit the workshop website, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/ourcs/.

OurCS is sponsored by Microsoft Research and a number of CMU entities: Carnegie Mellon Qatar, the School of Computer Science, the Microsoft Research-Carnegie Mellon Center for Computational Thinking, the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, the Machine Learning Department, the Institute for Software Research, the Lane Center for Computational Biology, the Robotics Institute and Women@SCS.