The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is a series of conferences designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront. Presenters are leaders in their respective fields, representing industrial, academic and government communities. The conference, attended by 2147 people, was held in Atlanta, Georgia September 28 - October 2nd.

Grace Hopper hosts ACM Student Research Competition(SRC) sponsored by Microsoft Research every year. SRC offers a unique forum for undergraduate and graduate students to present their original research at well-known ACM sponsored and co-sponsored conferences before a panel of judges and attendees. The judges evaluate competitors based on oral presentation, visual presentation, research methodology, and significance of research.

Nurcan Durak participated to the ACM SRC competition with the paper titled "Principal Contour Extraction and Contour Classification to Detect Coronal Loops from Solar Images". She won the third place from the competition and is now running for the grand prize. She received her award from the ACM Chair at the award ceremony. She is currently pursuing her PhD. degree under supervision of Olfa Nasraoui in Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the Knowledge Discovery and Web Mining Lab, where she has been a leading member of the NASA ans NSF funded project on Coronal Loop Mining since 2006. In this project, a system has been developed to automatically retrieve solar images with coronal loops from the SOHO/EIT online image catalog. The project's scope falls within the research areas of data mining and machine learning, computer vision, and pattern recognition.