Hopper 2011 Portland Convention Center

I returned home Saturday  from the  very exciting 2011 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing held in Portland Oregon at the convention center.

The big words from the celebration seemed to be Brand and Sponsor (have both)!
Job Fair
The Wednesday evening event was a job fair in the exhibition hall (although the recruiters were there throughout until Friday at 2. It was clear by the large number of companies and the enthusiasm of the young women visiting with those recruiters that there are jobs and that the recruiters were VERY interested in finding women to fill them.
Opening

At the opening session on Thursday morning, I learned that there were in attendance 30 babies, and 24 toddlers using the free childcare service provided by NetApp!  There were 2908 attendees, 235 academics, from 34 countries which represented a 35% increase over last year. The program listed 419 speakers.  But most promising  was the fact that there were 1136 students.    I  applaud Harvey Mudd whose president, Maria Klawe, was instrumental in the grant that allowed Z Sweedyk to arrange for 46 young women from Mudd to attend this year!
Sheryl Sandberg

Sheryl Sandberg

I will admit that I was not keen to hear the opening keynote by Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer.  Was I ever off base!  She was fantastic.  Tune into Facebook Live to watch Sheryl Sandberg’s keynote address live from the Grace Hopper Conference this Thursday, November 10 at 8:55 AM/PT!
RSVP to the Facebook Event here: https://www.facebook.com/events/125456260896830   You can watch the event on Facebook Live:  http://on.fb.me/techtalkslive

Sandberg used no visuals but very discretely used what was a remote for a probable  teleprompter.

I’ll  briefly summarize the talk which she prefaced by citing both the opportunities for women in tech careers and the abysmal stats regarding their numbers and salary gap.  One anecdote in this intro was that when Larry Summers’ (Harvard) mother got a high-level job at Standard Oil the CEO told her that they were getting twice the brains at half the money and she thought that it was a compliment!

She gave 5 pieces of advice.

1. Believe in yourself – Peggy Macintosh (author of ”White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”) reported feeling like a fraud.  Sandberg said men attribute  success to themselves,  women don’t but attribute it to luck or being at the right place at the right time.
2. Dream  big.  we have an ambition gap.  Success is positively correlated  with likability for men  and the opposite for women.  This is important because of stereotype threat –if there is a gender box on an exam,  women do worse on math tests than they do if there is no such box.
3. Success relies on whether one has a life partner and how supportive that partner is.  “Even if you marry the right guy they need training.”
4. Women make small decisions that lead to leaving career. She hinted that women worry too much about things way in the future (like would this job work is I had kids).  LEAN IN.   Lean all the way in until you have a real decision to make.  Note that CS jobs the most flexible there are
5. Start talking about this.  Sandberg’s TED talk  hasn’t hurt career to talk about difference

She said that her generation not going to change this but the young women here (at Hopper) can .

There was much more about Hopper than the opening, but I wanted to get this out there

I interviewed Andrea as part of the Computing Educators Oral History Project in 2007.   She spoke of some of the difficulties she experienced as the only woman  of color in her graduate program at Georgia tech in this short video  you may view as an  AVI file in new window OR as a youtube video in new window

Andrea was also featured as part of the Computer Scientists of the African Diaspora pro.ject.

Archived version of Andrea Lawrence’s professional webpage at Spelman College [Note: http://www.spelman.edu/~compsci/lawrence.html, the original address, has been non-functional since 2009]

The project has been supported by a generous grant from NSF. The Charles Babbage Institute will be archivists for the project. Additional interviews will be added and materials for classroom teachers will soon be included as well.

We hope that the stories of these dedicated teachers will serve as inspiration and role models for others.

Thanks go out to all our supporters and especially to Vicki Almstrum and Anne Applin for their hard work on this upgrade.

The award for Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education honors an individual or group whose work has had a long lasting impact on, and made a significant difference in, computing education. This award was initiated in 1981.  The 2011 winner is Matthias Felleisen, Trustee Professor at College of Computer Science, Northeastern University.  Matthias is best known for his work in promoting and facilitating the teaching of computing through the Scheme programming language.

Matthias will deliver a keynote address at the 42nd SIGCSE Symposium in Dallas on March 10, 2010.   To get a peek into Matthias and his philosophy you might take a look at this talk I found on youtube.

The award for Lifetime Service to the Computer Science Education Community honors a person with a long history of volunteer service to that community.  This award was initiated in 1997.  The 2011 winner is Gordon Davies, Department of Computing, Open University (retired).

Gordon will talk to First Time attendees at the SIGCSE Symposium in Dallas as well.  Take a look at Gordon in this excerpt from an interview that is part of the Computing Educators Oral History Project.

SIGCSE has an incredible membership and the community of educators that surround it are phenomenal.  See the list of  past award winners for outstanding contribution and for lifetime service.  Join me in congratulating the newest awardees!

Nell Dale is the consummate role model.   Nell retired from a long, illustrious career as a senior lecturer in Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin.  That doesn’t mean she is retired.  She is still writing and revising several series of computer science texts.

It was Nell who pioneered texts in introductory programming and data structures usable by both high school and undergraduate students.  Her over 40 texts emphasized just in time concepts with problem solving as the basis for instruction.

Nell has been a champion for women in computing and was the lead many years ago on an NSF grant to retrain unemployed and underemployed women for careers in computing in the Women in Science Program.  Even after retirement, Nell participated in a summer working group to collect stories of women computing educators.

Foremost in my mind is the seminal role she played in Computer Science Education Research.  She insisted that “my students liked it” and “everybody knows to be true” as flawed arguments.  She insisted that her graduate students partake in evidence based computer science education research at a time when this type of work was rare.  At an early SIGCSE Symposium I remember her exhorting the audience to test their ideas be willing to refute common beliefs about what works when faced with data.

Nell is a tireless volunteer.  She is past chair of the foremost educational computing organization, the Association of Computing Machinery Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education, ACM/SIGCSE.  She has served as a leader in the Advanced Placement readings, as a force in keeping high school teachers current in computing by holding summer workshops, and the list goes on.

Nell has been honored as an ACM Fellow, with the ACM Karlstrom educator award, and the ACM/SIGCSE outstanding educator award to name a few.

I am honored to consider Nell a friend and even more honored to have the opportunity to blog about her.

Listen to an interview with Nell at CEOHP.org and read about her latest award.

a resolution 

Grace Hopper’s  

It is being lauded as a week to focus on CS Education in the K-12 demographic.  As chair of ACM’s Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education (SIGCSE), I would like to exhort my colleagues in the university sector to consider ways to promote and celebrate Computer Science Education.

We in the field do have much to celebrate.  A substantive revision of the ACM/IEEE Computing Curriculum for Computer Science focuses more on relevant computing, computing security and parallel computing than in the past.  NCWIT and others are producing wonderful materials to aid in attracting more females and underrepresented groups to computing.

Universities are beginning to report a turnaround in the numbers of students enrolling in computer science courses.  We need to capitalize on this rising tide.

Let others know what is happening at your institution.  Computer Science Education week can provide a great opportunity for faculty and students in Computer Science to arrange to tell the story of computer science and its amazing potential for careers and contributions to society.  Contact your local school district and volunteer to make a presentation.  Write an article for your newspaper.  Blog about computer science.

You may also enjoy going through the list of links to blogs posted on the Ada Lovelace Day Site.  The blogs are categorized several ways — the list view gives  the person featured, the blog title and the blogger’s name.

My compiled list in reverse order of their receipt follows:

1. Matt Jadud  featured his PhD supervisor, Sally Fincher.
2. Tonya Groover compiled a list of women in PhD programs that motivate her: Sheena Lewis, Beth Adams, Deana Brown, Elodie Billionniere. Glenesha Johnson, Yolanda Rankin ,Tammara Massey, Wanda Eugene, and Shanee Dawkins
3. Eugene Wallingford highlighted Adele Goldberg.
4. Deepak Kumar pointed me to the Bryn Mawr CS home page and the linked blog by Kimberly Blessing that featured Amy (Biermann) Hughes and Sarah Hacker, two Bryn Mawr grads.
5. John Dougherty blogged about his 2008 co chair Susan Rodger, appropriately on the SIGCSE 2008 Symposium blog.
6. Alfred Thompson named several role models but featured his wife, Thelma.
7. Doug Blank lauded the “next generation” of  women in his blog, singling out :  Dianna Xu and Xiaohang Quan.
8. Ellen Walker pointed me to Annemeike Craig’s ACM-W blog telling the story of Sandy, an IT manager.
9. Mark Guzdial told about three heroines in his Amazon blog: Janet Kolodner, Amy Bruckman and Barb Ericson.
10. I blogged about one of the women I interviewed for the Computing Educator’s Oral history project, Tracy Camp.
    

Today is Ada Lovelace Day and I signed the pledge to blog about a woman in technology whom I admire.  I chose Tracy Camp, a professor of computer science at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado.

I have known Tracy for many years, having first met her when I participated in an NSF sponsored workshop on Ethics in Computing.  I interviewed Tracy as part of the Computing Educators Oral History Project.

Tracy is well-respected in her research field of mobile computing, has managed to select areas of research that have social significance, and has been honored for her teaching excellence.  In addition to this she has served as the chair of ACM-W, which is now a council of the Association for Computing Machinery dedicated to the support of women in computing careers.  Tracy currently serves as the treasurer of ACM/SIGMobile.  She is both a distinguished scientist in the ACM as well as one of their distinguished lecturers.  She developed a social networking tool for the attendees at the 2008 Grace Murray Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference and will serve as the program chair of the 2009 Hopper conference.

Tracy maintains a grounded life by integrating family (she has a husband and two young children) with her work and volunteer efforts. Although I often tease Tracy, encouraging her to say the “No” word more oftern, I admire her intelligence, energy, determination and grace.

A movement to promote female role models in technology is underfoot and you can help. But first some background, most of which I gleaned from Betty Toole’s marvelous biography, Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers, Prophet of the Computer Age.

Most women in computing have probably heard Augusta Ada Lovelace, (or Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace) referred to as the world’s first programmer. The more I learn about Ada’s remarkable life the more I am impressed by her intellectual acumen. Augusta Ada was born 10 December1815, the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron and his wife, Anne Isabella (Annabella) Milbanke, Lady Byron. Ada’s mother left Lord Byron in January of 1816 and received full custody of Ada as she was thereafter known. Ada never had a significant relationship with her famous father, but when Ada Lovelace died at age 36 she was buried next to him at her own request.

Lady Byron insisted that 5-year old Ada be tutored from dawn to dusk, hoping her daughter would be a mathematician or scientist, not a poet like her father. At age thirteen Ada suffered from measles and was confined to bed for three years, but her mother insisted that her rigorous mathematical education continue. Her mother made sure that Ada met the major inventors and scientists of the day. At age 17 she and her mother met with Charles Babbage. Both Ada and her mother were enthralled by his plans for the Difference Engine, a mechanical calculating machine, dubbed a “Thinking Machine” by Annabella.. She began then a lifelong correspondence with Babbage. She at that time began her correspondence with Mary Somerville, an influential mathematician and astronomer of the time. With her she discussed her ideas about Babbage’s work as well. Through her lifetime she corresponded with other luminaries such as Michael Faraday and Augustus de Morgan.

In 1835 she married William, Lord King who in 1838 became the Earl of Lovelace and she the Countess of Lovelace. In 1839 the young countess had given birth to three children, Byron, Annabella and Ralph. She like many women of the aristocracy, maintained three homes, supervised many servants and found it difficult to pursue her many intellectual interests.

Her mathematical studies progressed and she offered to aid Babbage. In 1843 Babbage had given a series of lectures on his Analytical Engine in Turin, Italy. An Italian engineer wrote an article summarizing the technical aspects of the Analytical Engine. Ada translated the article and added notes of her own. Babbage was impressed with these notes in which she put the Analytical Engine into a broader context. She viewed the potential of the machine as a general purpose device that could move beyond the processing of numbers into the processing of any information that could be represented symbolically. It was Babbage who gave Ada the sobriquet “Enchantress of Numbers”

Ada Lovelace died in 1851 following a common medical treatment, bloodletting, which was performed in an attempt to cure the cancer from which she was suffering. One of her last non-family visitors was Charles Dickens! Ada referred to her quest for knowledge as “Poetical Science” and her life is a beacon for us all.

The programing language Ada was named for her, and its 1995 reference manual is titled 1815, the year of her birth.

There are lots of intriguing sources about her life, ideas and family available. In addition to Tolle’s biography, you might enjoy Woolley’s The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason, and Byron’s Daughter. I strongly recommend the biographic film To Dream Tomorrow. I haven’t seen Conceiving Ada but seems like an interesting fictional piece. I enjoyed, Haunted Summer, a film about the travels of Lord Byron with Percy and Mary Shelley after separating from Annabella and Ada. The lovely little book, Scientists Anonymous by Patricia Fara has a short biography of Ada Lovelace, suitable for younger readers. Fara also contributed to a biographical piece on Ada broadcast on BBC.

Now to action. Ada Lovelace Day

If you’re a blogger and happy to write/video/podcast about one of your female technology heroes on 24th March 2009, please do join us in supporting the following fantastic initiative from Suw Charman-Anderson and sign-up to the Ada Lovelace Day Pledge:

I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same. — Suw Charman-Anders

This entry was first posted on twobagels.blogspot.com  and was also posted  on the ACM-W blog with my permission.

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