News
ACM's Activities to Spark Young Women's Interest in CIT - The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing - ACM-W Names Shafi Goldwasser the 2008-09 Athena Lecturer - Featured Scientist - Bo Pang - Ohio Brings in Experts to Review Troubled E-Voting Systems -
ACM's Activities to Spark Young Women's Interest in CIT
Australian Ambassador Catherine Lang, for the Association for Computing Machinery, reports that two activities, Digital Divas and Go Girl, Go for IT have been implemented to help motivate young women’s interest in Computing and Information Technology. The former is a trial club in high schools, introducing computing technology as a non-academic activity during students’ lunch break. The latter is an event for students hosted at universities where young women are exposed to the careers and experiences available in CIT by female professionals. Both activities have reported positive feedback from participants.
Website: http://acmwnews.blogspot.com/2008/02/australian-ambassadors-report.html
Posted on: 04/28/2008
The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing
The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, a program of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, is a conference of researching and professional women presenting their work from respective fields. The event is hosted at Keystone Resort in Colorado, On October 1-4, 2008, and is designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront.
Website: http://gracehopper.org/2008/
Posted on: 04/28/2008
ACM-W Names Shafi Goldwasser the 2008-09 Athena Lecturer
The Association for Computing Machinery's Committee on Women in Computing (ACM-W) has named Shafi Goldwasser of the MIT and the Weizmann Institute of Science as the 2008-2009 Athena Lecturer for her outstanding research contributions to cryptography, complexity theory, and number theory. The award, which celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science, includes a $10,000 honorarium provided by Google. Goldwasser will address the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing in Washington, DC in May 2009.
Website: http://women.acm.org/
Posted on: 04/28/2008
"I have a strange optimism about technology, " says Yahoo! Research
scientist Bo Pang. "I don't think technology will overtake us. But I
wouldn't have predicted the Web as it is today 10 years ago." As
philosophical as she is scientific, Bo views change as something
positive, but believes that people aren't necessarily happier now than
they were 100 years ago because of technological advancement. "We're
not superior to people in the past. Expectations were just different
then."
Bo joined Yahoo! Research in the summer of 2006 hoping to contribute
to change. Her research focus is on natural language processing and
machine learning, and her projects address how systems process text,
which could unleash new methods of search that currently require users
to find the right keywords to get the results they want. "I believe
that a deeper understanding of text can bring better comprehension to
humans, and therefore, better interaction between humans and
computers," Bo says. She believes that there are conceptually simple
methods that can enable progress in that direction, but it will take a
long time before a system is developed in which people interact with
their computers as though they were interacting with another
person. Bo hasn't always known this to be her professional niche. As
a child, Bo says she was "one of those girls who always played with
dolls." She describes herself as mostly introverted since childhood;
an independent movie buff who once took a personality test that
confirmed her self-psychoanalysis.
Born and raised in Beijing, Bo went from playing with dolls to playing
with computers when she attended Tsinghua University as an
undergrad. Her interest was in computer vision --- she was fascinated
with human perception of images --- and the way computers understand
pictures of the world as humans do. She was accepted to Cornell
University for graduate school, where she concentrated on artificial
intelligence and eventually discovered her love of natural language
processing. She also completed her PhD there. She minored in cognitive
studies, an interdisciplinary field that draws from computer science,
linguistics, philosophy, psychology and neurobiology. Her research
interest became clear to her when she took a seminar on statistical
methods and models for natural language processing, which provided her
with a partial answer to the "nature versus nurture" debate on
artificial intelligence - ignited in her cognitive studies program ---
on how much can be learned from data.
Today, Bo enjoys working with her colleagues at one of the most
visited Internet destinations in the world. She says, "The best
things about working for Yahoo! are the diversity of people here, the
fact that I work with real-world data, and the opportunities to work
with people outside of my research area." What's her biggest
accomplishment in life so far? Bo says, "I don't think that way. I
think I'm more interested in the process than the end result." But
she admits that seeing a highly utilized product or service to which
she contributed with her research would bring her immense
gratification.
Website: http://research.yahoo.com/node/1981
Posted on: 04/08/2008
Ohio Brings in Experts to Review Troubled E-Voting Systems
The state of Ohio has hired computer security researchers from three universities--Pennsylvania State University, University of Pennsylvania, and the University of California, Santa Barbara--as well as e-voting testing lab SysTest Labs to conduct independent tests on the state's e-voting machines in an effort to find and fix any potential problems before the 2008 presidential election. Ohio assistant secretary of state Chris Nance says the review will test a representative sample of 40,000 e-voting machines from Ohio's 88 counties. Ohio's e-voting hardware is primarily from Election Systems & Software and Premier Election Solutions, formerly known as Diebold Election Systems. SysTest Labs President Brian Phillips says the testing process began on Sept. 24 and will be finished by Nov. 30. The testing will examine hardware, election management software, polling place devices, and the central counting applications that tally the votes. SysTest will also conduct configuration management testing to ensure that the e-voting system hardware and software match the specifications of the certified systems allowed in Ohio. Final reports from the testing will be delivered to Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner on Dec. 14.
Computerworld (10/16/07)
Website: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&tax
Posted on: 10/17/2007