Tag: ada lovelace day

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Ada Lovelace Day: Marita Cheng, Robogals founder

Today, October 16, is Ada Lovelace Day: write or record a story about a woman in science, technology, mathematics or engineering (STEM) whose achievements you admire.
This is a slightly updated version of a profile that has appeared on Geek Feminism and Hoyden About Town.
Marita Cheng was named as the Young Australian of the Year winner at the beginning of the year. She’s been involved in volunteering since she was a high school student, and in 2008, early in her undergraduate studies (mechatronic engineering and computer science at the University of Melbourne) she founded Robogals, which is an engineering and computing outreach group, in which women university students run robotics workshops for high school age girls.

Marita, while still in the final year of her undergraduate degree, is also an entrepreneur and has been previously awarded for her work as founder of Robogals, including winning the Anita Borg Change Agent award in 2011. In 2012 she travelled to several countries with the aid of the Nancy Fairfax Churchill Fellowship to study “strategies used to most effectively engage female schoolgirls in science, engineering and technology.”

While I have heard of Robogals, I hadn’t heard of Marita specifically before she became Young Australian of the Year. One of the fascinating things about starting the Ada Initiative is slowly discovering all the other amazing women who work in technology career outreach and related endeavours. But it’s a little embarrassing, judging from her bio, to have not heard Marita Cheng’s name before the beginning of the year!

Further reading:

  • Marita Cheng’s website
  • Life is turbocharged for Robogals founder (a profile this past weekend)

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    Ada Lovelace Day: Marita Cheng, Robogals founder by Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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    Ada Lovelace Day: Else Shepherd, leading Australian electrical engineer

    Today, October 16, is Ada Lovelace Day: write or record a story about a woman in science, technology, mathematics or engineering (STEM) whose achievements you admire.

    Else Shepherd is an Australian electrical engineer specialising in communications equipment. She has co-founded multiple Australian engineering companies, including Mosaic Information Technology, a custom modems company, and Microwave & Materials Designs, developing microwave filters for mobile phones. She was appointed as the chairman of Powerlink, the state government-owned corporation maintaining Queensland’s high voltage electricity grid, in 1994, and has been a board member of the National Electricity Market Management Company (now known as the Australian Energy Market Operator).

    Shepherd won Engineers Australia’s Peter Nicol Russell Memorial Medal in 2007, their most prestigious award, recognising an engineer with over 20 years of substantial contributions to professional engineering in Australia. As best I can tell, she is the only woman Peter Nicol Russell medallist. She is also a Member of the Order of Australia since 2003, and was the University of Queensland Alumnus of the Year in 2009. She is also a pianist and choral director.

    Shepherd has talked about her experience as a woman in electrical engineering with University of Queensland publications. She and one other woman graduated in 1965, the university’s first women graduates in electrical engineering. She was unable to attend Institution of Engineers meetings in the 1960s, because they were held at the local Men’s Club. She continues to promote workplace flexibility, having used part-time work during parts of her career to care for her two children.

    Further reading:

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    Ada Lovelace Day: Else Shepherd, leading Australian electrical engineer by Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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    Ada Lovelace Day: Mahananda Dasgupta, nuclear fusion researcher

    7th October is Ada Lovelace Day, a day to blog about your heroines in science, technology, engineering and math.

    Mahananda Dasgupta is a professor in the Department of Nuclear Physics at the Australian National University. Dasgupta’s research takes place at the heavy-ion accelerator facility and investigates quantum tunnelling when heavy nuclei collide. Her Pawsey Medal award in 2006 cites cutting-edge contributions includ[ing] precision measurements of unprecedented accuracy.

    Dasgupta moved to Australia from India for a postdoctoral position in the 1990s, and eventually was appointed to a tenured position in 2003. She became the first woman to hold a tenured position in the Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering at the ANU in its entire 50+ years of existence! (I was very surprised to find this, the School must be enormous in terms of academic staff, it comprises nine research departments.)

    How do we retain that female workforce [in science]?

    By strong and meaningful mentoring, which doesn’t just mean a quick meeting once a month or web-based mentoring, but real mentors who encourage women or younger people to devise strategies about how best to use their time, and what roles to apply for to advance their career.

    Every person at that early stage needs support. We need to champion women scientifically – not “she’s a good person”, but “she’s an excellent physicist who’s done this great work”… Equally, the employers’ responsibility to provide childcare is very important… If we are expanding and building infrastructure – why are we not building childcare facilities?

    I was educated in India where, if a student is sharp, they’re encouraged to show it through participating in discussions or taking on extra-educational activities… It does strike me that in Australia we give a lot of kudos to those who excel in sports, but if you excel in studies you are a dork, particularly among other students… Sometimes, following talks I give in schools, students come to the carpark to ask me science questions, rather than asking them in front of the class… How do we get away from that? I believe that to make real long-term progress we must respect and encourage intellectual achievements.

    Mahananda Dasgupta, The Conversation: So seriously, why aren’t there more women in science?

    Dasgupta is active both in advocating careers in science in general, volunteering herself as a science careers lecturer at schools, and in speaking on behalf of women in science. In 2004 she was the Woman in Physics Lecturer for the year, and in 2011 she represented the Group of Eight universities (the eight universities that consider themselves Australia’s best research universities) at a Women in Science and Engineering summit at Parliament House. Her 2011 Georgina Sweet Australian Laureate Fellowship from the Australian Research Council calls upon her to increase the profile of Women in Science through outreach activities, and work towards advancing early career researchers as well as facilitate leadership pathways for senior women researchers.

    Recognition Dasgupta has received for her work includes:

    • the Australian Academy of Sciences’ Pawsey Medal in 2006, for outstanding work in physics by a scientist under 40
    • her election as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 2011
    • an Australian Laureate Fellowship in 2011

    I can’t embed them in the post for licencing reasons, but David Hine has a couple of photos of Dasgupta with her experimental equipment: Dr Mahananda Dasgupta and Dr Mahananda Dasgupta and Dr David Hinde.

    References

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    Ada Lovelace Day: Fan Chung, leading mathematician

    7th October is Ada Lovelace Day, a day to blog about your heroines in science, technology, engineering and math.
    This is an expanded version of a post at Geek Feminism last year.

    “Don’t be intimidated!… I have seen many people get discouraged because they see mathematics as full of deep incomprehensible theories. There is no reason to feel that way. In mathematics whatever you learn is yours and you build it up—one step at a time. It’s not like a real time game of winning and losing. You win if you are benefited from the power, rigor and beauty of mathematics. It is a big win if you discover a new principle or solve a tough problem.

    Fan Chung

    Fan Chung is a leading mathematician, specialising in combinatorics and later graph theory. She is Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at UC San Diego.

    I first heard of Chung in Paul Hoffman’s The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth; Chung and her husband Ron Graham were two of Erdős’s closest collaborators. Hoffman tells a great story about how when Chung had finished, and come first in, her PhD qualifying exams at the University of Pennsylvania, her eventual PhD advisor Herbert Wilf gave her a textbook on Ramsey theory to browse and she came back and explained that she’d improved one of the proofs. That was a core part of her PhD dissertation, completed in a week. Those kinds of stories are told about the best mathematicians.

    Chung has worked both in academia and in industry, having spent twenty years at Bell Labs and Bellcore in both information technology and mathematics before returning to the University of Pennsylvania, where she did her doctorate. After her time in industry she is deeply concerned with mathematical breadth, and is known for her “nose” for problems that cross several subfields.

    Many mathematicians would hate to marry someone in the profession. They fear their relationship would be too competitive. In our case, not only are we both mathematicians, we both do work in the same areas. So we can understand and appreciate what the other is working on, and we can work on things together-and sometimes make good progress.

    Fan Chung, describing her relationship with husband Ron Graham

    If my count is right, Chung’s publication list shows 79 papers co-authored with Ron Graham. I’ve always admired stories of professionally companionate marrages: even Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne can’t compete on those numbers.

    Chung’s website has a copy of a chapter about her in Claudia Henrion’s Women in mathematics: the addition of difference. Among other things it talks about her move to the United States from Taiwan for her graduate work, and her thoughts on having a child while at graduate school.

    [Graduate school] is a wonderful time to have a child. You don’t have to attend classes; you only have to write your thesis.

    Fan Chung

    Hrm, yes, well. Perhaps I will give that advice in 20 years time. Perhaps not…

    References

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    Ada Lovelace Day wrap 2: Karen Spärck Jones elsewhere

    Yes, this does mean that a third of these things is coming, but I wanted to point to some other profiles of Karen Spärck Jones, aside from my brief one. At least at the present time, she’s on the first page of most profiled Ada Lovelace Day subjects. I was really pleased to learn more about this inspiring scientist.

    Martin Belam has a long profile quoting extensively from Spärck Jones’s interviews and speeches and focussing on both her own career progression: she worked with Margaret Masterman at the Cambridge Language Research Unit. “You have no conception of how narrow the career options were [for women],” is one of Belam’s quotes. Another one of her stories reminds me of more recent stories Pia Waugh has told me about the resistance of parents playing a role in girls not choosing computing careers (these days it’s apparently the perceived low earnings and limited career prospects of programmers from the point of view of ambitious parents, so at least something has changed):

    We were trying to get at girls in schools [to take up computing] and we knew we had to get to the teachers first. We found that the spread of computing in the administrative and secretarial world has completely devalued it. When one of the teachers suggested to the parents of one girl that perhaps she should go into computing the parents said: ‘Oh we don’t want Samantha just to be a secretary’. That’s nothing to do with nerdiness, but the fact that it’s such a routine thing.

    Bill Thompson was a student of Spärck Jones’s, and writes about her influence on him as a fellow philosopher turned computer scientist. He also wrote her obituary for The Times (and, in 2003, that of her husband, fellow computer scientist Roger Needham).

    IT journalist Brian Runciman remembers Spärck Jones as the most interesting woman he’s ever interviewed in Computing’s too important to be left to men. (I think it’s very important to get more women into computing. My slogan is: Computing is too important to be left to men. seems to be Spärck Jones’s best known quote.) In the interview with him, she talked about how her ideas permeate modern search engine implementations.

    She scored smaller mentions from:

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    Ada Lovelace Day profile: Karen Spärck Jones

    Let’s create new role models and make sure that whenever the question “Who are the leading women in tech?” is asked, that we all have a list of candidates on the tips of our tongues… To take part All you need to do is… pick your tech heroine and then publish your blog post any time on Tuesday 24th March 2009. It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally blog about – everyone is invited.

    This is a profile of a woman in technology for Ada Lovelace Day.

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    Karen Spärck Jones by Markus Kuhn (modifications by Mary Gardiner) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia License.
    Based on a work at commons.wikimedia.org.

    I first heard about Karen Spärck Jones, who was a senior scientist in my field of computational linguistics, in 2007 as part of my paying job, which is as the editorial assistant for Computational Linguistics. Just before she died, Spärck Jones wrote Computational Linguistics: What About the Linguistics? which we published posthumously as the Last Words column for Vol. 33, No. 3. (Spärck Jones was aware both that she was dying and that her column was going to appear under the heading ‘Last Words’.) I was never able to correspond with her directly: she died before we even had the camera ready copies done.

    Spärck Jones’s academic career began in 1957, and was funded entirely by grant money until 1994: most academics will recognise this as a hard way, requiring researchers to fund their own positions with grant money awarded in cycles.

    Spärck Jones was the originator of the Inverse Document Frequency measure in information retrieval (1972, A statistical interpretation of term specificity and its application in retrieval., Journal of Documentation, 28:11–21) which is nearly ubiquitously used as part of the measure of the importance of various words contained in documents when searching for information. (The word ‘the’, for example, is very unimportant, as it occurs in essentially all documents, thus having high document frequency and low inverse document frequency.) She had a long history in experimental investigations of human language (most computational linguists are now in this business). She was also at one time president of the Association for Computation Linguistics.

    Awards Spärck Jones won in her lifetime include Fellowships of the American and European Artificial Intelligence societies, Fellowship of the British Academy, the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award and the Lovelace Medal of the British Computer Society.

    Elsewhere: Spärck Jones’s obituary in Computational Linguistics and Wikipedia.

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    Ada Lovelace Day profile: Allison Randal

    Let’s create new role models and make sure that whenever the question “Who are the leading women in tech?” is asked, that we all have a list of candidates on the tips of our tongues… To take part All you need to do is… pick your tech heroine and then publish your blog post any time on Tuesday 24th March 2009. It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally blog about – everyone is invited.

    This is a profile of a woman in technology for Ada Lovelace Day.

    Creative Commons License
    Allison Randal (Three photos) by Miles Sabin, Piers Cawley, Paul Fenwick, Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.

    Allison Randal is the chief architect of the Parrot virtual machine, which, I have just now discovered, had their 1.0.0 release a week ago today. I’ve known of Parrot for a long time, because of its posited relationship with the Python programming language (see the original April Fool’s joke), but I didn’t know much about the project beyond it being a VM until Randal’s linux.conf.au 2008 talk (see slides, Ogg Theora video, Ogg Speex audio).

    I am not a Perl programmer and Randal is mostly known within the Perl (and OSCON, see below) communities, but Randal’s talk at linux.conf.au 2008 was the most memorable for me: she talked about bringing modern compilation ideas to the Free Software programming languages community, and then about the architecture of Parrot and the various intermediate languages it is possible to target.

    The most striking thing about Randal’s work for me is that she combined high profile technical coding with deep community involvement (and technical writing). She is a past president and current board member of the Perl Foundation and chairs the talk selection for OSCON. In an ideal world I’d like to be able to straddle technical and technical community work in my own life, and Randal is one of the highest profile examples of this I know of.

    Elsewhere: Randal’s homepage, Randal’s O’Reilly Radar blog, Randal’s use.perl blog and Wikipedia.