In honor of Ada Lovelace Day, GHC celebrates two prominent women in technology

March 24th marks Ada Lovelace Day, an important date where we recognize women in technology. According to the FindingAda website, we are supposed to "blog to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science". We who plan the Grace Hopper Celebration do this every day! We talk to hundreds of fabulous technical women - we love our jobs!

So to celebrate Ada, this blog is dedicated to two of our GHC2010 keynote speakers who are so inspiring and deserve celebration days of their own: Barbara Liskov and Duy-Loan Le.

Duy-Loan Le is a Senior Fellow at Texas Instruments who started on her journey in technology at the age of 12 coming to America with very little other than a drive to make things happen. At 16 she graduated valedictorian from her high school and a short time later, a BSEE Magna Cum Laude from the University of Texas at Austin.

I knew very little about Duy-Loan until I read her nomination to receive the 2008 Women of Vision Award for Leadership. Her struggle to come to the US, to achieve a stellar academic background and to be the only woman fellow at Texas Instruments in its 80 year history is quite spectacular.

But it doesn't stop there - she has a huge following in the Vietnamese community. Duy-Loan’s service to the community is extensive. Among the many things that she does in America and internationally, she most enjoys providing education assistance for children and supporting social economic developments projects in 12 different countries through two 501c3 organizations, the Mona Foundation and the Sunflower Mission.

I see a lot of acceptance speeches and profiles of great women but her speech and profile are among the best I have ever seen. I have included the links here to her YouTube videos. Married for 27 years with children at that level, she has a lot of great advice for all of us.

Barbara Liskov is a Ford Professor of Engineering at MIT and is the second woman ever to win the Turing Award. Barbara has a long history with the ABI community and was the first keynote speaker at the very first Grace Hopper Celebration back in 1994. Liskov is known for developing not one but two programming languages - CLU in the 1970's and Argus in the 1980's which formed underpinnings for languages like Java and C++. She reminds me a great deal of Grace Hopper herself - a creator of programmung languages and an academic.

We look forward to hearing both of these prestigious women at the 2010 Grace Hopper Celebration in Atlanta in September. Mark your calendars - it's an opportunity to meet and talk with many great women like these.

Let me know who you admire as a woman in technology? Blog about her. Today is the day :-)

-Deanna Kosaraju

deannak *at* anitaborg dot org

#ald10

This is a cross post to the Grace Hopper Newsfeed