Grace Hopper Celebration 2010 - View from the Program Chairs - by Wendy Rannenberg

You might not realize it, but we started planning for this spectacular conference in July 2009. For us, it is wonderful to see the schedule come together, the letters of acceptance go out to the hundreds of presenters, the keynotes lined up, all just in time for us to start work on next year's conference.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. This year's conference theme, Collaborating Across Boundaries, highlights collaboration across boundaries of: academics, industry and government; international borders; multidisciplinary aspects of computer science; K-12 and higher education. There are probably more but you get the gist. It is a very broad set of topics.

This is a milestone conference. Not only is this the 10th celebration, it is the largest and we have responded to your input by adding new tracks, new collaborations, all at an exciting venue. This year the program committee saw an increase in the number of papers, panels and workshops that were submitted for review. Wow. So many great ideas. We have seen an increased interest in the conference from both academia and industry, here in the US and abroad. We are truly getting noticed.

Here, in this first article in our "View from the Program Chairs" series we take a look at many of the conference features and a closer look at a new event, the new Career Fair, and the Open Source track as well as the Technical Papers track.

In response to requests from our industry partners, the committee has added a Career Fair to be held on Tuesday (Note that is a day earlier than usual! Be sure to mark your calendars.) The Career Fair will have simultaneous tracks where you can meet up with our many sponsors who are hiring and also where you can work on your resume. In addition to the Career Fair and Resume Clinic there will be a Women of Color Workshop on Tuesday.

On Wednesday we will have the Phd Forum and New Investigator talks, and lots of career development workshops for both industry and academia. These will be followed by the poster session and opening reception.

After that great start the conference will have 10 tracks for you to ponder on both Thursday and Friday. (remember, it is the10th anniversary). We highly recommend you attend the Newcomers session on Wednesday to get tips for selecting from the wide variety of choices. The tracks are focused on Academia, Industry, Technical, Student, Career, our Theme track, Invited Technical Speakers, a special Steering Committee track, an Open Source track and an HCI track. There are Executive Forums, Leadership workshops and more.

The Open Source technical track is being designed specifically for the conference by a team of women who are dedicated to increasing the number of women involved in the open source community. A series of talks and hands on exercises will lead you through the process of getting started and understanding the tools out there.

In addition to the Open Source track we will be presenting a special track on Human Computer Interaction (HCI). This will be highlighted in our next article, along with some of the other special topics and presenters that we have lined up.

All in all this is going to be a very exciting conference!


Wendy Rannenberg is the Grace Hopper 2010 Program Co-Chair

Ada Lovelace Day: A Researcher I Admire

I love Ada Lovelace Day. It's so inspiring to see all the amazing technical women I've never heard of (and some more famous ones I have heard of) being written about all over the world! I participated last year, and sure wasn't going to miss it this year.

I wrote about a researcher I admire. The interesting thing is that she's in the exact same year of grad school as I am, so you might not expect her to be someone I look up to. But, as you will see, I have good reason to.

I met Michelle for the first time at last year's CRA-W Grad Cohort in San Francisco. We were both second year grad students, so we happened to sit at the same table when given time to mingle with our cohort.

I quickly learned that although Michelle was also a second year grad student like me, she was much further ahead in her research. In fact, she had finished her Masters thesis in January! She was going to do her PhD in September and work on cool stuff until then. She told me about the projects she'd been working on, and I just couldn't help but be impressed.

Check out the rest of this post on my blog.

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

Grace Hopper 2010: Collaborating (Online) Across Boundaries

The Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) 2010 conference will be held in Atlanta, Georgia from September 28 - October 2. The conference leadership and staff are very excited about this year's GHC theme: Collaborating Across Boundaries. As Communities Program Manager for the Anita Borg Institute (the nonprofit that presents the conference) I know our GHC online community members and volunteers will be right at home with this theme. That's because they have always collaborated across the boundaries of geography and institutions using our online communities to collaborate on conference sessions and to find answers, panelists, rides and roommates.

Are you working on a proposal for a Grace Hopper conference session? Thinking about how to convince your boss to send you this year? We’ve got something for everyone in our GHC online communities. Our new Grace Hopper Celebration page on Facebook is attracting fans and, currently, stories of interactions with Admiral Hopper herself. The Grace Hopper Celebration group on LinkedIn is a great place to make professional connections before the conference, whether you’re looking for a job or putting together a conference panel.

Follow our GHC updates on Twitter and connect with other conference twitterers. Subscribe to this blog and review the great content from last year’s conference. If you’re new to social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, you’ll find everything you need to get started on the Community Home and Getting Started pages. And don’t forget that the Anita Borg Institute’s email communities like Systers, LGBT and LiC (Latinas in Computing) are excellent sources of GHC collaborators and advice.

The Grace Hopper 2010 Call for Participation is open, with submissions due March 16. Don't be shy! Use our communities to find the information and collaborators you need. Oh, and see How To Ask Your Manager If You Can Attend GHC for an email template you can tailor for your own request.

I'm happy to answer any questions here on the blog or in the various communities. See you online!