GHC15: Call for Volunteer Bloggers and Note Takers!

It's that time of year again - we are looking for volunteer bloggers and note takers for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing!  The conference will be held in Houston, TX and our theme is Our Time To Lead!

Not every one can make the trip - or make every session they are interested in - to that end, we need your help!  Are you an excellent note taker?  A passionate blogger? Then you can help us to share the conference with thousands of others around the globe by becoming an Online Community Blogger or Note-Taker.

The deadline to apply is September 18, 2015 - so please don't delay!

Please note: you must be already registered in order to participate. Volunteering as a note taker or blogger does not get you a registration, travel, hotel, etc. It's just a way to give back to this great organization!

Hope to see you there!  Valerie

This post is syndicated from Security, Beer, Theater and Biking!

GHC10: Friday Keynote, Barbara Liskov, Another Perspective

I did not originally blog on Dr. Barbara Liskov's Friday morning keynote, but found while writing up my trip report that many of the things she mentioned had really stuck with me so I wanted to share with a wider audience.

First of all, Dr. Liskov was an amazing and energetic speaker - enough to keep 2000 jet-lagged women wide awake through an intense technical walk through the history or structured programming languages at 8:30 in the morning. Fascinating and inspiring!

My notes mostly come from my twitter feed, as well as Teri Oda's, and the Grace Hopper Conference wiki. Hope you get something from them as well!

Friday morning was full of extreme technical talks, beginning with the 8:30 AM keynote from Barbara Liskov, Professor at MIT and 2008 ACM Turing Award Winner.  Dr. Liskov regaled us with the evolution of programming languages by describing a series of must-read papers and the advances she made to this are of the science.  She started in computer systems, and in those days, it was the job of the programmer to make up for the lack of
system resources and under provisioned systems.

Dr. Liskov's advice:

• "Reading programs is much more important than writing them." (she notes people will be reading your program for years to come and you only write it once - comment!)
• "Don't try to work on a problem when you get too tired. The solution won't come to you until you're rested."
• "Programmers think in terms of programming languages...if the language supports and idea it's much more accessible to them."

Dr. Liskov's recommended papers:

• "Dataless Programming", R. M. Balzer, 1967.
• "Go To Statement Considered Harmful", E. Dijkstra, 1968.
• "Definition mechanisms in extensible programming languages", S. Schuman, P. Jorrand, 1970.
• "Hierarchical program structures", O. Dahl, C. A. R. Hoare, 1972.
• "Program Development by Stepwise Refinement", N. Wirth, 1971.
• "Information Distribution Aspects of Design Methodology", D.L. Parnas, 1971.
• "Global variable considered harmful", W. Wulf, M. Shaw, 1973.
• "Programming with abstract data types", B. Liskov, S. Zilles, 1974.
• "The connections between modules are the assumptions which the modules make about each other." Parnas in Liskov, 1980
• "A design methodology for reliable software systems.", B. Liskov, 1972.
• "Data abstraction and hierarchy", B. Liskov, 1987.

Dr. Liskov was a pioneer in computer language development. Many of the concepts she was discussing with her peers in the 1970s are just now appearing in modern languages. When asked what her advice was on the best "first language", she said "Python is used a lot, but lacking features we
want students to learn. C# and Java have those, but are harder to learn."

[Update: Thank you, Kelly, for the additional papers!]

GHC10: The Power of the Purse: Making Our Collective Voices Heard

The panel started out with some great slides that showed how much more women use technology than men. Women make 70% of the consumer buying decisions, women dominate higher education (140 degrees per 100 for men), and women are more likely to work in health care and education, slightly more resilient to economic swings.

The panelists include Kathleen Naughton (HP), Cathy Lasser (IBM), Wei Lin (Symantec), Divya Kolar Sunder (Intel), Vidya Dinamani (Intuit) and Patty Lopez (Intel).

Vidya said that Intuit has done a lot of lab and in home studies about financial behaviours, and they find that independently men and women behave similarly, but when they are put together to work on things like taxes they see that men are very quick to answer questions while women take the time to understand the questions and make sure they are answering them correctly.

Divya, a recent new mom, talked about shopping for baby products and how troublesome it was to find a diaper bag that worked for both her and her husband and baby bottles that seemed more like mom.  She found reading blogs from other mothers, who seem to naturally want to share their experiences, help her find what she needed.

Cathy, from IBM, is actually researching how people shop online. Some of the things they have found is that people are much less likely to return items they've bought online, which makes sense as it's harder. One thing they thought women might like was to have an avatar of sorts so they can see how an outfit would look on them, but it turns out most women don't want to see a 3D image of themselves, so it actually discouraged purchases.  An audience member said she felt similarly about shopping in stores, that she didn't like how clothes looked there, but did at home, so she preferred shopping online.
I can get that - it seems many stores always have really awful, harsh overhead lighting that, even when I was a skinny teenager, made me look awful.

A few of the panelists than discussed their thoughts on online retailers doing data mining, mostly saying they are comfortable with this occurring as it so greatly improves their shopping experience.  There is some concern that the retailers need to store this and use it in a safe manner, though there doesn't seem to be a good way to check this and currently no standards to protect the consumer. Wei, who works in security at Symantec, disagreed. One of the behaviours she has witnessed that she finds disturbing is when you shop for a type of item at one online retailer and they go somewhere else, you'll get an ad for that item. It's not clear to the consumer if this is a legitimate service or spyware.

Cathy said that a lot more companies are listening to feedback from their customers to redesign things - like NorthFace jackets and providing covers for cell phones to brighten them up so they can be found in purses!

Wei wanted to share some best practices with us: never give out your password, never give out personal information, never open a link or attachment from a stranger, change your password (personal one, too) frequently, use malware and virus detection software from trusted sources, and don't use a debit card for online shopping.  Wei also recommends getting a password wallet to help you manage all these passwords, so you can frequently change your password. I would caution you to be careful when choosing such software, as it can also be malware, too! You don't want to make it too easy for the hackers! :-)

There seemed to be a lot of questions about security and best practices for privacy on the Internet, so perhaps the Grace Hopper Conference needs a security and privacy track next year! :-)

GHC10: Fighting Cyber Crime: Technology that Fights Crime and Protects Our Children

You have a 6 in 10 chance of being impacted by cyber crime, yet people worry way less about this type of attack than they do about snake bites or getting struck by lightening. Rhonda Shantz, from Symantec, is concerned about this general lack of concern. Other panelists today include Cristina Fernandez (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children), Sarah Seltzer (Microsoft), Les Nichols (Boys and Girls Club of America), and Erica Christensen La Blanc (CA Technologies).

[TRIGGER WARNING: Some of the content below, which has to do with exploited children, may make some readers uncomfortable or bring up painful memories. Please proceed with caution.]

The cool thing about these panelists are their incredibly diverse backgrounds that brought them all into areas that protect children. For example, Les was an architect (not in the sense that we think of in the software industry, but rather the type that designs buildings) and Erica started out in television!

Taking us straight to the facts, the panel lets us know that 62% of children are having some sort of trouble online (sexual predators, bullying, stalking, virus, malware) and only 45% of parents know this.  WOW! According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, pimps are using social networks to try to recruit children and others into their prostitution rings. Only about half the children who are exploited online report to their parents, because they are afraid if they do tell, they will lose their Internet access. No matter how terrible it is being exploited or harassed online, it's not worth it to them to report because the typical parental response is to take the child off of the Internet. It's hard to imagine how important Internet access has become to our children - definitely something for parents to keep in mind.

The Internet, which makes all of our lives easier, has unfortunately made it 'safer' for pedophiles to get access to exploitive material and connect with other pedophiles that they can trade material with (peer to peer networking gone bad). Now technology companies like Microsoft, Symantec and CA are looking for technological systems to find inappropriate images, shut down servers and find the predators. While I've always associated groups like the National Center for Exploited and Missing Children with working on this issue, it is heartwarming to discover some really large businesses are helping to find these disgusting criminals.  The agencies that focus on children, unfortunately have little technology experience and have come to rely on these other companies to help them bridge the gap to protect children.

Norton provides a tool called Norton Online Family for free, which aims to help parents protect their children without overly restricting the child's access to the Internet. Boys and Girls club of America has My Club My Life for teens and Net Smartz, but that does require the children to voluntarily give up some of their online access but they are seeing children willing to do this.

Microsoft is working with Dartmouth on PhotoDNA, a fascinating piece of software that can identify inappropriate photos and permutations (resized, cropped, etc) in other places and help server admins take them down and find the perpetrators.

This is a truly frightening area for our youngest generation, and I'm glad to see some really brilliant people working on this!

GHC10: Computational Sustainability: Computational Methods for a Sustainable Environment, Economy and Society, Carla P. Gomes

Professor Carla P Gomes, faculty of Computing and Information Science and director of Institute for Computational Sustainability, is a pioneer in the field of computational sustainability.

In 1987, there was a UN report that first raised concerns about human impact on the planet. A follow-up report showed things like the biomass of fish is 10% of what it was 50 years ago.  We're over harvesting our planet and overusing our resources.  A 2009 report looked at whether or not we've crossed the tipping point, and it was looking grim. All these things inspired Professor Gomes to do further research in this area to see what we could do to help reverse the tide using the field of computer science. She strongly believes that computer scientists can, and should, play a key role in increasing our efficiency of managing natural resources.

Computational sustainability encompasses many disciplines like economics, sociology, environmental sciences and engineering, biology, crop and soil science, meteorology and atmospheric science.  There is a need to develop computation methods to model things in these fields, which will help resolve these problems.  This cross discipline model helps all fields learn new research models from each other, which is helping things in this area to progress.

One problem this field is addressing is wildlife corridors, which link biological areas allowing animal movement between areas. One of the issues here is that, while important for the the animals, there isn't usually much money available to buy land, etc, to set these corridors up so that animals in different national preserves can cross populate.  This is a computational problem - need to find the graph that has the best and cheapest path between the two places. While this is an NP hard problem, the computer scientists can simplify the problem by using the Min Cost Steiner Tree. Models are critically important in solving these problems and for addressing the issues of scale.

This approach allows them to handle large problems and reduce corridor cost dramatically, allowing the projects to actually proceed as opposed to being ignored or done with too much expense or in a sub-par fashion that won't help the animals as much as possible. Her work has been done for grizzly bears and wolverines.

Now she is working on assisting the recovery of a subspecies of woodpecker, by analyzing network cascades. They are buying up the land where the birds fly, then looking at the birds flight patterns and buying nearby land, which will help the birds spread their territory which will lead to increased population. The complicated issue is figuring out which land the birds will choose to spread to.

Further consideration is necessary for species interaction, as not all species interact in a cooperative manner.

They are getting help from the eBird project, at Cornell, which allows average folks to submit data about bird sightings. This helps them to learn where the birds are migrating and how long they spend in various areas.

Many of these concepts can also be applied to analyzing solutions to problems fought by very impoverished communities. For example, what will be more valuable to the impoverished? A chicken, improved roadways, or providing cell phones?

Back to the problem of over fishing, it seems to be caused by mismanagement. Professor Gomes is looking at models to help correct this mismanagement without causing any additional problems. Even after they figure out recommendations they need to get the fisheries to implement them. It is difficult to convince fishery owners that periodically closing the fisheries will actually lead to more fish when they reopen - you gotta give them time to reproduce and reach reproductive age!

Another thing her team is studying is the impact of fertilizers. While they do greatly increase the amount of food that can be harvested, they end up creating dead zones. On top of all that, they are also studying how to discover materials for fuel cell technology! These, again, Professor Gomes claims are problems for computer scientists.

Professor Gomes's research area is so incredibly broad! She shared with us, more quickly than I could capture, many of the different algorithms and approaches they are using to solve these problems. I got a great mini-introduction to all sorts of algorithms and data structures I'd never heard of before, like a spatially balanced Latin squares! She is an amazingly energetic, intelligent and passionate technical speaker and I think I could spend an entire day listening to her!

GHC10: Anita Borg Technical Leadership Award Winner Laura Haas

Laura Haas, IBM Fellow, has been recognized by the Anita Borg Institute and the Grace Hopper Conference for her outstanding contributions to technology. I am so happy to be here to hear her talk today on information integration!

Haas and her team are trying to tackle the problem of how do we get information to people when they need it? For example, if a doctor is treating a patient with cancer, she will need to find information on how this type of cancer has been treated in the past, how well the treatments have worked and access past patient records.

The challenges faced are that you have diverse data models, overlapping data, incomplete and often inconsistent data. Different people involved want different views of the data and needs and knowledge change over time.

In order to do data integration, you need to understand what is available, as well as what the data means or its intent. You have to set up the schema, figure out how to identify information about the same object and figure out what to do with missing or inconsistent data. You need to decide which problems you're trying to solve, and execute - and hope the customer doesn't come back and tell you that they really wanted something else entirely :-)

Dr. Haas started her career in 1981 at IBM and relational databases were just coming onto the scene. You no longer had to be a database wizard to write code to interact with a database - which broadened the concept of information integration. They even called it "eager integration" - as you could eagerly get as much data as you wanted.

She then started her work on the project R* (pronounced R-star), which was a distributed relational database management system. One query was allowed to access data in multiple, homogeneous relational DBMS. This type of system helped prevent data loss and helped to distribute queries and transaction management.  While the project did not have much commercial success, it paved the way for a lot of work in database systems and future products for IBM and her own future research.

Relational database technology was growing rapidly in 1984, a very exciting time for those in the industry.  Dr. Haas then joined the the Starburst team (no, not named for the "fruit" chews, but named as an extension of the R* project).  This was an extensible relational DBMS that allowed many types of additions - new functions, optimizations, indexes, data types, and storage methods. The best part of this? This project had legs - and became foundation for IBM's DB2 "for workstations".

Several people that worked on this project ended up being named Fellows or Distinguished Engineers, though she notes it took her a lot longer to get Fellow than her male colleagues and she had to earn many more accolades.  Dr. Haas recommends that you wrap yourself with the best team you can find, do not be intimidated if they are better or smarter than you are, as they will take you places!

Dr. Haas was able to take a sabbatical from IBM to study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studied with the brightest minds in database technology at the time (1992).

One of the new problems that needed to be solved in 1993, when she returned to IBM, was how to store images, videos and text that were starting to proliferate online.  Digital libraries start to emerge in this time frame and they eventually will leverage relational DBMS.  Customers were starting to want databases that could store multiple data types, so Dr. Haas and her team went to look back at concepts from R* and Starburst to solve the problem and started a new project... Garlic.

Why Garlic? Because Dr. Haas doesn't like acronyms, which IBM was famous for at the time, and she loves to cook. Garlic and chocolate being her favorite things - her old team thought if they renamed the team/project to Garlic, they'd get her to come back off of sabbatical. It worked!

Garlic was a data-less (object-)relational DBMS (aka virtual DBMS/federated DBMS). Had all the benefits of a high-level query language and all the features of the underlying data sources.  This not only became a product for IBM, but started two separate business units (Life Sciences and InfoSphere Information Integration).  Something that is very obvious listening to Dr. Haas speak is that once you find people you like working with - stick with them. You can do amazing things!

IBM was having trouble with integration, as people working in life sciences that were trying to work together wouldn't use the same database as their colleagues, so Dr. Haas's team worked on something called InfoLink to attempt to bridge this gap. Unfortunately the project was not a market success, but did help get IBM in the door at new customers and led to the InfoSphere suite - "a complete line of products for all your integration needs."

The longer Dr. Haas was at IBM, the larger her teams got - from a 10 person research team to a 120 person development organization and eventually to over 700 people (no team picture for that group... :-)

While this all sounds wonderful, there was still major problems that needed to be solved in 1999. As more people were adding federation to their systems, issues emerged. Set-up of federation was too slow and complicated, and while the development team had assumed users would be doing very simple joins/queries, but it turned out that complex queries were more the norm.

This lead to yet another project, Clio (not an acronym!) to do schema mapping by simply drawing lines! This opened up many more doors for IBM in the DBMS space and gave the researches many more ideas for future projects.

What impressed me most about Dr. Haas was the importance she gave to her team. She was so proud of each and every person she ever worked with, remembered their names and knew all about what they were doing now. Dr. Haas is clearly an amazing collaborator and it's not surprising that these brilliant people want to work with her.

What a phenomenal technical woman, very deserving of the Anita Borg Technical Leadership award!

GHC10: Are You a Salmon, Too? BoF

This BoF, on gender discrimination and sexual harassment, started out in a very interactive style, when the panelists asked us to discuss amongst ourselves the following question: "When you asked to go to this conference, did people ask you 'When are they going to have a conference for men?'"  While nobody sitting around me got that exact response, we had various levels of questions from colleagues and management, like, "It's a women's conference, obviously not technical", "why do you need to go to a conference for women?", "why do you want to study hardware, I didn't think girl's were interested in that".

Sharon Mason, Rochester Institute of Technology, started out asking all of us to think about the experiences they were going to share with us and what we would do in these situations. Saying nothing, when you're confronted, is not the best option. This became a very interactive session.

Kristen Kielbasa, University of Albany student, gave us our first taste of strange behaviour from male colleagues. She was asked where she had just gotten some chocolates from, and when she responded "at the awards event for women", and her colleague responded, "Oh, we don't care about women". I guess even the enticement of free chocolate isn't enough to get a man to care about someone he works with every day.

Once the comments started coming from the audience, it became clear that it wasn't necessarily that these men don't care about women, as an individual, but that they don't understand how isolated women can be in technology careers and comments like that are not funny, but hurtful and further isolating. Some advice for responding to the above man were, "Does your mother know that?", "Why should 50% of the population make decisions for 100% of the technology user base?", "Why did you say that? What did you mean?"  Great conversation openers so the person you're talking to can think more about their own comments and start a discussion.

Sharon Mason, was involved with organizing a women in technology group lunch and a male fellow student said, sarcastically, "I'm glad my tuition is going to fund women's lunch. When do we get to have a men in computing lunch?"  Her response, which I think is fantastic, "Anyone, male or female, that supports women in technology are welcome to attend our lunches."

Jennifer Goodall, State University of New York, Albany, had a note in her .signature about the women in technology group she is involved in and it was included in an unrelated email she sent to a listserv. She received five bizarre email responses from men on the list, not at all about the message she sent, but about her .signature.  One of them said that it wasn't necessary for women to be paid the same as men, because they can just marry a man that makes more money than they do to supplement their income!

The general opinion of women in the room was that some people cannot be won over, are aggressive towards women in general, and are only looking for a reaction.  Though some did think that it may be a chance to take it as an opportunity to educate by asking an open ended question, like "what do you mean by that? Why do you think that we don't need more women in technology?"

As more women came up to share their stories, it became painfully clear that sexism and misogyny in the workplace and in universities are alive and well in present day. Some of the stories are clearly men that don't realize what they are saying may be hurtful or make women feel more uncomfortable, like "Wow, I can't believe there's a woman here."  Others are truly horrifying, especially when many of these men are just claiming that it's all just a joke, said in fun. I heard things like: "We only hired you because you're cute," "Someone might lose their job over this project, it's okay if it's you because your husband can take care of you", "I heard you like 'meat'".

Things to keep in mind, often women get higher grades and graduate at higher rates. We aren't dumb, we just hear it often enough in university and work settings and can start to believe it. Others recommend having the facts available, like "women don't actually have different admission standards than men at this school", "there are lots of women that made great technology advances, like ..."

Lesson for men: If you have to keep saying, "I was only kidding", "I only say this sort of stuff around you because I know you're cool with it", "Encouraging technical women just furthers the diversity gap", etc, please realize it is hurting and discouraging women. It seems these types of wounds take a long time to heal and may have permanent damage on retention of women in technology.

GHC10: Role of Usability in Security

Heather Richter Lipford, from University of North Carolina (Charlotte) and a high school class mate of mine, started out by surveying the audience to see how many bad habits those of us that should know better have: password reuse, falling for phishing, or getting a virus (lots of hands came up).  This is known as the weakest link property, where the people are the weakest link - but could it be because the systems are too hard to use? (this is a reoccurring theme at this conference, it seems). Ms Lipford asks, how to improve this? Consider ease of learning, ability to perform the task quickly, have a low user error rate and high user retention over time.

Some possible solutions to things like phishing would be to have spoof warnings in browsers, but it needs to be something that users will not only notice, but understand what it means. Unfortunately, people are now thinking that things like seeing the lock icon in the browser means the site is legitimate - when all it means is that the site is secure.  Phishing sites, it turns out, can use encryption, too.  Oops!

Dr. Lipford's research is showing that users greatly underestimate the risks and negative outcomes of their behaviour, particularly when it comes to balancing short term gain vs long term risks.

Mary Ellen Zurko, from IBM, talked to us about her specialty in cloud computing. She noted that she's seen a change in how customers interact with IBM. Years ago, customers trusted that vendors would make the product secure and they simply wanted to know about features. Nowadays, customers want to know how the system will be secured and how their data will be protected. This comes up a lot when it comes to cloud computing, perhaps because the data is no longer centrally located and people feel more vulnerable.

More recently, people have a growing concern about keeping their email address private than a decade ago, this is a strange concept for me, but the thought of no spam is nice ....

What is usable security?  UI designers need to be thinking about this usable security early in the design, make sure it's obvious and available to everyone, and avoiding surprises by anticipating future changes and addressing confusion and make sure you handle user mistakes.

Diana K. Smetters, from PARC/Google, started out by noting that more than 50% of the certificates on the Internet are wrong (this could be because they are expired, site address mismatch, invalid, etc), so all "rational" users who actually want to use the Internet are going to always click through!

You've got to meet the users half way (or more than that). For example, phishing attacks are a mismatch problem.  The browser doesn't know the user's intent, ie they don't know you don't want to go to the evil PayPal imitation site. One approach to this is to not use general purpose browsers for accessing sites like banks, but rather an application - but that only works if you can get the users to use the application! [Side note: not to mention having cross platform support.]

You have no idea what a user will find difficult, unless you do an actual usability study. You have to give up on what you think would be good for the user (no matter how right you know you are) and you have to think about all types of users.

Dr. Lipford came back to expand this to to privacy as well. She talked about photo sharing sites, where other people upload and tag photos of you. The problem is that you may not want to have these photos linked to your profile or online identity. The problem is very complicated, because it may not be that you don't want to share the photo at all, but just not necessarily share it with everyone in your network. It's not just strangers that people don't want to share with - it could be that you don't want people you work with to see you drinking that giant beer at a friend's party.  The thing is, even people who have had problems with photo sharing in the  past, still continue to share photos, because this is something we as humans love to do.

Dr. Lipford is working with her students on coming up with a photo sharing application that allows two-way feedback between the owner of the photo and the person tagged in it. That is, the tagged person could restrict who could see the photo and request to the owner that the photo be removed.

The panel recommends the book Security and Usability, O'Reilly 2005, and the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security, for further information on this topic, and mostly to keep in mind that usability and security go hand in hand and need to be designed in from the beginning.

GHC10: Thursday Welcome/Keynote, Another Perspective

After entertaining us with a great video filmed at last year's Grace Hopper conference, they let us know that this year's conference sold out even before the early bird registration was meant to close and they still ended up with over 2100 attendees! WOW! I am so glad I registered early so I could be  part of the tenth Grace Hopper celebration!

Duy-Loan T. Le, from Texas Instruments, moved to America when she was 12 years old and didn't speak English. By the age of 16, she had not only mastered the language, but was graduating high school as valedictorian!  After being elected the first female senior fellow at TI, she vowed that she wouldn't be "first and last" and gave herself 15 years to help make another woman a senior fellow. Eight years later, she's still working on this goal...

Ms. Le talked about the great struggle of arriving here, becoming, in essence, deaf and dumb, as she didn't speak the language. She started working by babysitting and doing translation work, struggling to learn her school lessons at the same time as learning the language.  Through all of that, she somehow managed to graduate early. Continuing on that track, she graduated from college with her engineering degree cum laude at 19 years old.  By the time she was 20, she'd purchased her first house, bought her mother a house and gotten married.

During her first business trip to Japan in 1985, she noted that there were no women in the workforce. Any women seen were cleaning or serving tea. She asked us to imagine the look on the face of all those men when she introduced herself as the senior engineer that had been sent there to train them :-)

Realizing that she couldn't begin training these men with their preconceived notions, she spent the first two weeks of her four month stint learning about her hosts and her host country, and teaching them about herself as well.  She found that once they got to know her as a person and as an engineer, she was able to finally proceed with the training she'd been sent there to do.

Even with all this new technology we have at our fingertips, the only real way to build relationships, according to Le, is by starting the relationship with good old fashioned face to face. There was something she had been working of for two months, that had totally stalled. It was resolved in two hours once she flew out to the person she was working with.  You need to remember that it's not technology we're working with - it's people!

In order to successfully collaborate across the boundary of people, you need to have respect for those people, what they bring to the table and what they need.  Doing this will help you attain your goals and get respect from those you are working with.

What a very inspiring speaker!

GHC10: Collaborative Risktaking

Getting a bunch of engineers into a giant ballroom after a wonderful lunch filled with great conversation is hard. After much wrangling, we all got at tables of 10 and Dee McCrorey started us off with a really fun video taking a look back at women in technology and famous risk taking women.

Right off the bat, we're being asked to take risks at this conference: meet (and follow-up) with 20 new people, dance, and get interviewed for the Anita Borg Institute archives (and possibly used in future ABI events).  I've been meeting lots of very interesting women and getting business cards (or connecting my super cute Poken to theirs) - but will I follow-up?  Right now I'm going to say yes... check back with me :-)

Dee started talking about how the business world has drastically changed. For the first time, there are multiple generations working together on the same projects and that is changing the workplace as ideas are quickly exchanged.  Old style companies treat their people as exploitable, let legality stifle innovation and only focus on ROI, but that type of management style will not work in this new world of business.

In order to survive in this new world, you need to innovate, collaborate, be willing to take risks, be bold, responsible and able to measure your results.

At this point, we did our group activities at our tables. We started with scoring our pre-work, a worksheet on our risk taking style.  It was a strangely scored test, and we were all, apparently, responsible risk takers. :-) We were next supposed to do a team challenge, but instead my table started working on our own personal/career time lines...oops [Side note: several of us had trouble remembering order of events, except for the very tragic or very happy - ie weddings and deaths. The time line would've been excellent pre-work.]

Dee then brought up a calculus concept: an inflection point. This concept can be applied to your own personal and career peaks and valleys - these inflection points are personal and/or organizational shifts with the power to transform our lives (for better or worse). If you don't learn how to identify when these changes are coming down the pipeline, you are at risk for making a bad decision or poor career move that you'll have to work a long time to recover from.

Our next exercise was to work on our Optimum Change Cycle worksheet, which I had a lot of trouble with. Because I couldn't remember all my peaks and valleys from over the last 3 years, my time line was incomplete so then I had a tough time with everything that built onto that.  Fortunately, our table mentor gave me tips to work around this which helped me relax and get more into the activities. Dee, and others, were all talking about their personal cycle - for example, Dee said she is on a two year cycle - she needs some sort of change, or she might start sabotaging herself or career.  I don't think I have to have change on any cycle, as I'm often quite content to "stay the course".  I mean, really, I've been at Sun (Oracle now) for 14 years, and working on the same team since 2002. [Side note: one advantage of working at a really large company is that you can change jobs without losing accrued vacation and benefits, heck, you can even change your job without changing managers!]

As I was listening to my table mates, I got to thinking - I am not change adverse and can happily role with the punches, but I don't often seek it out. Does that mean my ship doesn't have a rudder?  Or is it something much simpler than that - a few years back, I lost my biggest advocate in our organization. Thing is, I didn't even know he was advocating for me behind the scenes, helping me get interesting projects as well as promotions. It was actually more than a year after he left that I noticed something was different, and my manager explained what I had lost.  So, what can I do?  Seek a new one out? Become my own advocate? Combination of both?

All that said, Dee says we've got to build safety nets, like networks of people to help and support you in your risks (the greater the risk, the greater your network needs to be). Beware of filling your network with just birds of a feather type folks, instead you want an innovation tribe - a diverse mix of people that can give you a mix of opinions.  Doing so should allow you to make better decisions more quickly.

Make sure you share the experience with others and feedback to your network of support. This can be down with short videos, emails, blogs, etc.

Towards the end of the session, our table mentor asked about how the session impacted us and what we'd do with what we learned. My table mate, Misti, mentioned that she realized she could really benefit from a semi-annual self assessment of her career and life - to look for those inflection points and make sure she's on track with her goals. I think that's a great idea and am going to commit to doing that for myself.  A lot of being a good and responsible risk taker means being aware of what you bring to the table and supplementing what you lack with a network of support.

What did you get as a take-away from this workshop?

GHC10: PhD Forum 3 UI/Education: another perspective

I love the PhD forums, as you get 2-3 short presentations on fascinating new work

In this session, Laurian C Vega started with her presentation on Usable Security in Practice: Collaborative Management of Electronic & Physical Personal Information. Ms. Vega is taking a unique stance of data security: that it's not the user that is the weakest link, but the systems that make it difficult for the user to act in a secure manner. For example, one government agency she spoke to had an application that required 60 different passwords to use it fully. Now, there's no way someone is going to remember that many passwords, so users will work around this by writing things down or reusing passwords. Systems need to be made with security and usability in mind.

She went to physicians' offices and childcare facilities in rural Virginia to see how they managed their data records. She found many still used paper, but in some ways it was more secure than digital records. Obviously, nothing was online, so that threat was eliminated, and the physical records were very strictly controlled, typically by the physician themselves or by the director of the childcare facility. The downside of such a system, though, is that archives and "backups" (ie photocopies) often end up stored in someone's basement, where access is not controlled.  So, there is something to be learned from the old way - both practices to initiate and to avoid!

Katherine Panciera presented In the Beginning: The Early Lives of Users in Online Communities. She had read a paper, Becoming Wikipedian, which talked about the evolution of a Wikipedia editor, showing that the more edits people performed, the more involved they got in the community. She wanted to see what she could learn about the users of online communities and how their behaviour would change over time. Much of her research so far has been on users of an interesting bike website, Cyclopath.  So far, she's found that power users actually show themselves within their first few days of using the site. It'll be interesting to see what further research shows.

Our last speaker was Lijun Ni presented Building Professional Identity as Computer Science Teachers. Apparently there is a lack of teachers in this country  that can teach computer science to high school students. For example, the entire state of Georgia has only 72 CS teachers! I wouldn't have even known about this problem, as it seems all the high schools (and even some of the middle schools) in the San Francisco Bay area all have CS teachers. Heck, even my high school in Indiana (R Nelson Snider) had a math/CS teacher back in 1990.

Ni's research shows that a major contribution to this is teacher retention - 46% of teachers leave the profession after only 5 years! This is so surprising to me, as it seems they are only working about as long as it took them to get their initial qualification to teach! The other major issue is that teachers who do stay are very resistant to change in their curriculum. Makes me wonder if anyone is still teaching Basic in high schools?

Ni's furthering her research to try to resolve those problems, and it seems she has a lot of work ahead of her.

Getting Ready for Grace Hopper 2010!

I am unbelievably excited about the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing event happening next week in Atlanta, GA! My bag is packed... well, over packed... need to fix that. I've got my laptop upgraded and set up to access my new mail server and my new business cards with my new phone number arrived this week! I put new batteries in my Dymo label maker and have two extra sets of tape for it - you'll be able to find it at the community table so you can add extra information to your badge (like your twitter feed, etc). I looked at the conference schedule and have already made myself a personal schedule with all the rooms for all the sessions I want to attend.  I need to make sure I don't forget my chargers and extra laptop battery.  Packed tea and my travel kettle and I pre-ordered a travel mug from the conference, so no need to bring my own. Oh, and my rain jacket, as thunderstorms are in the forecast!

I am really looking forward to attending the PhD forums on Wednesday, before the big conference kick off happens, and I'm thrilled that usability forums include issues like how usability impacts security of the entire system. I'll be sure to post my notes right away (unlike PBWC, GHC has prolific wireless access, so live blogging is easy).

I've already started connecting with other attendees, thanks to the twitter lists that @ghc is maintaining.

What are you looking forward to? Anything other unusual items to pack?