GHC: Working with a Virtual Team in a Global Company

This is a birds of feather session that started out a bit strangely - with no introductions or structure, per se. I guess I was expecting something more like a panel, but with less structure - not the hanging out the panelists were apparently expecting. They wanted to avoid too much duplication with their earlier session, which I was unable to attend as I was working at the Sun recruiting booth.

In general, they are recommending using tools and technology to make working with remote team members more productive. Some obvious things, like sharing information in advance so everyone can be on the same page, speaking slowly on the phone & pausing to give the international folks time to speak up (as there is often a delay on the line).

Everyone had great ideas to share - biggest seemed to be being organized, following through, and learning to communicate with out visual cues. One of the speakers noted that with our global community, we can't count on the visual cues we've all learned growing up anyways - even when we are face to face.

One of the women, who is a manager, said that when she holds meetings with her global team, she has all people call in - even if some folks are local. She wants a "level playing field", though with most conference call management companies charging by per line dialing in, I imagine it is tricky decision to make.

Valerie Fenwick

Official GHC 2007 Blogger. You may comment on this blog by visiting the GHC Forum.

GHC: Business Innovation through accurate, high-volume data capture: Using RFID to shed light on the dark corners of the enterprise

Deirdre Athaide may be from IBM, but she's promising that we won't be getting an hour long sales pitch. She started out with a good solid background on RFID software (Radio Frequency ID software), using an ongoing example of book store inventory.

After having done inventory at National Record Mart many years in a row, which involved working til 2-3AM with clueless contractors who would completely mess up our alphabetizing, and miss entire sections of product, which would result in weeks of recounting efforts on the part of management...which unfortunately involved me. We had to use contractors, because the entire point of doing inventory was to check for loss - caused by customers and staff. That is a nightmare - and RFID can be the perfect solution for that. Of course, it requires total compliance by all record merchandisers, employee training, and installation of servers/readers.

She also covered how money can be saved in the pharmaceuticals industry, by allowing manufacturers to track individual bottles of drugs through the supply chain until they reach consumers. She explained the complicated "chargeback" processes between manufacturers, wholesalers & retailers that currently leads to $40 billion a year lost in sales due to theft and diversion! An additional $40 billion a year is lost in counterfeit drugs. The proposal is that the unique chip ID and EPC# for each RFID tag makes it nearly impossible to counterfeit, and very easy to track (you can "see" the contents of a box w/out actually opening it.)

Then her laptop died (apparently the power strip she had plugged into was not actually plugged into a power source....), but good for her - she has her presentation memorized! It took a few minutes for a gentleman to show up with a long extension cord to bring her power!

She noted how this is also used for knowing where which employees are when, particularly for hazardous jobs.

Deirdre then did a brief spiel on how important privacy is to IBM and that the technology is neutral, the security and privacy issues are around how the technology is used.

I asked her about more specific issues on privacy, for example, I don't want someone driving by my house to know all of the books/cds/prescription drugs I have in my house. She mentioned there is are new tags that can have their antennas clipped after you purchase the item, though that just limits the range - it doesn't actually stop it from working.

So I can see the huge benefits for this technology, but am concerned that it could be rife for abuse.

Valerie Fenwick

Official GHC 2007 Blogger. You may comment on this blog by visiting the GHC Forum.

GHC: Split Session: Interplay of Life & Work

What a fun session! Three very diverse women presenting here gave lots of different perspectives on how they balanced life & work!

Cecilia Aragon, Computer Scientist, grew up in a small town in IN, feling she was good at nothing, but after getting out of her small town she has had quite a successful career, obtaining a PhD in computer science & moving forward with an exciting life. She's an aerobatic pilot - quite a task, considering she was afraid of heights and flying and much smaller than the standard man the cockpit of most planes was designed for! She had to get special shoes cobbled with thick soles, a booster seat & 40 pounds of weights.

Barbara-Ann Fox, Technologist - grew up a tom boy and has found the best role models for her professional career were men. She ran her own "personal workshop" asking herself these questions: Who am I? What do I want? Where do I find Satisfaction? How do I operate most effectively? Her beest advice: Trust yourself. Reengergize yourself, be human, design your life. (Don't evolve: sometimes you need to start over from scratch). She realizes that she'll never be the expert, but it's not part of her requirement path so it doesn't stress her out. She recommends doing things you think are impossible - because you may surprise yourself!

Robin Wilensky, Solution Architect, hasn't been afraid of reinventing herself as needed. Once she joined Sun, she started making her own niche. This was good, because she could do what she loved - but troublesome as people didn't know what to do with her. She makes personal & professional goals, and balances the issues together. Working 'til 1 AM every day is not conducive to good social life, which she wanted, so that had to stop. She was surprised to find she was still productive, got a lot of work done & nobody was really requiring her to work those crazy hours! Robin has a slightly different perspective on being expert: if you talk about something enough, you will eventually become an expert!

We got to hear more from Cecilia Aragon after the panel, when she showed us a cool video of her in her specially built plane, She went into detail about how somehow being an aerobatic pilot was somehow less scary than getting a PhD in computer science! (she does all of this while working full time and raising a family with the help of her husband)

Valerie Fenwick

Official GHC 2007 Blogger. You may comment on this blog by visiting the GHC Forum.

Grace Hopper Welcome Session and Keynote

The wireless is down, so I'll be writing down my thoughts using "vi" for now, and attempt to jam this into my blog editor later on! Hopefully this will cut & paste in fine later. Please let me know if any of the links are broken - there's no way to check right now!

Telle Whitney, co-founder of the Grace Hopper conference, gave a fantastic overview of the sponsors, the purpose of them, and why we're all here. She let us know that this year's conferencer is SOLD OUT! Cool!

Stu Feldman, President, ACM, told us about an investigation of lack of women in computing that ACM is doing. They have a wiki where they want suggestions.

Jeanette Wing, National Science Foundation, talked about her grand vision for computing - that everyone will be using computational thinking by the middle of the 21st century. Much of her talk focused around thinking out of the box when considering the question: What is computable?

Donna Dubinsky, all things Numenta (founder, CEO, Board Chair), Palm, Computer History Museum, etc - wow! "Thinking about Thinking" covered the background of Numenta - a company founded to build a new computing platform based on the human brain. What a complicated problem - brains are so flexible, and computers are not!

She used the example of vision & pattern recognition and how it can be very useful in other areas like car safety (cars are now very safe, they need to protect now against bad/unsafe human behaviours) and pharmecutical (what drugs realy work for whom). For example, our eyes take in lots of data & passes it on to our brain, and we can always recognize things like... a cat, regardless of how odd the cat is (odd color, mising tail, missing foot, etc). Numenta's goal is to teach computers how to do that. Fascinating!

Valerie Fenwick

Official GHC 2007 Blogger. You may comment on this blog by visiting the GHC Forum.

Made it to Florida! Newcomers Session and Poster Session

So after two long flights, Jen & I made it to Florida yesterday. It's unbelievably hot here, even in the evenings. I know, I know... it's not the heat, it's the humidity. I grew up in the midwest, but California has totally softened me to this type of weather.

We got to wander around Downtown Disney a bit last night, though we tried to get to bed early to help get over our jet lag. That didn't happen, but I did get up before 9 so I'm exhausted now. Hopefully I can get up even earlier tomorrow - I don't want to miss any sessions!

I attended the Newcomers session tonight, even though this is not my first Hopper - I haven't attended a Hopper conference since 1997, so I felt I was due for a refresher. There was a nice overview of who Grace Hopper and Anita Borg were, though I was oddly left craving more information. Like, why was this conference started in the first place? What was Hopper's famous nanosecond wire? What happened to Anita Borg? (I know the answers... linked above! :-)

The opening reception and poster session was very interesting. I wish students had business cards with their name and session title on it, as I'm afraid I've forgotten many things. I do remember some very interesting presentations on gender and social networking sites, the science behind online dating, as well as a neat talk on routing protocol optimization. The women whose names and talks I did get were Lin Chao on terascale computing, Graciela Perera on doing Diffie-Hellman key exchanges using images, and Dana Zhang had a fascinating poster on automating definition of roles for Role Based Access Control (RBAC).

Everyone really had something interesting to contribute! I only wish there had been more cake ;-)

Well, I should try to get some sleep for my early start!

Valerie Fenwick

Official GHC 2007 Blogger. You may comment on this blog by visiting the GHC Forum.

Last chance to see Beauty & The Beast!

We had another sold out production last night, and now we're down to our last two shows. There are still tickets left for both tonight & tomorrow night, so please come on down and catch our show before it just becomes a distant and pleasant memory.  All the details on purchasing tickets and where the theater is located can be found at the Saratoga Drama Group's website.  Don't forget to tell the Box Office that you're coming to see me! :-)

Grace Hopper Conference 2007

I'm totally excited about the Grace Hopper Conference next week in Florida! I've been chosen as an official blogger, so the Grace Hopper website will be picking up this blog for the next week - so the format of my entries will be slightly different than normal (including signing my name to to my entries). All the attendees here from Sun met today to discuss who would be doing what when. I have an incredibly busy schedule for Thursday, starting with an 8AM bloggers meeting! Those of you who know me well know I am not a morning person, so that combined with the jetlag will make for a tricky 8AM start. Yikes!

Looking forward to meeting you all next week in person!

Valerie Fenwick

Official GHC 2007 Blogger