Thursday, October 2, 2008

GHC08: Awards ceremony and DANCING!

There was no awards banquet this year, as the Grace Hopper conference took a more casual approach to the awards reception. Dinner was served buffet style in advance, which nice as we all got a chance to actually pay attention as awards were given out, instead of attempting to balance between eating & listening to the presenters. I really enjoyed the switch!


I have never seen an awards ceremony with so many heart fealt hugs and ear to ear grins. The wonderful stories told about Grace Hopper and Anita Borg were fascinating to listen to.  It was cool to see a fellow Gaslighter Alum, Elisa Camahort Page, and her colleagues win the Anita Borg Social Impact Award for their work with BlogHer.  I especially liked the acceptance speech from Elaine Weyuker for the Anita Borg Technical Leadership Award.


I was lucky enough to be entertained again by David Garibaldi, who dazzled us as he did 6 foot portraits of both Grace Hopper and Anita Borg in less than 10 minutes each (perfectly coordinated to music).  I saw him last time at the Professinal Business Women of California conference in April.


The evening then turned to dessert and dancing - what a fantastic combination! Though, I will admit, dancing is challenging at altitude! :-)


Valerie Fenwick

GHC08: Getting it Together: Empowering People through Information (Integration)


Laura Haas, from IBM, talked about how we have lots of information - but the problem is it is in lots of places.  There is a big challenge of integrating data so the right data is available to the correct people at the right time - and most importantly in a format they can understand.


This research has been going on for decades, but advances in technology are making easier to find the right information that needs to be collated together. 


She went on to describe how to use search, as well as "was this what you were looking for" type queries to better aggregate the data, and noted the problems with dirty data sets.


There are still a lot of problems to tackle - it still needs human input, and too much expertise to run.



Ms. Haas is very passionate about this subject and has a list as long as her arm of followon work. Definitely seems like there are a lot of opportunities in this area!



Valerie Fenwick




neat workaround for broken harddrive


So, I'm anofficial blogger for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing ... and my laptop hard drive dies. Read errors. Sense errors. Oh, joy. It is a brand new laptop - this being my first real use of it (other than installing Solaris on it, configuring VPN and verifying the system worked).  Jim Hughes, a chief technologist at Sun, had the brilliant suggestion of using the OpenSolaris Live CD we included in all of the bags for everyone here at the Grace Hopper conference. Lo and behold, after an extended boot time, it worked! I'm online again. I can't access my Sun account, since my VPN keys are on the dead hard drive, but I can blog... it's something.  The extended boot time is caused by the Live CD attempting to mount all devices, which includes a dodgey hard drive...


I guess I can facebook too... ;-)

Laptop died!!!!!!

OH NOOOOOO! My harddrive in my brand new laptop just died... disk read error. Awesome. This entry is coming from the cyber cafe - I'll have to see if I can find a laptop to borrow for the other sessions I'm blogging, but I won't be logging into work anymore!

GH08: Future Mobile Technology Empowering Users: Understands, Guides, Decides


This session from Mary Smiley, from Intel's Emerging Technology group, was presenting on new micro technologies that enable all of us to "live large".


Some of the technology she covered were sensors, like the one in the iPhone or iPod Touch that can tell when you tip or shake the device. Some more advanced sensors that seem to be in the pipeline would be able to judge your mood from your body temperature, recognize your voice to determine more quickly if your phone might be stolen, and just check how healthy you are.


Some of their research leverage the Polar heart rate monitor straps and the mobile devices that measure activity to get an overall picture of their health. Clearly their are privacy implications for this, where you would not necessarily want to share all of this information with just anyone, and apparently those are being addressed.


Valerie Fenwick 

GHC08: Fighting Crime using Gunshot Location Systems

This is a very interesting talk on the ShotSpotter technology by Elecia White and Sarah Newman. This technology has been installed in several major cities, helping to solve crimes when the shooter can be pinpointed quickly.  In one example, a sniper shot someone from a roof, and actually stayed on the roof, relaxing and smoking a cigarette - thinking he was out of the expected shooting area.  But, the ShotSpotter technology had pinpointed him and the police were able to make an arrest.


Of course, this technology needs to attempt to differentiate between firecrackers, hammers, backfiring cars and gunshots. The technology takes a first pass at guessing what it was hearing (and gives a level of confidence), but then asks the police dispatcher to make a judgment call on whether police action is required or not.


They find this gets faster and better reporting than actually relying on people calling 911 (as there is a longer delay before they call and only about 50% of gun crimes are called in).  The system isn't perfect, but seems that it can definitely help!


Valerie Fenwick

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

A great start!

What an adventure getting here to the Grace Hopper Women in Computing Conference, with busy shuttles and lots of hustling around.  I'm glad I'm here and have been able to reconnect with women I met last year at the conference, mostly from Sun and from Purdue.


The  poster session was outstanding, as usual, though they seemed closer together or something, so it was sometimes difficult to move down the aisle.  I saw a lot of interesting research on learning techniques and new ways to get students inspired to explore computer science as a career.  I was happy to see a few posters from Purdue's CERIAS lab as well.


Travel is exhausting, though, so I'm off to bed now! Busy day ahead tomorrow!


Valerie Fenwick