GHC12: SRC Poster Competition: Undergraduate – Round Two

In this session semifinalist undergraduate students from the Wednesday night poster session are each given 15 minutes to present their work.

The first presentation was on Digital Organisms, a topic I had never heard about before!  Mairin Chesney, The student, whose name I missed, was from Michigan State. She was focusing on host and parasite organisms, along with sexual recombination. I have to admit, this was a bit difficult to wrap my head around, though the videos of a organism growing and being attacked by a parasite were quite fascinating. She also shared some stories from the research about these organisms learning things - like "playing dead" in an attack scenario.

The next presenter was Jillian Kramer, Villanova University, talking about her work on mobile technology and efficiency. For example, what's faster? Starting an app to read a QR code to get to a webpage, or just opening a browser window and tying in the URL? Her research assumed there was an expert user and the phone was already unlocked. The most efficient method for accessing a link? Clicking on a link in email, next fastest was QR code, finally - good old fashioned typing was the slowest.

Kaleigh Clary, Hendrix College, researched for a superior method for handwriting recognition by a machine. Part of her research had to do with teaching a machine to learn handwriting, using a lot of interesting algorithms She compared Self-Organized Maps with Growing Neural Gas Network, finding that GNG was the best.

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GHC12: Leveraging Mobile and Internet Technology to Improve Women's Lives in the Developing World

Ann Mei Chang (US Department of State), started out by telling us what we know: technology is important! While only about 30% of the world population are online, there is great gender disparity in  developing countries (20% fewer women have access to mobile technology).

In the US, men and women have relatively equal access to Facebook, but in Egypt/Africa, only 37% of the Facebook users are female. In Afghanistan, it's only 16%.

This is disturbing, because it's been shown that having access to technology increases individual's abilities to earn money and move their household (and eventually their country) forward.

Mobile apps can bring a lot of technology to individuals, like basic health information, government information, education, access markets so you that you can find out the price of goods, etc.

More apps are becoming available every day, but they are not widely used. There are many issues for this adoption, though, including that only 50% of the rural population has any type of cell coverage. This is also much more expensive in  places like Africa (both in real dollars and compared with their income). In the US, a mobile Internet connection costs about 1.5% of your monthly income - in Africa, it's 300% of their monthly income!

For women in particular, this can be worse, as their husbands/brothers/fathers are not allowing the women in their lives to even have access to mobile phones. The men in these countries believe the only reason a woman would want a phone is to have an affair, which is, 1) pretty ridiculous 2) extremely unlikely the reason why they'd want a phone. (Can you imagine telling a man that the only reason to have a phone was to have an affair? opinion mine)

Another barrier to entry is the types of phones available in these developing countries - remember feature phones? You know, pre-smartphone? (Okay, my husband is still using his ;-) You probably didn't use very many applications, and the ones that you used were probably SMS based. Those types of phones that many of us consider outdated are state of the art in other countries.

Ms Chang recommends trying to leverage existing technology and apps - already have recognition and people have access to it. Don't try to rebuild the wheel - too difficult to maintain.

She recommends designing applications for women's needs and priorities, working with intermediaries to help with access and literacy barriers, be open to a non-technical solution, and be aware of maintenance plans from the start.

Ms. Chang likes the idea of a technology career for women in developing countries, because of the flexibility of the hours and the fact that it's a new and emerging field, not male dominated (yet).

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GHC12: Welcome and Keynote

An exciting official welcome to the conference from Telle Witney - attendance at this year's conference is up from 23% from last year, has over 1500 students, and attendees from over 42 countries!

Nora Denzel, Technical Executive and Corporate Board Member, has a long list of great tech companies that she's been involved with, either as a board member or as a technical executive. She has also recently started "Mentoring Walks" - a way to mentor and get exercise at the same time Probably healthier than "Mentoring at Classic Gelato" :-)

Ms. Denzel took us down a fun walk down memory lane with great stories about programming on the TRS80: programs were stored on cassette (quality controlled by volume setting), you were allowed one array, two strings and 27 numerics, and worst of all - everything was in upper case only. :-)

Now, why upper case only?  Because it saved $5 off of the manufacturing cost of each machine.  Sounds silly nowadays, but those are the types of design compromises many of us will be asked to make in our career. Sure, you may not be making the best machine or software component you could - but it will be affordable by your users and available in a timely fashion.

Ms. Denzel could not believe her luck when she found out that it was possible to get paid to write code :-)

After a few years, she worked her way into meeting with customers, doing technical marketing and eventually a technical manager at IBM.  She left IBM when they wanted to transfer her to upstate New York. After having lived in California, she couldn't bear the thought of doing a winter in New York.

Women make up about 50% of the professional workforce, but only 25% of all computing jobs - down from 30% about a decade ago.  Fewer women are graduating with computing degrees, and even when they do get them, they don't stay in the field.

Ms. Denzel is asking all of us to work on recruiting more women into tech and help keeping them here. This matters, because gender diverse teams make better decisions - which means we can have better products.  Men and women approach problems differently - by working together, we can come up with more creative solutions.

For example, older dictation machines were designed by men and tested by men, but they did not work with the female voice - so they were not successful. Similarly, with airbags - the initial deployments were actually dangerous for women and children.

Rules for longevity in technology:

• Your attitude.

• Her dad told her, "Your attitude is like a flat tire, if you don't change it, you're not going anywhere".
• Ms. Denzel realized  she didn't have a career path - but a career obstacle course. She had to change her attitude: these problems weren't happening to her, but for her.

•  For longevity, you need to be very comfortable with being uncomfortable.
• Don't be afraid of vertical learning curves.

• Act as if...
• Act as if you're confident. Act as if you're a good speaker. Act like that.
• It's easier to act your way into a new way of thinking, rather than think way into a new way of thinking. Stay out of your head.

• Control your career PR agent
• That's you!
• Sometimes our own personal "press releases are ... too long! Or... too much!
• For example, Ms Denzel once, as an executive, congratulated a woman on a great technical talk. The woman then went through a laundry list of mistakes she had actually made, complained about how she was tired and not at her best, etc. Pointing out her own shortcomings and mistakes - where she should've just said, "Thank you".

• It takes a village
• Make sure you have a network that you can nurture.
• It's not what you know, or who you know - but who knows what you know.

Tips for recruiting:

• You can wear what you want
• You get free food
• You get SWAG
• You have the chance to change the world

Lots of great things to think about! The "Act as if" reminds me of a great book I read, Leadership Presence. I've been using that for a few years, and it really does help.

You can find the more accurately captured quotes and citations at Nora's site.

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GHC12: New Investigators - Mobile Devices

Moderators: Gilda Garreton (Oracle), Rachel Pottinger (University of British Columbia)

 On User Privacy in Personalized Mobile Services

 Michaela Goetz, Twitter, presented her GHC12 Award Winning paper,

Ms. Goetz's paper covered her research on how to best target advertising without compromising user privacy - tricky if you want to find out which advertising is working and to target advertising appropriately.

Her research included a method for doing this without requiring a trusted third party server, which involves doing counts by including noise terms - enough to protect the privacy without statistically impacting the overall counts.

It's nice to allow the users to set their own personal context for what is sensitive or not: for example, going to the hospital to see a relative would be very private, but walking the dog may not be so. While it's nice for the advertisers to learn what is sensitive or not, but even then they could learn more about the user than desired.

Understanding How Children Use Touchscreens

Presented by Quincy Brown, Assistant Professor, Bowie State University.

This is an important topic, as millions of these devices are being sold. Kids love these touch screen products, but they are not designed with little fingers and skill sets.  Children have trouble with things like dragging - the concept of maintaining contact to drag was surprisingly challenging.

Dr. Brown's research covered adults as well, on several different devices. In one of the experiments, they measured success based on target size (area size you could touch in order to get the desired action) and gesture interaction (how they could do things like drawing letters or symbols). Children miss the targets twice as often as adults and found (unsurprisingly) that larger targets were easier for the children to find.

The researches discovered a new phenomenon: holdovers! When the application was "too slow" to respond so the user wasn't sure if they had hit the target or not, they would repeat their action. 96% of the "holdovers" came from children.

Kids gestures were also different - they lifted their fingers more often. For example, to draw a square, children frequently drew 4 independent lines, whereas adults never lifted their finger, just turning their finger to make the shape. This causes problems for the touch device - it doesn't recognize four lines that overlap at the corners as a "square".

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GHC12: Oracle Again Sponsoring GHC!

In all of the hustle and bustle I've been going through to get ready for the conference, I haven't had a chance to write much.  I'm thrilled that Oracle is, yet again, sponsoring the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

While you're at the conference, stop in and see Sue Zwinger, VP of Oracle's Global Systems Technology Service Center, talk on "From Engineer to Executive" (Thursday, October 4, 11:30AM-12:30PM in BCC 307-308).

Gilda Garreton, Oracle Principal Software Engineer, is presenting twice: "Are We There Yet? Finding Your Career Sweet Spot" (Friday, October 5, 3:45-4:45PM in BCC: 307-308) and a Birds of a Feather slot: "Juggling our Different Worlds" (Friday, October 5, 5:15-6:15PM, BCC 314-315).

You'll be able to find me at the Oracle booth, the Grace Hopper Conference Communities Table, hosting a lunch time table talk on transitioning into management, or feverishly writing blog posts in many sessions.

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In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What an amazing true story, brought to life by Erik Larson, based on the journals written by the US Ambassador to Germany, William E. Dodd, and his daughter, Martha Dodd. What a strange time it was for them, heading to Germany on the brink of the second world war. William, never a fan of the Nazis, was forced to entertain them in his home. A simple man, Dodd never seems to adjust to what is meant to be an ambassador's lifestyle, constantly battling both the German locals and members of his own embassy.

Martha, a young and impressionable woman, falls in love with several of the men whose lives intertwine hers, from Germans, other diplomats all the way to a Russian spy.

Ambassador Dodd also brought his wife and son, but you do not get to know much about them, presumably they did not write as many letters or keep as detailed of a journal to gather information from.

This is a wonderful book that takes you to Germany as it was on the cusp of war, showing you how human everyone really was, and how vile others were at the same time.

Lest we forget, even some Americans sided with the general principles of the Nazi party, which made it difficult for those back home (and even for the Dodds) to believe the cruelty that was happening right under our noses.

Thanks to Martha's many associations, the book also gives us a detailed look at high ranking officials in the German government.

View all my reviews

Grace Hopper Community Volunteers

I am thrilled to be co-chair of the Grace Hopper Celebration's Communities Committee again this year.  I love working with the Anita Borg Institute, talking and working with other technical women, and bringing the excitement and inspiration of this conference to women and men the world over.

I first volunteered as a blogger in 2007, and immediately became hooked.

Being an official blogger or note taker let's you get your thoughts written down while everything is fresh in your mind, making those memories last longer.  This is great for me, otherwise I tend to let my notes languish in a notebook.  This is also great for the conference organizers and speakers, as these moments are kept for posterity.  Best of all, people can participate in the conference remotely, through our words.

If you don't have a blog, don't worry, you can take notes on the official Grace Hopper Wiki.

Being an official blogger or note taker only requires a commitment of 3 posts, and gets you a nifty ribbon you can attach to your badge - an immediate conversation starter!

Want to join us? You can read more about the communities we participate in and what it means to volunteer, and then sign up!

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