Celebration of Women in Technology
Women and technology seems unrelated to many. For all those ignorant beings, the Grace Hopper's Women in technology conference was elucidating. Anita Borg institute brought together around 500 women from industry and academia, to share their experiences and to talk technology. This was the first Grace Hopper conference in India, held in Bangalore on 8th and 9th Dec 2010. This time it was open only to the sponsoring companies. A few students were selected to showcase their research in the poster session.
The conference began with a keynote by Kalpana Margabandhu, Director of WebSphere Development, in IBM India Software Lab. She spoke about her journey and how she took up challenges and never gave up. All sessions were divided into 4 tracks - Newcomer, individual contributor, manager and technical speaker. While the first three talked about challenges, opportunities, options and technology at various experience levels, the technical speaker category focused on solving technical problems. I was honored to be part of a panel discussing challenges in continuing as individual contributor. The session drew a huge crowd and I was elated as well as honored to address so many talented technical women. The second keynote was delivered by Nandini Singh, a physicist and a neuroscientist, spoke about sound, how brain interprets and differentiates it, representation of sound and applications. The second day also featured a plenary for challenges and opportunities for women, panelists included Krista Claude, CTO Thomson Reuters, Nagamani Murthy, Vice President of the Mobile, Automotive and Consumer Electronics (MAC) business at Wipro, Dr. Rebecca Parsons, ThoughtWorks’ Chief Technology Officer and Dr. Radha Shelat, CEO Aviram Networks & Nevis Networks. It was moderated by Justin Rattner, vice president and chief technology officer (CTO) Intel. Their mere presence was encouraging, and i'm sure every attendee pledged to put in all the hard work and perseverance required to climb that acme.
The sessions I attended were mostly in the technical speaker track. Here's summary of those sessions :
1> Solving technical problems - Pradnya talked about faster webpage loading and Pallavi talked about morphing ultra sound images to prevent gender detection.
2> Visual processing in computers and humans - Jayanthi Sivaswamy spoke about cognitive algorithms to identify and understand a scene by processing digital images and its application in medical science.
3> Cloud platforms and applications - this was a panel of 3 speakers, Janani from Google, Aditee from Microsoft and Karpagam from Yahoo. They spoke about computing models, security and administration and particularly about Hadoop.
4> Product innovation - women in emerging markets - Priya Mani talked about innovations that've made it big in the emerging market and how these simple ideas were transformed into breakthroughs. She bought up an interesting point that women are emerging markets.
5> Case studies in machine learning - Mani from Yahoo spoke about page indexing, and how machine learning algorithms are used to extract useful information from infinite pool of data. Vidya Narayan of Google, spoke about Machine Learning techniques employed by Orkut to rank profiles for porn detection and spam classification
6> Experiences with working on linux kernel - Suparna talked about the challenges she faced while working on linux kernel, how some features like dynamic probing etc made it to the kernel.
7>Case studies in computing at large scale-Jyoti talked about content optimization using hadoop stack and Pooja, from Google, talked about smoke test infrastructure which runs tests for dependent projects on a single change.
Overall a heavy dose of technology and it gave me a kick of the lifetime.
The conference began with a keynote by Kalpana Margabandhu, Director of WebSphere Development, in IBM India Software Lab. She spoke about her journey and how she took up challenges and never gave up. All sessions were divided into 4 tracks - Newcomer, individual contributor, manager and technical speaker. While the first three talked about challenges, opportunities, options and technology at various experience levels, the technical speaker category focused on solving technical problems. I was honored to be part of a panel discussing challenges in continuing as individual contributor. The session drew a huge crowd and I was elated as well as honored to address so many talented technical women. The second keynote was delivered by Nandini Singh, a physicist and a neuroscientist, spoke about sound, how brain interprets and differentiates it, representation of sound and applications. The second day also featured a plenary for challenges and opportunities for women, panelists included Krista Claude, CTO Thomson Reuters, Nagamani Murthy, Vice President of the Mobile, Automotive and Consumer Electronics (MAC) business at Wipro, Dr. Rebecca Parsons, ThoughtWorks’ Chief Technology Officer and Dr. Radha Shelat, CEO Aviram Networks & Nevis Networks. It was moderated by Justin Rattner, vice president and chief technology officer (CTO) Intel. Their mere presence was encouraging, and i'm sure every attendee pledged to put in all the hard work and perseverance required to climb that acme.
The sessions I attended were mostly in the technical speaker track. Here's summary of those sessions :
1> Solving technical problems - Pradnya talked about faster webpage loading and Pallavi talked about morphing ultra sound images to prevent gender detection.
2> Visual processing in computers and humans - Jayanthi Sivaswamy spoke about cognitive algorithms to identify and understand a scene by processing digital images and its application in medical science.
3> Cloud platforms and applications - this was a panel of 3 speakers, Janani from Google, Aditee from Microsoft and Karpagam from Yahoo. They spoke about computing models, security and administration and particularly about Hadoop.
4> Product innovation - women in emerging markets - Priya Mani talked about innovations that've made it big in the emerging market and how these simple ideas were transformed into breakthroughs. She bought up an interesting point that women are emerging markets.
5> Case studies in machine learning - Mani from Yahoo spoke about page indexing, and how machine learning algorithms are used to extract useful information from infinite pool of data. Vidya Narayan of Google, spoke about Machine Learning techniques employed by Orkut to rank profiles for porn detection and spam classification
6> Experiences with working on linux kernel - Suparna talked about the challenges she faced while working on linux kernel, how some features like dynamic probing etc made it to the kernel.
7>Case studies in computing at large scale-Jyoti talked about content optimization using hadoop stack and Pooja, from Google, talked about smoke test infrastructure which runs tests for dependent projects on a single change.
Overall a heavy dose of technology and it gave me a kick of the lifetime.
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