Greetings all, March 24, 2009 (today!) is Ada Lovelace day, and it's been suggested that folks post notes, blog entries, etc. about women in technology they admire on this day...
http://www.pledgebank.com/AdaLovelaceDay Of course under-representation of women is one of the very big and real problems in Computer Science, and unfortunately it has been and remains a problem in our Computer Science department here in Duluth (and at many other places too). Right now we have a handful of undergraduate females (out of perhaps 200? majors) and 2 female graduate students (out of perhaps 30 graduate students...) These are tiny tiny percentages of course, and really not a good thing at all...why that is the case remains an issue that we really ought to try and understand better and do more about... However, one of the nice things about doing research in Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics is that there is a somewhat more sane male/female ratio in that research community, and I think that makes for a healthier and more productive environment in general...as a result I've had the good fortune to have a professional circle of colleagues and acquaintances that includes both men and women - as such there are quite a few female researchers, scientists, professors, etc. that I know quite well, and I must say it's hard to single out just one that I admire more than all the rest. On the other hand, if you start to provide long lists then you worry you might inadvertently forget someone. :) So, let me mention someone who I didn't know personally, and probably never spoke to, although I was always keenly interested in hearing her comments and talks at conferences, and consider myself fortunate to have seen and heard her in that setting ... This would be Karen Sparck Jones : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Sp%C3%A4rck_Jones who I'm sure has been mentioned by many other people on this day, but, let me add to the list... Her book "Synonymy and Semantic Classification" from the 1960s is something I discovered in graduate school, and I revisit it every few years, and continue to learn from... it has clearly had a very large influence on me and anyone else who attempts to deal with issues surrounding words, meanings, synonyms, etc. etc. While this work was done in the 1960s it wasn't published in a widely available form until 1986...here you can find a review which gives further info about that publication : http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/J/J88/J88-4004.pdf if you haven't read "Synonymy and Semantic Classification" - please look for it and give it a try, it's really quite remarkable for any era, and when you consider this was done back in the 1960s...well, it's a bit humbling (and a bit of humility never hurt anyone). This was among her earlier works....among her last works was a column in Computational Linguistics which she apparently wrote knowing that she was quite ill and perhaps did not have much time to live. I find this very moving (that she would write this under those circumstnaces) and so I really think if you haven't read this you ought to take a few minutes *right now* and read it.... It is fairly brief, very interesting, and called "Computational Linguistics : What about the Linguistics" : http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/J/J07/J07-3008.pdf [If you are reading this and didn't click on that link, go back now and do it! :)] And if you aren't sure who this Ada Lovelace is, here's a little bit about her... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace Enjoy, Ted -- Ted Pedersen http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse
