![]() Stories of women computing pioneers could fill books. Karen Sparck Jones* (1935–2007) developed inverse document frequency, the technology underlying modern search engines. Judy Clapp (born in 1930) developed an air defence system prototype that used radar to track and direct aircraft courses. Radia Perlman (born in 1951) developed spanning tree protocol, making the internet possible. Sister Mary Kenneth Keller (1913–1985) helped develop BASIC computer code. The ENIAC Team-Betty Jean Bartik, Kathleen McNulty, Mauchly Antonelli, Ruth Teitelbaum, Frances Spence, Marlyn Meltzer, and Frances Holberton-was responsible for the world’s first general-purpose computer used for calculating World War II ballistic trajectories. Grace Hopper (1906–1992) worked on the first commercial computer produced in the US, created the first complier, and invented the first English-like data processing language. When women’s contributions are overlooked, the public forgoes opportunities to derive inspiration and gain advice from an important sector of computing pioneers.Īnd the ACM has definitely missed opportunities to recognize pioneering women computer scientists. In public programming emanating from the ACM Awards Banquet and beyond, they serve as role models to inspire young people. For a certain nerdy cohort-one I belong to-they are heroes. Winners are sought-after, invited to give high-profile speeches, meet with business leaders, and advise politicians. Million-dollar prizes like the Turing Award seize the public’s attention. However, the roughly 4 percent of women recipients does not approximate the fact that women currently earn 21% of the Ph.D.s in computer science, down from the 1987 peak of 37%. Some hypothesize that the dearth of women Turing Award recipients reflects women’s underrepresentation in the field. The first female recipient didn’t win until 2006-it took 40 years to recognize a woman. Since the Turing Award’s inception in 1966, 70 computer scientists have won it, only three of whom have been women. Reading through the recipient list, you could easily come away with the false impression that men are responsible for nearly all computing breakthroughs. If you attend, you’ll notice something stark: Nearly all of those who have received computing’s top prize have been men. Later in June, it will honor the recipient(s), along with winners of its other, less prestigious computing prizes, at an awards banquet in San Francisco. ![]() The ACM typically announces the winner(s) in March. Nominations for the 2019 Turing Award are due to the Association for Computing Machinery-the awarding organization-by Jan. Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun’s (2018) breakthroughs in deep learning have enabled self-driving cars, facial recognition, and more. Raj Reddy (1994) pioneered artificial intelligence, which enables computers to understand spoken language. Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman (2015 recipients) invented public-key cryptography-the security ingredient that permits us, for example, to enter credit card numbers online with confidence. ![]() Tim Berners-Lee (2016 Turing Award recipient) invented the World Wide Web and the first web browser. Recipients of the Turing Award-widely considered the Nobel Prize of computing-may not be household names, but their innovations have wired our lives.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |