Ada Lovelace Day: Grace Murray Hopper and Computer Programming

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day to blog about female computer scientists we admire. Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace (10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) is credited with authoring the first computer algorithm (which concerned a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers) in 1843 for use on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine.

This year I'm going to write a posting on Grace Murray Hopper (December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) aka "Amazing Grace", whose contributions to Computer Science are innumerable, the true successor to Ada Lovelace, she was one of the first programmers of an electronic computer, starting in 1944, SHE INVENTED THE FIRST COMPILER (for the A-0 programming language), and was instrumental in the development of machine-independent programming languages which led to the development of COBOL. She is credited with popularizing the term "debugging" for fixing computer glitches (in one instance, removing a moth from a computer).

A natural hacker, at the age of seven she decided to determine how an alarm clock worked, and dismantled seven alarm clocks before her mother realized what she was doing. She graduated from Vassar in 1928 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics, and earned her master's degree at Yale University in 1930. In 1934, she earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale under the direction of Øystein Ore. Her dissertation, New Types of Irreducibility Criteria, was published that same year. Hopper began teaching mathematics at Vassar in 1931, and was promoted to associate professor in 1941.

During World War II, she obtained a leave of absence from Vassar and was sworn into the United States Navy Reserve, She served on the Mark I computer programming staff headed by Howard Aiken. Hopper and Aiken co-authored three papers on the Mark I, also known as the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. She continued to serve in the Navy Reserve, and remained at the Harvard Computation Lab until 1949, turning down a full professorship at Vassar in favour of working as a research fellow under a Navy contract at Harvard.

In the 1970s, Hopper advocated for the Defence Department to replace large, centralized systems with networks of small, distributed computers. Any user on any computer node could access common databases located on the network. She developed the implementation of standards for testing computer systems and components, most significantly for early programming languages such as FORTRAN and COBOL.

Thank you Grace Hopper.

Ada Lovelace Day: Karen Spärck Jones and Information Retrieval

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day to blog about female computer scientists we admire. Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace (10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) is credited with authoring the first computer algorithm (which concerned a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers) in 1843 for use on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine.

This year I am going to post about Karen Spärck Jones, whose work on information retrieval is fundamental to the operation of all modern search engines.

Karen Spärck Jones was born in Huddersfield, in 1935, she attended Cambridge University, in the late 1950s began working as a researcher at the Cambridge Language Research Unit. During that time she worked in the field of Natural Language Processing, and looked at the problem of near-synonyms, and developed more sophisticated ways of distinguishing ambiguous terms.

By the 1960s she was focusing on Information Retrieval and helped develop a metric to measure the importance of an individual word (or a family of words) in a document. This is the notion of Inverse Document Frequency (IDF) weighting, which she introduced in a 1972 paper "A Statistical Interpretation of Term Specificity and Its Application in Retrieval"

The Inverse Document Frequency (IDF) is used in all web search engines and is fundamental to their operation in terms of classification and retrieval, and has also filtered into areas of NLP.

Her more recent work had been on document retrieval, including speech applications, database query, user and agent modelling, summarising, and information and language system evaluation as well as projects on automatic summarising, belief revision for information retrieval, video mail retrieval, and multimedia document retrieval, the last two in collaboration with the Engineering department.

As an influential figure on evaluation programmes, Karen Spärck Jones was also involved in setting the standards for a large proportion of the work in NLP.

She was recipient of a significant number of awards, including:

• Gerard Salton Award (1988)
• ASIS&T Award of Merit (2002)
• ACL Lifetime Achievement Award (2004) 
• BCS Lovelace Medal (2007)
• ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award (2007)

She died on 4 April 2007, and Computer Science lost one of it's most important heroes.

Ada Lovelace Day: Professor Jane Grimson and Federated Healthcare Records

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day to blog about female computer scientists we admire. Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace (10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) is credited with authoring the first computer algorithm (which concerned a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers) in 1843 for use on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine.

This year I'm going to write a posting on Professor Jane Grimson, the Dean of Engineering and Systems Sciences at Trinity College, Dublin as well as Associate Professor and Co-Chair for Health Informatics at Trinity.

Professor Grimson was the first female graduate in Engineering from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1970. She did an MSc in Computer Science at the University of Toronto before doing a PhD at the University of Edinburgh.

She was Project Manager of the Synapses Project funded by the EU Telematics Applications for Health Programme and am involved in the follow-on project, SynEx . Under the Synapses project she helped developed a Federated Healthcare Records Server which allowed client applications to request healthcare records (or parts of records) and related medical data about individual patients irrespective of where that source data is stored.

Another major project she worked on is Medilink, an interdisplinary, inter-institutional research programme in Health Informatics funded by the Irish Department of Education and Science under the Higher Education Authority's Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions.

She was awarded the O'Moore Medal for significant contributions to Healthcare Informatics in 2007 in recognition of her outstanding contributions to the development of healthcare informatics within Ireland and throughout the world.

Her current research is in the area of Health Informatics, specifically Electronic Healthcare Records and system integration. Other areas of interest for her include Federated Database Systems, Decision Support and multi-media user interfaces. She is the co-founder of the inter-displinary Centre for Health Informatics, which she is currently Director.

I was blessed to have her as my databases lecturer in the final year of my degree in Computer Science - she is a fantastic lecturer, a gifted communicator, and  presented a wonderfully cohesive and thoughtful course on databases. She has been a significant inspiration for my own career as a lecturer and researcher.

Ada Lovelace Day: Susan Kare and the Apple Mac

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day to blog about female computer scientists we admire. Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace (10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) is credited with authoring the first computer algorithm (which concerned a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers) in 1843 for use on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine.

This year I'm going to write a posting on Susan Kare, whose contributions to HCI (Human Computer Interaction) are immense. She is an artist and graphic designer who created many of the interface elements for the Apple Mac.

She started working for Apple in 1982 and created a number of user interface elements for the Mac, which set the standard for all graphical user interfaces. Some of her contributions are here:
http://kare.com/portfolio/03_apple_macicons.html

As well as the iconic "Happy Mac", she worked on the Chicago typeface, the Geneva typeface, and the original monospace Monaco typeface.

She left Apple to join NeXT (the company Steve Jobs set up after he left Apple in 1986) as the Creative Director. She currently works as an independent graphic designer working with all of the computer giants including Microsoft and IBM. Her work for Microsoft includes the card deck for Windows 3.0's solitaire game:

http://kare.com/
--------------------

Ada Lovelace Day: Barbara Liskov and Data Abstraction

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day to blog about female computer scientists we admire. Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace (10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) is credited with authoring the first computer algorithm (which concerned a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers) in 1843 for use on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine.




This year I'm going to write a posting on MIT professor Barbara Liskov who won the 2008 ACM Turning Award for 'foundational innovations' in programming language design. Barbara Liskov has worked at MIT AI lab since 1972, and one of her most significant contributions to the field of computer science is her work on championing the idea of Data Abstraction (which seperates the implementation from the use of complex data types). She also designed CLU, an object-oriented programming language incorporating clusters to provide coherent, systematic handling of abstract data types. Following this she developed Argus, a distributed programming language whose novel features led to further developments in distributed system design that could scale to systems connected by a network.

Without her work we would not have programming languages like C++ and Java, without her work we wouldn't have distribtued databases and innovations in real-time systems, without her work we wouldn't have Cloud Computing, thank you Barbara Liskov.

This is a video of Barbara Liskov discussing Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance from December 3, 2001, Running Time: 00:55:32
http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/43

Ada Lovelace Day: Female Hackers on TV

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day to blog about female computer scientists we admire. Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace (10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) is credited with authoring the first computer algorithm (which concerned a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers) in 1843 for use on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine.



 Happy Ada Lovelace Day,

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. For my contribution I'm including a list of female hackers from various television shows:

* Abigail "Abby" Sciuto (Pauley Perrette) in "NCIS"

* Angela Bennett (Brooke Langton) in "The Net"

* Barbara Gordon/Oracle (Dina Meyer) in "Birds of Prey"

* Bonnie Barstow (Patricia McPherson) in "Knight Rider"

* Chloe O'Brian (Mary Lynn Rajskub) in "24"

* Chloe Sullivan (Allison Mack) in "Smallville"

* Cindy "Mac" Mackenzie (Tina Majorino) in "Veronica Mars"

* Penelope Garcia (Kirsten Vangsness) in "Criminal Minds"

* Theora Jones (Amanda Pays) in "Max Headroom"

* Rachel Gibson (Rachel Nichols) in "Alias"

* Sydney Bloom (Lori Singer) in "VR.5"

* Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan) in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"