Friday October 19, 2007

GHC: Panel: Outstanding Women in Computer Security

This panel had women from both industry and academia: Carol Taylor, Eastern Washington University; Rose Shumba, Indiana Univeristy of Pennsylvania; Kathy Jenks, Sun Microsystems, Inc.; Becky Bace, Infidel .  The moderator, Carrie Gates from Computer Associates, asked each woman to start out answering a few set questions.  I've captured a few of their answers and related ideas below.

Carol Taylor recommends having a multi-disciplinary background to be successful in computer security field, and she loves the field because there are never ending problems that are very socially oriented.

Rose Shumba said grants from NSF & Cisco really helped her to get involved in information assurance, as they wanted a security lab set up and to have security worked into their courses at IUP, so she really had to dive in and get hands on experience. She recommends that you attend as many conferences you can, including black hat conferences, in order to keep your skills sharp.

Kathy Jenks sort of morphed from an individual contributer developing software into a management role, which eventually led to being in a position to bring up an awesome team of security engineers for the Solaris operating system. (that's the group I'm a member of ;-)  To be successful, she recommends being curious, paying attention to the industry and discussing security from an objective perspective.

Becky Bace grew up in the south (North Alabama) and started her own company in 1998 (Infidel). She got into security on accident, by taking a job a friend recommended her for and suddenly found herself working on an early Intrusion Detection System.  Since then, she's written two books on security, funded security research programs (like CERIAS at Purdue) and companies, among many other major accomplishments in the industry.  Becky Bace mentioned again how important mentoring was to her career success (a repeated theme in this conference!)  She sees this as a great field for women, since it is still growing, is very dynamic and has great social implications.

This was a really cool panel - it was so neat to hear from successful women in the industry!

Valerie Fenwick

Official GHC 2007 Blogger. You may comment on this blog by visiting the GHC Forum.

GHC: Split Session: At the Internet's Edge

RFID: IP Network Applications and Societal Implications - Monique Morrow

Monique gave a great overview of the technology, which was a bit of a repeat for me, since I attended the RFID talk yesterday, but she did cover different aspects - covering passive vs active RFID chips. Passive devices are lower cost, but have lower range & more expensive readers than active devices.

"Hybrid" RFIDs that contain bar code, for backwards compatibility, are likely going to be the most popular.  As this technology gains foothold in the world, we'll be able to get much larger & more accurate data about merchandise, pharmaceuticals, employees, etc.

By 2009, Monique is anticipating a significant share of network traffic with be RFID related (data, voice, video, RF, GPS).

Wireless Security Best Practices Guidelines - Nancy Cam-Winget

Wireless LANS are everywhere now - touching all of our lives, whether you know it or not.

These are so popular because they are cheaper and easier to deploy than traditional wired networks, and lead to increased productivity for employees. What's not to like?

It's harder to secure - the network goes beyond the walls ("open air"), uses a very standard protocol that anyone can use and understand - or their readily available inexpensive devices will.

Most common threats:
Accidental rogue access points
ad-hoc wireless networks
denial of service attacks
client mis-association

WEP was designed with out much (any?) input from knowledgeable security folks.

By the time the committee realized this, there were already millions of units deployed.  So, they needed to come up with something to not immediately break those units.  

So, a new standard was created (WPA2), but still needs to be backwards compatible for some time.  This protects against man-in-the-middle attacks, but not if you still allow people to use WEP. It does not protect against rogue networks, though. She cautions that new deployments must not be done with WEP.

New technology for doing rogue detection & confinement is becoming available, so there is light at the end of the tunnel.

This was a very interesting talk, considering we have a WEP network here at Grace Hopper...

Valerie Fenwick

Official GHC 2007 Blogger. You may comment on this blog by visiting the GHC Forum.

(2007-10-19 13:59:47.0) Permalink

GHC: Technical to Management: Expect the Unexpected - A synopsis of two women's first years experiences

Jessica R Eidem and Tara G Pelletier, both from IBM, went over their initial experiences - pros & cons - of leaving the technical track and going for management.

Jessica talked about how difficult it was giving up her technical role - she had to purposefully stop making technical decisions, to avoid micromanaging her team.  This is a something I've thought about a lot in the past, and that is the main reasons I've stayed technical. I'd like to advance my career, and sometimes management seems to be the only path - but I enjoy the technical aspects of my job so much, I can't let go.

They both agreed that they get a lot of intangible benefits from helping their employees grow their careers, through training or giving them challenging opportunities.

They state how important it is to set expectations up front and acknowledge the work of employees to the correct people.  They made it very clear that folks should make sure they really want to go into management, because the work they do will greatly impact peoples lives.

This was an outstanding overview of the pros and cons of making this large career change.

At this point the presentation turned into a panel, adding Bev Crair from Cisco and Susan Miller from Sun, two women who have been in management for many years.

The panel was truly a delight to listen too, full of good advice about MBAs, gender diversity, managing career and life balance and why they went into management in the first place.

Bev reiterated how important it was to not pursue an MBA directly after completing a bachelors degree - the work experience you get is invaluable to understanding the course work in an MBA program. She also recommends taking an MBA program aligned with your own life - for example, if you're working full time, don't try to pursue an MBA full time. It's too much work and you won't be with students in the same mind frame of yours.

All of the women on the panel do have an MBA, and they all seem to believe it's really helped them with their work.

This was a very valuable panel - I really wish they could've been given more time!

Valerie Fenwick

Official GHC 2007 Blogger. You may comment on this blog by visiting the GHC Forum.

(2007-10-19 12:53:33.0) Permalink

GHC: Helping Businesses Invent the Future: Improving Engagement among Women in High Tech

Heather Foust-Cummings from Catalyst, Inc, gave a fun and deeply interesting talk on attempting to expand opportunities for women & business.  She notes that while women make up 46.3% of the workforce, they only make up 15.6% of Fortune 500 corporate officers, and only 6.7% of Fortune 500 top earners.  Wow. So it's not just our imagination that we make less than men.

Catalyst, Inc has been doing more and more studies of women in technology and science, most recently they did a study with an online survey in January-February 2007. The survey was not random, more of a "convenient" sample, but they found the respondents were from a variety of backgrounds.

Women in technology gave these barriers for lack of career advancement:

• Lack of similar role models
• Lack of a mentor/champion who makes accomplishments known
• Exclusion from important networks of key decision makers

According to Heather this is not unique to women in tech - women in other professional jobs have the same problems. Bummer! 

She went on to go into great detail of her yet to be published survey results (so we were asked to not publish them yet), ways individual women can improve their  chances of career advancement, and things managers can do to get a good balance and make sure they don't overlook the women in their organization.

Valerie Fenwick

Official GHC 2007 Blogger. You may comment on this blog by visiting the GHC Forum.

GHC: PhD Forum: Algorithms

Jo-Anne Ting started us out with her presentation on Automatic Bayesian Learning Methods. Her goal is to help systems that need to learn, learn on the fly. For example, robots or automaton cars. Her research is focused on finding the most suitable algorithm that can do this with limited memory and in real time, that doesn't get confused with with outliers.

Wei Ding gave us an overview of her research with correlation of spacial data, starting out with an example of the cholera outbreak in London in 1854, and how the outbreak was only stopped once proper analysis of the spatial data was done. She gave a good overview of how she's applied her research to analyzing problems with water wells (arsenic) in Texas & finding water on Mars.  Her research results are supporting expected troubled areas in Texas - cool!

Wow - one of the folks asking a question on this paper is one of my friends from the Bay Area (Kelly), who a couple years back moved to Virginia to be a professor. I didn't know she was at this conference. Neat!

Our final presenter is Michelle L. Crane talked about her research on slicing the 3 layer architecture of UML. Her goal is to map actions to a symantec domain.  I'm not familiar with UML, but I still found the discussion quite interesting.

Valerie Fenwick

Official GHC 2007 Blogger. You may comment on this blog by visiting the GHC Forum. (2007-10-19 08:06:18.0) Permalink

GHC: Keynote speaker

It was tough getting up this morning, the caffeine kept me up (shaking) til about 2:30 or 3AM, but I"m glad I drug myself out of bed (and so happy that Jen toasted a bagel for me).

Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd College, had a lot of interesting points about why women have problems following up with a career in computer science. A big thing they are doing at Harvey Mudd is making their introduction to computer science class as exciting as the careers students will be able to do once they graduate.

She noted another interesting thing that I can really relate to: lots of women students think they must be in the wrong field, because they don't spend their evenings trolling slashdot.org, or writing more code just for fun.  It turns out, you can love your field, and still have hobbies outside of your career.

Another interesting tidbit - apparently parents & school counselors are telling high school students that there are no longer any careers in computer science, since the dot-com bust - that it's a dead field. Weird - we're all still using computers, aren't we?  We certainly aren't still buying systems and operating systems from 1999 are we?

I can't agree with her more - computer scientists do have an image problem. It really is a fun career, and does allow you the flexibility to pursue many different careers and still leaves room to have hobbies.

Valerie Fenwick

Official GHC 2007 Blogger. You may comment on this blog by visiting the GHC Forum.