afterword (Ira's blog)

The MAGIC Project Begins ...

Five of us from Sun Microsystems kicked off the MAGIC (More Active Girls In Computing) project at the Grace Hopper Celebration in Computing Conference in Orlando on October 18th. Inspite of the BOF sessions being from 5:30-6:30pm and thus overlapping with the conference banquet reception starting at 6pm, the MAGIC BOF attracted quite a crowd. Meenakshi, one of the MAGIC team members, counted the number of attendees, and we had 54 members in the audience! And many of them stayed behind after the BOF session, to offer feedback, suggestions, advice and to sign up as MAGICMentors. We also got a couple of leads for legal and administrative help. Great!

During the BOF, the MAGIC team members offered thoughts on four main MAGIC topics: challenges, implementation, resources to utilize and publicity. And we solicited interactive audience feedback throughout the session. The discussion generated a host of ideas, including (in no particular order):

• Try to get groups of mentees from the same school, esp for middle school girls. Groups work well for middle school girls.
• Engage the teachers of the mentees, to enlist their help, directly and indirectly.
• Have a powerful introductory presentation for energizing the mentees.
• Middle and high school girls are distinct populations, so be sure to tailor the program differently for each segment.
• Investigate resources such as Girl Scouts, YMCA, the Sally Ride Festival, NCWIT and women programs in industry, for publicizing MAGIC.
• Investigate publicizing MAGIC in girls magazines such as Girls' Life and Americal Life.

We also identified a set of next steps, at the end of our presentation. This list includes:

• Start the process for establishing MAGIC as a non-profit organization.
• Finalize the MAGICMentor and MAGICMentee registration process.
• Finalize web-based training for MAGIC.
• Build MAGICMentor and MAGICmentee database.
• Plan and execute a MAGIC pilot, with the initial set of mentors and mentees.
• Plan and execute publicity events, for enlisting additional (the goal is 30) MAGICMentors and MAGICMentees in 2008.

At the end of the BOF, seven women applied for being MAGICMentors, and an additional one has applied through our website. We are very excited! We will start looking for MAGICMentees in the near future.

A couple of things are very clear in my mind from this BOF session. Mentoring middle and high school girls, that MAGIC aims to provide, seems to be a universally important and worthwhile thing to do. It is much needed at this juncture. At the same time, there are several challenges in executing such a project successfully. Clearly, this is a difficult task. All of us at MAGIC feel extremely passionate about making a difference in the lives of young girls, and feel that we are up to the challenge!

Please visit the MAGIC website for more information on this project.

Posted at 01:05AM Oct 24, 2007 by Ira Pramanick in MAGIC  |  Comments[0]

Let's Get MAGICal!!

Let's get More Active Girls In Computing (MAGIC) and lead the way into increasing the percentage (currently 28%) of women in the technology workforce.

That is the mantra of the MAGIC program. We are kicking off this project at the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) of Women in Computing being held this month in Orlando.

The problem at hand is that the number of girls entering the high tech arena continues to drop, as does the number of girls staying in computing and technology areas in college. It is also universally accepted that this trend is not due to a lack of talent. Rather, a multitude of societal factors are largely responsible for this phenomenon. This needs a-fixing, and fixing systemically. It needs fixing now. True, there are pockets of very worthwhile efforts or projects that address this problem in certain parts of the country, but those are not widely available. What is needed is a nationwide mentoring program, available to every middle and high school girl. MAGIC aims to be such a program.

MAGIC will be kicked off at a Birds of a Feather (BOF) session at GHC on the 18th of October. The title of our BOF is Mentoring Makes MAGIC for Middle and High School Girls. We plan to discuss challenges, implementation plans, resources to utilize, and publicity plans. And anything other major issue that the BOF participants will bring up. This promises to be a very fruitful discussion, and we are looking forward to getting strong participation from the GHC attendees.

We will also be actively signing up potential mentors and mentees (or leads thereof) at GHC for MAGIC. I am keeping my fingers crossed for a very successful kickoff of MAGIC! Here're our MAGIC BOF slides.

The MAGIC website has more information about the MAGIC program. Please visit this site and send your comments, either here, or at the MAGIC website.

Posted at 01:48AM Oct 17, 2007 by Ira Pramanick in MAGIC  |  Comments[0]

An Impulse to Soar

An Impulse to Soar was the title of my keynote at the Technology Powered by Women conference, that I wrote about yesterday. As I had mentioned to some of you, I am making my slide deck available here. Please keep in mind that this keynote was presented in a college setting, for educational purposes and not for profit.

Although not explicitly in the slides, I had a personal narrative to go along with most of the slides. Thanks to Katy Dickinson for suggesting that I focus on my personal experiences during the keynote; it made the keynote message more compelling.

The first few slides give examples of cool technological innovations over the years; this is not an exhaustive list. Similarly, there are slides which talk about some women leaders of technology; again, this is not an exhaustive list.

Posted at 11:30AM Mar 08, 2007 by Ira Pramanick in General  |  Comments[2]

Technology Powered by Women (Conference for Girls)

It has been too long since my previous (and only) blog entry, which I did way back in 2005. I won't let this sort of a lapse happen again.

Last Saturday (March 3rd, 2007), I was invited to give the keynote for the "Technology Powered by Women" conference held in Kansas City (actually Liberty, which is a suburb of KC). This NSF (National Science Foundation) sponsored conference was organized by the William Jewel College SIFE (Students in Free Enterprise) team and the Girl Scouts organization. The 1-day event was for middle- and high-school girls, aged 12 to 18. The goal was to motivate young women to consider pursuing technology careers (if they enjoy science and math) by providing a positive exposure to the same. Parents were also invited to attend. The conference was closed to registration, a couple of days before the actual event, after the number of registrants reached 70. This was the number that had been planned for (also, there were no more T-shirts left to give away ;-)). About 30 parents also attended.

I was a bit nervous about the keynote. I had never spoken in a public forum to an audience of young women, about how exciting technology is and why they should pursue a career in this field, if that is where their passion lies ... as opposed to giving in to a myriad of discouraging factors, including peer pressure and discouragement in general at home and at school. Today, women make up only about 28% of the technology workforce, so this is indeed a serious issue.

The keynote went well, judging by the response I got from the audience, both in terms of Q&A, as well as the many individuals (both girls and parents) who came up to talk to me afterwards. I am very pleased.

After the keynote, four concurrent workshops were held on ALICE programming, Lego Mindstorm, web design and a panel discussion on career opportunities in information technology. The first three workshops provided hands-on experience to the attendees. These workshops were conducted by women professors and professionals from the Kansas City area, including high school girls! Yes, that was awesome. Three high school girls - Jackie Thompson, Katherine Meinig and Katherine Kennedy - conducted the Lego Mindstorm workshop. These remarkable girls are part of the PantherRobotics team in Paola, Kansas. Two of their team teachers, Kathy Shirk and Luci Kennedy, also accompanied them.

I partially attended each of the workshops, spending most of my time in the Lego Robotics one. The attendees were divided into three groups, with the three group leaders from PantherRobotics. Each team programmed their robots to try and move as many cans of Pringles chips as they could in 2 minutes, from a large circular area. They were given about an hour to accomplish this, culminating in a competition between the three teams. The group leaders led their newbie (to Lego Robotics) teams through this competition, teaching them the basic concepts of programming and logic, using iterative trial and error techniques, and encouraging each of their young team members to participate actively. The team members got into it right away, and it was amazing to see the looks of excitement and pleasure as they witnessed their programs working, even partially. What better way to teach young girls about technology than through slightly-older-than-them girls who were masters at atleast one aspect of it! As often happens with experiments, some things went wrong, but these group leaders knew exactly how to recover and continue. Finally, they also taught their teams that having fun in a competition was more important than winning.

All in all, I had a great time at the conference, both giving the keynote, and watching young women having hands-on experience with technology that they seemed to enjoy tremendously.

Posted at 11:12AM Mar 07, 2007 by Ira Pramanick in General  |  Comments[0]

Hi (& DSN, Japan, etc.)

Welcome to my website!

My name is Ira Pramanick and I am the Availability Architect for Sun Cluster, the High Availability (HA) product from Sun Microsystems. Prior to working for Sun, I worked for SGI (on its HA and HPC products), IBM (on its HPC products and parallel CAD tools) and taught for a year in the ECE Dept at UAH. I have my Bachelor's degree in EE from the Indian Institute of Technology, and my Ph.D. in ECE from the University of Iowa. I am fascinated by algorithms in general, and by parallel/distributed/clustering algorithms in particular. Working on the HA infrastructure of Sun Cluster has therefore been very intellectually rewarding. My other passion is availability, which also happens to be my current day job ;-).

A team of us at Sun has done some exciting work in the area of availability benchmarking, which brings me to my second topic (cf. parenthesized words in the subject line). My cohorts in this project are Ji Zhu and James Mauro. The three of us started this endeavor about four years ago, and about two years into this work, we proposed the R**3 Availablility Framework in a Sun Labs Technical Report. We have used this framework to build availability benchmarks, which are currently being used at Sun. Most of these have also been published in IEEE conferences and we hope that this work will lay the foundation for industry-wide standard availability benchmarks. None exist today.

I will be presenting some of this availability benchmarking work at IEEE Dependable Systems and Networking (DSN) conference next week in Yokohama, Japan. In two different forums. The first is the DSN panel, which is on Dependability Benchmarking. This promises to be a very stimulating panel, since the topic is a hot one, and all my esteemed co-panelists from industry and academia have strong opinions on this topic! Perfect for a panel! I am looking forward to a lively audience participation as well. Here's the slide deck for my panel presentation. I will also be presenting more details on the R**3 framework and associated benchmarks during a later session in the conference. That comprehensive slide deck can be found here, together with the paper itself that will appear in the conference proceedings.

As for the Land of the Rising Sun, I am so looking forward to this trip. Never been there myself, but my husband was there last year. He tells me that it is an enchanting place, and is also very different from other parts of the world that he has visited.

Posted at 02:25PM Jun 24, 2005 by Ira Pramanick in General  |  Comments[3]