Katy Dickinson

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http://blogs.sun.com/katysblog/date/20081002 Thursday October 02, 2008

2nd Hopper Day

Today is the second day of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (aka GHC 2008) in Keystone, Colorado. We are at 9,300 feet and few people are sleeping well because of the altitude but the conference is still excellent.

Today started early with a kenote/CTO breakfast, followed by an interesting keynote presentation by Fran Allen (IBM Fellow Emerita and first woman to win the prestigious Turing award). Before Fran spoke, two female sailors from the USS Hopper missile destroyer showed pictures from their ship. There were many activities, panels, and presentations to pick from. I attended:

    • Session One: "Innovating with Chip Multi-Threading Technology" by Catherine Ahlschlager (Sun Microsystems) and
      "Outside of Normal Operating Conditions: Using Commercial Hardware in Space Computing Platforms" by Heather M. Quinn (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
    • Session Two: "Enabling Nonprofits to Accomplish their Missions through Technology"
    • CTO Plenary Session - "Leading Technology, a View from the Top" (including Sun's CTO Dr. Greg Papadopoulos)
    • Session Three: my panel! "Taking the Long View - Many Careers in One Company" with Sheueling Chang-Shantz (Sun Microsystems), Martha Lyons (Hewlett Packard), Cristina Mahon (Hewlett Packard), Ana Pinczuk (Cisco), and me. Our panel was well received with both the panelists and audience enjoying themselves.
    • Session Four: Invited Technical Speaker - Anna Karlin, Professor, University of Washington, on "A Survey of Some Recent Research at the Border of Game Theory, Economics, and Computer Science"

There was a thunderstorm and rain at lunchtime but the weather cleared after. Dinner was another buffet in the poster hall followed by the annual award ceremony, a "Rhythm and Hue" painting performance by David Garibaldi (who painted portraits of Admiral Hopper and Anita Borg), and finally dessert and a dance.

Closing the Hopper awards with a dance was a tradition started by Anita Borg and remains one of the unique and delightful experiences of the Hopper conference. Dancing with several hundred women college students, Engineers, and executives from all over the computing world is a real delight. (But having my daughter Jessica as a dance partner was the best part!) The few men present seemed to have a good time as well. Our MAGIC girls' mentoring BOF is tomorrow.

Posted at 10:42PM Oct 02, 2008 by katysblog in Hopper - Anita Borg Institute  |