GHC2007: Welcome, Poster Session/Banquet and General Session - Day 1
GHC 2007
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing
Session/Event:Welcome/Orientation for Newcomers
Commentary:
This session seemed like it was primarily directed at the college women and not the industry folks, but here are my notes anyway.
Why come to Grace Hopper?
First of all: Networking!!!
- Get ideas, give feedback
- Gets you job interviews
- Gets you invitations to give talks, be on panels, etc...
- Source for letters of recommendation
- Helps get papers accepted and proposals funded
- Foster professional life
An outside the box way of networking: Look at presenters acknowledgment slide. Who did they thank for sharing content? Contact those people!
How to prepare for GHC?
- Prepare "Elevator Chats" for several subtopics in advance.
- Decide who you want to talk to
- Follow-up with contacts after conference
- Make notes on the backs of business cards
Best Picks by Anne Condon:
- We made it!!! Advancing Your Career, Advancing Your Life. Check out my notes on the Grace Hopper Wiki.
- Storytelling
- Introducing the Computing Community Consortium
- Tech solutions for environmental & social issues
Action Items:
Speakers - upload slides & send blog postings to GHC. Take a look at the conference Web 2.0 stuff - blogs, wiki, twitter, MySpace/Facebook, broadcast postings.
Session/Event:Poster Session/Banquet
Commentary:
The opening banquet was done where the posters were set-up. There were a lot of interesting proposals at the session but my 2 favorite from a pure "fun" perspective were:
- Wikipedians over Time: A Comparative Study of User Contributions
-
Algorithms of Love - The Technology of Online Dating
Pictures from Algorithms of Love:
Session/Event:Day 1 General Session
Commentary:
Jeanette Wing from the National Science Foundation: Computational Thinking will be in use by everyone by the end of the decade... She thinks this is true of men & women from "K-Grey". Here are questions that she believes need to be asked of the science of computing...
- Does people in P? (not sure what this means)
- What is computable?
- What is intelligence?
- What is information? What is biology? "An information science"
- Can we build complex systems simply?
Donna Dubinsky, founder & CEO of Numenta
(She is also the founder of Palm, Handspring, Treo...)
The premise of Numenta is Intelligent Computing which is based on the functions of the neocortex - you know that thing in your brain that makes you think...
For example, intelligent computing could be used in Transportation to make cars safer. Cars are not safe because people don't pay attention. Cars should "understand" the road and adjust to traffic conditions as appropriate.
The brain deals with huge amounts of data, noise, ambiguity and novel patterns. If a square is drawn of 4 squiggly lines, your brain knows it's still a square. If you see two pictures of a car where one is a photo and the other is a cartoon, your brain still knows they are both cars because they have the property of "carness". The brain builds a model of the world. The model is a hierarchy in time & space. The brain learns about the world through the senses. Causes are made up of experiences and Beliefs are made up of brain-processed experiences.
I had to leave early to go set up for my session so I missed the conclusion at the end, but still this idea was interesting enough to put in incomplete.
