Codeathon for Humanity

I wrote a post about the Codeathon for Humanity held at GHC this year for the Open Source Business Resource (OSBR), a publication of the Talent First Network, in which I talked about the great strategies used by the organizers to ensure maximum participation and engagement.

I’ve just returned from the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) in Atlanta and had the opportunity to experience my first open source mini-codeathon and learn about the humanitarian open source project, Sahana Eden.

Sahana Eden is an open source disaster management platform that can be used in a wide variety of ways to provide organization on the ground in the aftermath of a catastrophe.

Read the complete post here. A special thanks to Terri Oda for the photos.

OSBR also has a great issue on Women and Open Source, which is worth the read.

Cross-posted on the Grace Hopper Blog

GHC10: Open Source Codeathon for Humanity (a blog post in pictures)

I'm a bit late in reposting my GHC10 blog posts here, but better late than never! This was originally posted on my personal blog

There comes a time when you just have to code like a girl:



So building on some success last year, we had a codeathon at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. This year, we were working on Sahana Eden, a free and open source disaster management system.



I'm going to admit that the start was a litle rough. Even the mentors found the trainings a bit overwhelming and found that a lot of little issues cropped up when you were setting up your dev environment. One of my "favourites" was an issue where you'd have to run something twice in Eclipse before it would work. There were some perplexed faces!



But gradually, people started having success, and having more fun chatting and hacking with the women around them:



It certainly took some work, and some people even came back after the keynotes to keep hacking until late in the night. Fueled with some wine, though, it was pretty fun and I think there was even a patch going in when I stopped by around 11pm. Thanks to everyone who came out and gave it a shot!



The open source track was graciously sponsored by the NSA, and we'd love to have it again next year, so if you have any comments about how much you enjoyed it, please let us know! You can post here, or Stormy Peters is collecting all the comments together and you can contact her at stormy at gnome.org.




And if you've got suggestions on how we could make the codeathon run more smoothly or things we should do again, we'd love to hear those too! It was very challenging, from getting mentors trained to getting development environments set up through to figuring out what needs doing and how to do it, and I'm sure there are things we can improve upon for next year.

PS - You can see more of my GHC10 photos, including more from the codeathon here, and don't forget to check out our GHC10 flickr group and the professional event photos

GHC10: PhD Forum 3: UI/Education

I'm a bit late in reposting my GHC10 entries here, but better late than never! This was originally posted on my personal blog


As always, I've got to say that it's a real breath of fresh air to hear people talk about their research at GHC. Often times, I dread grad student presentations (despite being a grad student myself!) because the quality of presentation isn't polished... but this is totally not the case at GHC. These women are enthusiastic, interesting, and great communicators and it's been a joy to attend these sessions. So here's the three women whose talks I caught today. (My apologies for the poor quality of the pictures: the room was quite dark and I was too busy listening to focus on photography!)



Usable Security in Practice: Collaborative Management of Electronic & Physical Personal Information
Presenter: Laurian C. Vega (Virginia Polytecnial Institute)

Security literature likes to imply that humans are the weak link in the security chain, but that's not actually true: much of the problem is that security work doesn't take the human into account when designing systems, so we wind up having to do things just that don't make sense. I sort of take this as a given, since it's a common theme within my own security group and our larger research network, but it's sometimes a hard sell in the larger security community.

So I was really thrilled to see Laurian's presentation about how she's investigated taking the human into account in security research for electronic health records. She points out that we need to go beyond focusing on getting medical folk to adopt them, figuring out their workflow, etc. and understand the entire environment in which a system is used, particularly when considering records in medicine.

Laurian's been doing active observation at childcare centres and physician's offices, specifically in rural southwest-virginia. Because she was working with rural sites, she's found a lot of the records are non-electronic, which in some ways can make things more secure: physical records can be hidden behind someone's desk, files can be hidden in the back, cabinets can be closed. One problem she found in childcare and physician's offices is there are quite a lot of interruptions, and many people do not return to the task when they're interrupted. Laurian's looking at ways to design systems which can handle this sort of interruption, as well as other realities of what goes on in the offices. This is pretty neat and not much like traditional security work, which assumes a user who's paying attention and will always do all the right steps. It sounds like some really fascinating work to deal with some very specific challenges!



In the Beginning: The Early Lives of Users in Online Communities
Presenter: Katherine Panciera (University of Minnesota)

From the title, I was expecting a more broad look at various online communities, but Katherine's work actually focusses on wiki contributions, specifically a site called Cyclopath where users can contribute cycling route information, including the roads to follow and details about what to expect along the way. The idea was to see how the top 5% of users ("cyclopaths") differed from other users, and how cylopath users in general differed from users of Wikipedia.

It turns out that you can actually determine which users will become cylopaths from day one: they start off by making many more edits than more casual users (50ish versus 5ish), and like Wikipedia users it turns out that people start high and then slowly tail off to a stable editing pattern. But what was even more interesting about Katherine's research is that you could see patterns in the future cyclopath uers use of the site even before they started editing.

I can only imagine how helpful it might be to be able to identify your top users and perhaps encourage them right from the beginning so they feel even more at home in the community. Very neat!



Building Professional Identity as Computer Science Teachers: Supporting Secondary Computer Science Teachers through Reflection and Community Building
Presenter: Lijun Ni (Georgia Institute of Technology)

Lijun says she got interested in computer science teachers because there are very few of them at the K-12 level, so there's a great need to prepare and support the teacher. She's focused on two problems: it's very difficult to retain teachers (46% will leave teaching within 5 years, and math and science are worse than some other subjects) and teachers have some resistance to change (many in-service teachers will not adopt curriculum innovations). It's also surprisingly difficult for CS teachers to develop a sense of identity as a CS teacher, since there's inconsistent certification, it's hard to fit them into the school hierarchy, they have few peers, etc.

What I really thought was interesting about Lijun's work is that she's working on finding ways to support teachers over the course of their carrers, giving them opportunities to learn and grow and develop an identity as a CS teacher. She's looked at how their identities change over time to see how to better support them. This is really interesting because most effort thus far has been in training them to start rather than retaining people with very little focus on retention.

It got me thinking that this is something you also see as a problem when talking about women in computer science: there's lots of programs for younger girls who want to get involved, but fewer programs in place to help keep women from leaving in disgust. I wonder if Lijun would be interested in tackling that problem next?

Geocaching in Atlanta Part 2

On September 30th, Gail, Shruti and I decided to spend part of the morning doing the USAA geocaching challenge. We had a chance to win an ipad and some t-shirts. It wasn't the kind of geocaching where you find a container with a log book. Instead it was the kind where you collect specifc data at the coordinates. These kinds of caches are called virtual caches. This challenge took us on a tour of the area around our hotel. The most interesting location was the SunTrust building. The coordinates took us inside the building to a hanging statue that the security guard told us that even though it appears to be moving, it's not. It's actually the earth rotating around it. We completed the challenge but all three of us came up empty handed at the draw.

While we were completing the USAA geocaching challenge, we found a real geocache. We found 'Arms Wide Open'. It was Shruti who spotted the cache under the statue's shoe. It was definitely a clever hide. Later in the day, I had some time to myself and decided to find 'Shining Light #2'. The cache page explains that a shining light award is given each year to recognize "a Georgian who has been an inspiration to the lives of others through service to humanity. A gas lamp and plaque is installed in their honor at a site of their choice." This cache was a nano cache. This is the smallest kind of cache container. The cache has a magnet on it and it was placed on one of the screws on the back of the plaque so it looks like it belongs there.

October 1st was a busy day for me so I only had a chance to look for a cache right before heading over to Sponsor Night at the Georgia Aquarium. Just before heading out to look for a cache I ran into Terri and she was interested in helping me look. We headed to 'Allons-y Alonso' which I wanted to do because of its French name. We ended spending several minutes looking in some trees without having any luck. It finally occured to me that it might be a lamp post skirt cache. This is a cache that is hidden near the bottom of a lamp post. You need to lift the 'skirt', a metal piece near the bottom of a lamp post, in order to find the cache. That's exactly where it was. We had to be discreet since there were a couple of cab drivers parked close by.

I decided that on October 2nd, our last full day in Atlanta, I would geocache for most of the day. I made a plan with my husband, Tom, to complete the 'Downtown U Web Cam Cache'. A webcam cache requires to you to have your picture taken by a webcam. They usually suggest that once you are at the spot, to call a friend with your cellphone and have them save a picture on their computer. I do not own a cellphone so Tom and I made a plan for me to be at the location from 11:00am to 11:05am. It all worked out and Tom was able to get a picture of me in from the webcam. Next, I walked to the state capitol to attempt '23 Karat Dome'. Unfortunately, there were too many people around and I wasn't able to find this one without being spotted.

After lunch I completed 'Reading Rainbow Cache'. This one, like 'Quilt of Nations', was a multi. The first stage took me to a statue and I had to count the number of books in it. After a few calculations with this number, I had the coordinates for the final. This took me to the Atlanta-Fulton County Library. In order to find the exact location, I had to some research on the internet. I had to find four numbers and do some more calculations to get another number. This number turned out to be a Dewey decimal classification number. So I made my way to the books with this number and started looking for the cache. I had done a similar cache in Montreal a couple of years ago where the cache was in the book "Geocaching for Dummies". This time the cache wasn't in a book but stuck using a magnet to the bottom of a shelf.

The next cache I attempted was 'Gone With The Wind'. It took me to the cemetery where Margaret Mitchell, the author of Gone With The Wind, was buried. This cemetery, the Oakland Cemetery, is one of the oldest cemeteries in Atlanta. Unfortunately, I was unable to find this cache. The cemetery also has two virtual caches here which I found. The first virtual cache I found was a monument to the Confederate dead that was dedicated April 26th, 1894. It is called 'The Lyin' Cache'. After collecting some information from the monument and a headstone of confederate soldier, I was on my way to the other virtual cache in the cemetery called 'The Master'. This brought me to the headstone of Bobby Jones, one of golf's greatest players. To complete this cache, I had to collect some information from one of the headstone's close to Bobby Jones'. Once I got back to my hotel later that day, I emailed the cache owners the information and was them able to log my finds.

Later that day, Gail, Terri, Shruti and I wanted to try out The Varsity and there happened to be some caches on the way there. We ended up not finding two of them but we did find the one at The Varsity called 'What'll Ya Have?'. It was another lamp post skirt cache. On the cache page, it recommended trying the chilidogs, onion rings, glorified steaks and frosted orange drinks. Since I wasn't all that hungry, I tried the onion rings and a frosted orange. I always love places like this because they do fast food the way I imagine it used to be done and their portion sizes aren't ridiculously huge.

On Sunday October 3rd, I only had time to find one cache. Gail, Terri, Shruti and I headed back to one of the caches we couldn't find the night before called 'Atlas Shrugged'. It's a statue of Atlas holding an advertisement. During our initial search we didn't have the hint (it was "Do you really kneed one?"). This made all the difference and we easily found it this time. Also during our initial search for this cache, a guy in his car stopped at the light asked "Are you geocaching?". I guess four girls frisking a statue isn't very subtle.

Before putting 'Atlas Shrugged' back, I grabbed a travel bug from the cache. A travel bug is an item that is moved from cache to cache which is logged each time it is moved. The travel bug I took from 'Atlas Shrugged' is called Maori Ducky and is trying to get to the South Island of New Zealand. This is a map of its travels to date.

During my 6 day stay in Atlanta, I managed to find 13 geocaches. Not a huge amount but not bad considering how busy I was with the conference and that I mainly got around Atlanta by walking. A lot of these caches took me to places I never would have known about and made sightseeing more interesting.

Developing Skills to Enhance Group Intelligence and Productivity

I read Terri's blog on the importance of collaboration and social sensitivity in increasing the collective intelligence of a group and wanted to share my experience with two programs that I found useful in developing the social skills necessary to work effectively in group settings.

The first is Dee McCrorey's Collaborative Risktaking™ workshop which was held at the recent concluded Grace Hopper 2010 conference (check out this amazing video on women risktakers through the ages!). This session is designed to provide guidance on how to build an effective group, how to harness the collective intelligence of that group and thereby innovate and create value in today's changing business world .

The move towards knowledge-based jobs and globalization make innovation a key differentiator for firms. Firms which are able to develop and manage their innovation processes are more likely to succeed and sustain their success. However, innovation requires change and can be risky and so it becomes very important to understand how to mitigate the risk.

Dee's workshop focuses on teaching participants on how to build their "innovation tribe", a diverse group of people that can collectively make the best decisions in the face of uncertainty. In order to do this, Dee works to help people identify their personal risk taking style, to learn to recognize the styles of others, and shows them how to move towards Responsible Risktaking™ as a group. By being cognizant of the different roles needed in a group, leaders can effectively build an innovation tribe that is varied in its talent and expertise.

Not only does this apply in business settings, but these skills are also great to develop in your personal life - to recognize when you are falling into a rut and need to take that next risk/challenge. It also gives you tools to be able to build a support system and network around you that can offer their mentorship, experience and knowledge to you (and vice versa) when the need arises.

The second piece of the puzzle is the ability to foster better communication among the group you have assembled. In this, the skills taught by the Crucial Conversations program can be invaluable. Crucial Conversations provides techniques for making it "safe" for everyone to contribute, improve your listening skills and increasing the productivity and quality of interactions.

I feel that in the technology industry, we can take a step to differentiate ourselves by developing our social sensitivity and collaboration skills. The above two programs have helped me in this regard and I hope you benefit from them too.

Please do share your thoughts and any resources you have used for developing these oft ignored "soft" skills.

Information about Dee McCrorey and links to her blogs can be found on her website. Notes on her session at GHC 2010 can be found here (this was the largest workshop on collaborative risktaking ever!).

Advice on conversational strategies can be found on the Crucial Conversations blog and via their newsletter.

Career and Economic Opportunity in Open Source Software

As part of the open source track at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) this year, there was an informative session on career and economic opportunity in Open Source Software (OSS).

The session served two main purposes -

a) to show that participating in open source projects can provide many skills that can be relevant in obtaining a job and building a career, and,

b) that open source does not necessarily mean free software and therefore, there are multiple ways in which to make a living from OSS.

I've provided a summary/transcript of the discussion in this session on the GHC 2010 Wiki, so below I list some of the key takeaways for me.

a) Building Job and Career Skills from OSS projects

1. Online and multi-site, multi-timezone collaboration and communication is perhaps one of the best skills you can pick up from an OSS project. Interacting with people of different cultures and in different physical locations can prepare you to handle multi-site activities that occur in many large companies today.

In my own experience, I find that being able to interact effectively with a geographically dispersed and culturally diverse team is an increasingly important skill in our globalized world. These kind of soft skills set you apart from those who have equivalent technical expertise.

2. OSS is a great way to slowly build up skills, be it programming, organizational etc. and be able to get feedback (it helps to develop a thick skin :)

I think this is something I will keep in mind when I think I need to build expand my technical skill set.

3. Flexible timings can provide women with the work/life balance that they might be looking for.

OSS might be a great way to keep in touch with the industry and keep your skills and experience up to date while taking a hiatus (like maternity leave)

b) OSS Business

1. Making money from OSS projects is not a bad thing, and shouldn't be seen as such. Indeed, many OSS projects become richer (in quality, and in participation) for having had a few high profile customers that were willing to pay for custom development

2. Providing complementary software, services and support is a widespread revenue model adopted by many companies that leverage OSS

In general, I was inspired to see such names as Cat Allman, Leslie Hawthorn, Stormy Peters and Margo Seltzer participating in the open source track and it served to reinforce the quality of the content that GHC offered this year.

Cross-posted to the Grace Hopper Blog

GHC10: HCI Track at Grace Hopper

From the Communications of ACM blog:

The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing had two special technical tracks added to the program this year: open source and human-computer interaction. While I was definitely happy to see the open source track, it was the HCI talks that really got me excited. I'm just getting into HCI myself, choosing it as one of my topics for my PhD comprehensive exams and submitting my first CHI paper. There was so much to learn from a variety of great speakers!

Read the rest of my post here.

Overcome Personal Barrier - Duy-Loan Le

Duy-Loan T. Le, Thursday's keynote speaker, senior fellow and world wide advanced technology ramp manager at Texas Instruments. She arrived in US at age of 12 without knowing the language. However, she became the first Asian and the first woman to be elected to senior fellow at TI. She took herself as an example to show how to overcome personal barrier and encourage collaboration across the boundary.

Read more on ABI's Wiki

http://community.anitaborg.org/wiki/index.php/Keynote:_Duy-Loan_Le_%28Texas_Instruments%29

Pyramids, Not Ladders - Carol Bartz

Carol Bartz, Thursday keynote speaker, Chief Executive Officer and a Director of Yahoo!. Carol talked about how to build a solid foundation for your career instead of climbing up the ladder, stand by your values and don't forget your family.

The Power of Abstraction and The Barriers Women Could Have - Barbara Liskov

Barbara Liskov, Friday’s keynote speaker, MIT Professor and Associate Provost , 2008 ACM Turing Award Winner, highlighted the evolution of her career and the technical papers that influenced her thinking. Some of the wisdom she shared included the need to persevere, the importance of doing work that is interesting rather than expedient, and the rewards derived from intellectual honesty by understanding the pros and cons of what you are working on. ( From ABI)

In her interview with Silicon.com, Barbara mentioned the barriers women could have:

Exactly what the barriers are--people have theories about this (but) they don't totally understand it. I think a lot of it has to do with our societies. It's probably strongly related to other things we see going on like the fact that women are not well represented...in the top maths. If you look at, for example, who's doing well in the maths contests that happen internationally you'll see that women are underrepresented there.

I don't believe any of this has to do with basic abilities but I do think it has a lot to do with the way that our society is--what we think is appropriate for women to do (and) what we think is appropriate for men to do. I do think it's mostly a problem before they get to college--if they get to college and they still are open-minded enough to be interested and they didn't cut themselves off by taking the necessary science and math ahead of time then I think at least they aren't going to hit the glass ceiling until they get quite far along.

About Barbara Liskov, you can read more on MIT EECS website.

http://www.eecs.mit.edu/spotlights/liskov_jvg-bio.html

Grace Hopper at David Letterman show

The hotel we stayed

Because of the limited budget for our GHC trip, we have to find the most economic ways of travelling. The conference hotel has been sold out at the discounted group price, we looked around trying to find some place at reasonable price. Shruti came up with Hyatt Place which is just one block from the conference hotel – Hyatt Regency and it is even cheaper. The hotel is pretty new and modern. The interior design is a little different from the conventional hotel room with the wash basin in the living room. The toilet is still in the bathroom, thank God! Besides, there is a "huuuge" L-shape couch in the living room - if you ever been to Steve Jobs' keynote then you know what size he really means!:) It is actually a folded bed and very comfortable.

The hotel has complimentary breakfast which I like. This is the example for a typical breakfast, with cooked cereal, toast, fruit and juice. I was reading the paper newspaper and there is a lady sit beside me reading the morning news on her iPad.I found it very interesting and took a picture at her permission.

Mentoring, Encouraging and Celebrating at GHC 2010

It sounded very interesting to me when I first heard about the Grace Hopper Conference. After I reviewed the program book, it seemed apparently that I really need to be there, at least once.

Finally I arrived in Atlanta with four other Carleton students under the support of WISE . They are Gail and Terri from Computer Science, Bridget from Mathematics and Shruti who is my roommate from Innovation in Technology. The weather coordinated perfect in Atlanta for the conference, sunny and the temperature was always in the middle of twenties. And we couldn’t wait for the conference.

It turned out a great surprise to me and at the same time full of joy. I have never seen so many technical women (about 2100 people) coming to conference together in my whole life. Because I am an electrical engineer, every time I went to conferences I was always the minority. Although I never feel awkward in those circumstances, I still feel the big difference when so many women get together, talking about their ups and downs, mentoring and encouraging each other, and at the same time celebrating. Just like the keynote speaker Duy-Loan Le mentioned in her witty talk – now it is the time to let those men to feel what it is like when they are surrounded by so many women.

Before we came to the conference, the conference committee sent out a newsletter asking all the participants to introduce themselves to people sit around them and make new friends. So the overall atmosphere during the conference was very positive. Participants introduce themselves by either shaking hands or exchanging the Poken, which is pretty cool. Company staff standing besides their booth would tell you that they really, really want to meet with you, which made all the people laugh.

Every day I was very busy running between different sessions and the most important, never missed a keynote speech and plenary panel. Those women are all excellent role models and at the same time good speakers. Some of them are very straightforward and witty, others are deliberate and full of wisdom. But all of them showed us how wonderful their lives are, how proud they feel as the leaders in their own fields, and how grateful they are to their mentors and families. Many of the award winners were talking in tears especially those from academia. Then I saw a different picture in these amazing women, as intelligent and strong as men, as delicate and sensitive as ordinary human being. Gender is not an issue anymore in these occasions, instead I saw those beautiful minds coming across long journeys and sharing their struggles and happiness at the podium.

GHC10: NCWIT at Grace Hopper: Recruiting and Retaining Women

From the Communications of ACM blog:

Research scientists Lecia Barker and Joanne Cohoon from the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) gave an excellent talk on recruiting and retaining women in computer science at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. I almost didn’t attend because I’ve been immersed in these topics through my involvement with Carleton University’s Women in Science and Engineering group (known here as CU-WISE), but I found that I still learned a lot. I highly recommend taking a look at their website after reading my summary of the talk.

Read the rest of my post here.

GHC10: Dancing with Hundreds of Technical Women at Grace Hopper

From the Communications of ACM blog:

When I tell someone about the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, I start by explaining the dance parties. I tell them, “You wouldn’t think that an all-female dance would be fun… but you’d be wrong. There’s nothing like dancing with hundreds of technical women who let loose because there’s nobody around to feel stupid in front of.”

Read the rest here.

Geocaching in Atlanta Part 1

I guess any blog post about geocaching should start with an explanation of what it is. It's basically a high tech treasure or scavenger hunt. You log onto geocaching.com, do a search of a location you want to geocache in, put the coordinates on a GPS and then go find the cache. A cache is a container that contains at least a log book that you sign once you find it. It can also contain trade items. These are items that you can take if you leave something else in the cache.

I got into geocaching a few years ago when visiting my friend Dave (whose geocaching name is Juicepig). He had been doing it for a couple of years and was very passionate about it. The first cacheI ever found was at an abandoned campsite in Utopia, Ontario. It was interesting to visit and we would never have gone there if it wasn't for this geocache. This is one of the great things about geocaching in a city you are visiting; it takes you to places you never would have known about. That was one of the reasons I decided to geocache in Atlanta while attending the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. The other reason is that before I left for Atlanta, I had found at least one cache each day for the last 58 days and wanted to keep up my streak.

I also wanted to find two caches that were really far apart on the same day. So on Monday September 27^th, before leaving for Atlanta, I found 'OLYMPIQUES 3 - TIGRES 2' near the Robert Guertin arena in Gatineau, Quebec and once in Atlanta, I found 'Birds Eye View' with Terri and Gail. The distance between these two caches is about 1500 km (900 mi). The 'Birds Eye View' cache was magnetic and stuck on a pole that had to road signs on it.

On Tuesday September 28^th, Gail, Terri and I spent the day at the Atlanta History Center (you can read about it here) so I didn't end up caching until after 5pm. Gail and I decided to find a cache before heading over to the Hyatt to pick up our badge and swag for Grace Hopper. We attempted 'Folk Art Park Part 2' but couldn't find it. We moved onto 'Folk Art Park Part 1' and found it without any trouble. Both of these caches brought us to two interesting parks with Folk Art.

On Wednesday September 29^th, I went to Centennial Olympic park and started working on finding 'Quilt of Nations'. This cache is what is called a multi cache. It takes you to several locations and often you have to collect some information at each spot in order to find the next stage of the cache. The first stage took me to a 'quilt of nations'. I had to count the number of flags, add it to a particular number and that would complete the missing portion of a coordinate. I did this and went on to the next stage.

This stage was at a building that used to be a church but is now a music hall. I had to find the three numbers to the left of the box office and add them to a number and this gave me the missing portion of the coordinate for the final. I made my way to the final but there were two police officers nearby so I moved on to another cache called 'Shining Light' which was at one of the entrances of Centennial Olympic Park. Its container is the smallest kind of container in geocaching. It is called a nano and I'll talk more about this type of container in my next post.

After finding that one, I headed back to the final for 'Quilt of Nations' and easily found it. One of the hints on the cache page told you to remember the numbers from the music hall. I needed it in order to open the combination lock on the cache. The final for this cache was a gray plastic container attached to a telephone poll. It is out in the open but unless you were looking for the cache you would never give it a second look.

In 'Geocaching in Atlanta Part 2', I'll talk about the rest of the geocaches I found in Atlanta as well as explain what a travel bug is.

GHC10: Usable Security

From my blog:

One of the sessions I attended on Wednesday at GHC was a PhD forum. In this special type of session, three PhD students present their research in an hour, and the audience fills in feedback forms to give them suggestions and/or praise. It's a great opportunity.

The first presentation in this particular session was given by Laurian Vega, studying HCI at Virginia Tech. Her research is all about usable security, with a focus on day cares and doctor's offices. Although I'm not a security person by any stretch of the imagination, I found the topic quite interesting.

Read the rest here.

GHC10: The Impact of the Grace Hopper Celebration

In addition to my own blog, I'm writing a few posts for the Communications of ACM blog about the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

From my first post:

This year's edition of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is officially underway, and you can almost taste the excitement. Last night I had the opportunity to speak with an external evaluator about my experiences with the conference in an effort to determine what kind of impact it really has. I quite enjoyed the opportunity to reflect on my role this year and the previous two years I’ve attended.

Read the rest of the post on CACM.

GHC10: Sight Seeing in Atlanta

One of the coolest things about attending the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is the opportunity to explore new cities with a few other awesome CU-WISE ladies. This year's conference is in Atlanta, and a few of us went to the Atlanta History Center to learn more about life in the south.

I wrote about our trip and posted some photos on my own blog. Check it out.

Grace Hopper 2010 - The Celebration Begins!

Less than 2 days till the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing starts in Atlanta!

I learnt about the conference last year (was too late to register) and ever since then I've been waiting for GHC 2010. Since this will be my first time at the conference, I've been reading blogs from veterans of the conference (check out the GHC blog feed) and following #ghc10 and @ghc on Twitter to get pointers on how to prepare for the week.

And prepare you must! The sheer volume of planned activities is mindboggling, leave alone those impromptu meetings and outings that are bound to happen. I've taken some time to look through the abstracts of the various seminars and mark those that are most interesting to me.

I'm especially excited about the track on Open Source as I am taking a course on Open Source Business as part of my Masters. I hope to share what I learn with my classmates. There will also be a chance to participate in open source development via the Codeathon for Humanity for the Sahana-Eden project. As a facilitator for this event, I'm looking forward to learning more about their disaster management software platform and how I can use my coding skills for social good.

The codeathon is a brilliant example of the conference theme of "Collaborating Across Boundaries" and my aim will be to look at the talks I attend in this broader context.

I'm also eager to meet many of the accomplished women participating this year, especially those interested in mobile platforms and wireless applications and those who (like me) have taken or are interested in a business career path after a technical degree.

The rest I'm leaving to serendipity :)