AWICS Distinguished Lecturer Series

During the 1997-98 academic year, AWICS initiated a Distinguished Lecturer Series in which we invite prominent women computer scientists to visit A&M and speak about their research.

Sponsors have included:
Motorola
Microsoft
IBM

Speakers in the series:

The importance of linking science and engineering fields to societal needs is gaining attention with reports such as the National Academy of Engineering's publications on The Engineer of 2020. The Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) program is proving to be a successful model for integrating engineering design with community contexts. EPICS highlights the ways the long-term, for-credit projects in the community provide the time and context for experiences that enable our students to :

• Develop technical depth and multi-disciplinary breadth.
• Experience start-to-finish design.
• Acquire and hone many professional skills.
• Create products that have a significantt impact on their community.
• Grow as individuals, engineers, and citizens.

Initiated at Purdue in 1995, EPICS programs are now operating at 16 universities and one high school. Over 2000 students have participated in EPICS courses at Purdue since 1995; in the last academic year; over 1500 students on over 150 teams participated at the 16 EPICS universities. In 2005, EPICS was awarded the National Academy of Engineering's Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology education.

Leah Jamieson is Associate Dean of Engineering for Undergraduate Education and Ransburg Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. Dr. Jamieson has a S.B in Mathematics from M.I.T and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University. She joined the faculty at Purdue in 1976. She is co-founder and Director of the Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) Program. She will be 2007 President of the Institue of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (IEEE).

Dr. Jamieson has been recognized for her achievements in research, service, and traching. She was elected a Fellow of the IEEE for her research on parallel processing algorithms, received the National Science Foundation Directors Award for Distinguished Teaching Scholars for her contributions in research and education, and was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering for innovations in integrating engineering education and community service. She is a recipient of the IEEE Signal Processing Society's Meritious Service Award and the IEEE Millennium Medal. For her work with EPICS, she has received the American Society for Engineering Education's Chester F. Carlson Award for Innovation in Engineering Education and the IEEE Eduaction Society's Harriet B. Rigas Outstanding Woman Engineering Educator Awards. She was named 2002 Indiana Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation and the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education. Dr. Jamieson's activities on behalf of women hav ebeen recognized with the Helen B. Schleman Gold Medallion from Purdue Mortar Board and the Violet Haas Awards from Purdue's Council on the Status of Women.

• AWICS Distinguished Lecture 4:00 p.m., Monday Mar 6, 2006

Dr. Nunes will present IBM's view of global technology directions, including trends in semiconductor technology, pervasive connectivity, legislation & data. In addition, Dr. Nunes will address the role of innovation and how it is changing the nature of research.

Sharon Nunes is currently Vice President of Technology in IBM's Corporate Technology & Manufacturing Group. In this role she works with IBM's Chairman and the senior executive team to set the technical agenda for the company. Prior to this assignment, Sharon was the Vice President of Emerging Business at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York where she was responsible for identifying and growing new technologies into future businesses for IBM. Previously, she was Director of Life Sciences Solutions in IBM, bringing new technology solutions to the pharmaceutical and biotech markets. She has held many management positions in IBM, ranging from Research to Development and Manufacturing, as well as positions in hardware development, software development and networking. Sharon was responsible for the launch of IBM's Computational Biology Center in 1997, and was a key driver in highlighting IBM's business opportunities in the Life Sciences market.

Sharon received her PhD in Materials Science in 1983 from the University of Connecticut. She is a member of the Advisory Council of the Whitaker Biomedical Engineering Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland and a Board Member for the Center for Security Technologies at Washington University in St. Louis. he was a National Academy of Engineering "Frontiers of Engineering" fellow in 2000 and has been a member of the National Academy of Engineering "Engineer of 2020" advisory board. Sharon is an advocate for women in technology, and is co-chair of IBM's international conference for Women in Technology. She is a member of the executive advisory council of SWE (Society of Women Engineers) and is a member of the Anita Borg Institute's Senior Women's Leadership Group.

• AWICS Distinguished Lecture 2:00 p.m., Friday February 18, 2005

How can we design and build systems that adapt and learn from their experience? Is there a general theory of embedded learning? Can we build machine learning tools that can be used "off the shelf"? These questions have defined my research. In this talk, I will present my work and show the progress we have made in building learning systems for a wide range of applications in science and engineering.

Devika Subramanian obtained her undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology, and her PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 1989. Her research interests are in the design and analysis of embedded adaptive systems and their applications in science and engineering (http://www.cs.rice.edu/~devika). She has been at Rice University since 1995. Her research is currently funded by NSF, ARPA, NASA and Texas ATP.

• AWICS Distinguished Lecture 2:00-3:00, Monday February 9, Room 302 HR Bright

In 1994, Len Adleman described how to solve a small instance of a famous combinatorial problem - the Traveling Salesman problem - in a novel way. Adleman's method was to efficiently create a test tube of DNA strands, each representing a possible solution to the problem, and to extract the elusive true solution using tools from molecular biology.

Adleman's work raises many questions at the interface of biochemistry, mathematics, and computer science. How can information be efficiently and reliably stored in, and subsequently retrieved from, DNA molecules? How can logical operations be performed on information-carrying DNA strands? Can new nanostructures and materials be assembled in a programmable fashion from DNA? What might be useful applications of DNA computing?

In this talk, we describe our collaborative work that addresses these questions. The premise of the Wisconsin DNA computing group is that solid-phase chemistry will be a critical technology in realizing DNA computation, because it allows a much greater degree of control in the chemical processes than that achievable via solution-phase methodologies. With this approach, many DNA strands are immobilized on a planar surface, and logical operations are performed on all of the strands in parallel, using chemical and enzymatic processes. The talk will describe some combinatorial problems that arise in building our prototype DNA computer, as well as results of a DNA computation for a small instance of the NP-hard Satisfiability problem.

This is joint work with Professors Rob Corn and Lloyd Smith of the Chemistry Department at U. Wisconsin-Madison, along with several students.

Anne Condon's research contributions are in the areas of probabilistic and interactive complexity classes, design and analysis of algorithms for computationally intractable problems, and DNA computing. Condon received a B.Sc. degree from University College, Cork, Ireland in 1982 and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1987. Her thesis, a study of game-theoretic complexity classes, won an ACM Distinguished Dissertation Award in 1988. Condon received a National Young Investigator Award in 1992. She was named Distinguished Alumna of University College Cork in 2001, for her contributions in the area of DNA computing. Condon is currently a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at U. British Columbia. She was a faculty member of the Computer Sciences Department at U. Wisconsin between 1987 and 1999.

• AWICS Distinguished Lecture: 4:10-5:00pm, Monday Feburary 25, Room 124 HR Bright.

Valerie Taylor is an Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northwestern University and holds a guest appointment with the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. She has been at Northwestern since 1991. Her research interests are in the areas of computer architecture and high performance computing, with particular emphasis on mesh partitioning for distributed systems and the performance of parallel and distributed applications. Valerie received her B.S. and M.S. from Purdue University, and her PhD in Electrical Engineering from University of California at Berkeley. In 1993, Valerie Taylor received a National Science Foundation ``National Young Investigator'' award. She holds a U.S. patent for her dissertation work on sparse matrices. She is a member of the SC Steering Committee and Co-Chair of the Coalition to Diversify Computing.

We are really looking forward to Prof. Taylor's visit. She will deliver an AWICS Distinguished Lecture in the computer science department on Monday April 30, 2001. We are planning many exciting events during her visit - and look forward to seeing everyone there!

• Free AWICS Lunch : 12-1:30pm, Monday April 30, Room 302 HR Bright. All undergrad and grad women in CS and CE are welcome!
• Reception: 3-4pm, Monday April 30, Room 302 HR Bright. All CS students, staff, and faculty welcome - come enjoy the tasty treats!
• AWICS Distinguished Lecture: 4:10-5:00pm, Monday April 30, Room 124 HR Bright.

Jessica Hodgins joined the Robotics Institute and Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University as a Associate Professor in fall of 200. Prior to moving to CMU, she was an an Associate Professor and Assistant Dean in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Her current research focuses on computer graphics, animation, and interactive virtual environments. Her research explores techniques that may someday allow robots and animated creatures to plan and control their actions in complex and unpredictable environments.

In addition to the lecture by Prof. Hodgins, we will have a graduate school information panel where Prof. Hodgins will be joined by Dr. Joann Ordille from Lucent Technologies, and two graduate students. Did you ever wonder what it's like to get a PhD in CS? Well this is a great opportunity to get some expert advice! (And there will be free PIZZA!)

Here is a list of the events - we look forward to seeing everyone there!

• Free AWICS Lunch : 12-1:30pm, Wednesday November 15, Room 302 HR Bright. All undergrad and grad women in CS and CE are welcome!
• Reception: 3-4pm, Wednesday November 15, Room 302 HR Bright. All CS students, staff, and faculty welcome - come enjoy the tasty treats!
• AWICS Distinguished Lecture: 4:10-5:00pm, Wednesday November 15, Room 124 HR Bright.
• Grad School Info Panel: 8-10pm, Wednesday November 15, Room 101 Richardson (across the street from Bright). All students, CS/CE and other, welcome - FREE PIZZA!

Susan Dumais is a Senior Researcher in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group at Microsoft Research where she works on algorithms and interfaces for improved information access and management. Prior to joining Microsoft Research in July 1997, she was at Bellcore and Bell Labs for seventeen years where she worked on a wide variety of human-computer interaction and information retrieval projects. Susan is Chair of ACM's SIGIR group, and serves on the NRC Committee on Computing and Communications Research to Enable Better Use of Information Technology in "Digital Government". She serves on the editorial board of: Information Retrieval, ACM:Transactions on Information Systems, Human Computer Interaction, Information Processing and Management, Hypertext, Encyclopedia of Information Retrieval, and Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, and is actively involved on program committees for several conferences.

We are really looking forward to Dr. Dumais's visit. She will deliver an AWICS Distinguished Lecture in the computer science department on Monday October 2. We are planning many exciting events during her visit - and look forward to seeing everyone there!

• Free AWICS Lunch : 12-1:30pm, Monday October 2, Room 302 HR Bright. All undergrad and grad women in CS and CE are welcome!
• Reception: 3-4pm, Monday October 2, Room 302 HR Bright. All CS students, staff, and faculty welcome - come enjoy the tasty treats!
• AWICS Distinguished Lecture: 4:10-5:00pm, Monday October 2, Room 124 HR Bright.

Dr. Anita Borg is President and Founding Director of the Institute for Women and Technology (IWT) in Palo Alto, California. She is also a member of the research staff in the office of the chief technologist at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center and is on full-time loan to IWT. In July 1999, Dr. Borg was appointed by President Clinton to the congressionally mandated Commission on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering, and Technology. Dr. Borg also received the 1999 Melitta Bentz Women of Innovation and Invention Award and the 1999 Outstanding Women's Achievement Award presented by Forbes and IBM. She is a Fellow of the ACM and a member of the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association (CRA). Dr. Borg is the founder of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

We had a great time with Dr. Borg when she visited. She delivered two lectures which drew diverse audiences from around the university. Her AWICS Distinguished Lecture, Outrageous Ideas from Ordinary People: Inspiring Great Research By Looking Outside the Box, and her Women's Week special lecture, Technology, Democracy and the Future, gave us plenty of interesting new ideas to think about. And not to be topped by Dr. Berman's feat of the previous year, which resulted in eight of us attending the CRA-W workshop in Atlanta in May 1999, Dr. Borg inspired us to do some fundraising which, thanks to Microsoft and the conference sponsors, resulted in AWICS sending a group of TWENTY FOUR to the 2000 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference. We were by far the biggest group there! See what a great time we had!

Francine Berman is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at U. C. San Diego, Senior Fellow at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and founder of the Parallel Computation Laboratory at UCSD. Over the last two decades, her research has focused on parallel processing, in particular software tools, programming environments, and prediction models. In her seminar, she described her ongoing AppLeS project which focuses on the development of agents for scheduling high-performance distributed applications.

Prof. Berman's visit was great! We had a lot of fun at the AWICS Lunch, the Departmental reception, and the reception for PhD students at the Reveille Inn! Of course, we also learned a lot from her lecture. And, if that wasn't enough, Prof. Berman convinced many of us (eight total) to attend the CRA-W workshop she organized in Atlanta in May, where we met some very interesting women and learned about many interesting career opportunities.

Dr. Maria Klawe , Professor of Computer Science and Vice-President of Student and Academic Services at the University of British Columbia, was the speaker at our inaugural lecture on October 8, 1997. Prior to assuming her present position, Dr. Klawe was Head of the Computer Science Department at the University of British Columbia. She also spent several years working at IBM Almaden Research Lab in California.

Dr. Klawe's visit was a great success - we all had fun and learned a lot too. Her seminar on Interface and Navigation Issues in Designing Educational Software was very interesting and drew a large audience from around the university. Other highlights of her visit included the reception at Dr. Jennifer Welch's home and the lunch for all AWICS members. (Thanks are owed to Mac Lively for archiving the event with his camera!)