Jennifer Rexford

1. Jennifer Rexford Jennifer Rexford is a Professor in the Computer Science department at Princeton University. From 1996-2004, she was a member of the Network Management and Performance department at AT&T Labs--Research. Her research focuses on Internet routing, network measurement, and network management, with the larger goal of making data networks easier to design, understand, and manage. Jennifer is co-author of the book "Web Protocols and Practice" (Addison-Wesley, May 2001). Jennifer serves as the chair of ACM SIGCOMM, and as a member of the ACM Council and the CRA Board of Directors. She received her BSE degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1991, and her MSE and PhD degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from the University of Michigan in 1993 and 1996, respectively. She was the winner of ACM's Grace Murray Hopper Award for outstanding young computer professional of the year for 2004. Favorite Quote: “I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.” Charles Babbage

2. Grace Murray Hopper The late Rear Admiral Grace Hopper's spectacular scientific achievements have become international. She had changed the ever-growing world of the computer. As a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Vassar, she went on to receive a M.A. and Ph.D. degree at Yale. Her return to 1944 Vassar as an assistant in mathematics progressed to an associate professorship and further studies at New York University. She brought her mathematical abilities to the nation when, in 1943, she entered the U.S. Naval Reserve commissioned as lieutenant. As a senior mathematician with Sperry Rand, she worked on the first commercial computer. As Director of Automatic Programming, she published the first paper on compilers in 1952. She published over fifty papers on software and on programming languages. "It's always easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.” Grace Hopper

3. Anita Borg Dr. Anita Borg (1949 - 2003) was the Founder of the Institute for Women and Technology. On her passing IWT was renamed in her honor to the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. Anita's work to change the world for women and for technology and to make women's brilliance and perspective drive new and relevant technology received international recognition. Dr. Borg was a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and a member of the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association (CRA). She served on program committees for conferences in the computer architecture and operating systems communities, and was regularly asked to speak about both her technical work and her work on behalf of women scientists and engineers. Dr. Borg received her Ph.D. from the Courant Institute at New York University in 1981 for research in the area of operating systems synchronization efficiency. Many of today's memory performance analysis tools are based on that work. Throughout her career, Dr. Borg worked to encourage women to pursue careers in computing. In 1987, she started systers, an electronic community for technical women in computing. Today, systers has 2500 members in 38 countries and provides an international community of advice and support. In 1994, Dr. Borg and Dr. Telle Whitney, then at Actel Corporation, founded the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. This is a prestigious technical conference featuring talks by women who are changing the face of our world. Favorite Quote: “Well-behaved women rarely make history.” Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

4. Valerie Taylor Valerie E. Taylor earned her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1991. From 1991-2002, Dr. Taylor was a member of the faculty of Northwestern University. Dr. Taylor has since joined the faculty of Texas A&M University as Head of the Dwight Look College of Engineering's Department of Computer Science and holder of the Stewart & Stevenson Professorship II. 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. She has authored or co-authored over 70 publications in these areas. Dr. Taylor has received numerous awards for distinguished leadership and research including the Richard A. Tapia award.

5. AdaLovelace Ada Lovelace was one of the first women to become involved in the technology of computers. Her mother had Ada tutored in mathematics and music in an attempt to counter any tendencies toward becoming a poet, like her father. In fact, Ada inherited both her father’s intelligence and his psychological imbalance. When she was 18, she attended a lecture by Charles Babbage, an English mathematician who had recently developed the idea for a mechanical calculator that he called the Difference Engine. The next year, she was married to William King, the future Lord Lovelace. Two years later, now using her husband’s new title, she began to correspond with Babbage as Countess Ada Lovelace. Then in 1844, she volunteered to translate for Babbage an article written in Italian about the Difference Engine. Babbage, impressed with her work, encouraged her to append her own comments to the translation, which she did. In this way, Lovelace publicly contributed to the ongoing development of computing technology. Her notes included instructions for using the Difference Engine to calculate so-called Bernoulli numbers, a feat that has earned her the title of the first computer programmer.

6. Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli Kathleen “Kay” McNulty was one of a small number of women employed as human “computers” during World War II and later went on to become one of the first women programmers. McNulty came to the United States from Ireland in 1924. Kay, who spoke only Gaelic, learned English and eventually attended Chestnut Hill College in Pennsylvania, where she was one of three women to graduate with a degree in mathematics in 1942. That year she became one of 75 women employed during World War II as human “computers” by the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Engineering. As a “computer” McNulty calculated tables of numbers that would be used by soldiers in the field to aim artillery shells. McNulty was one of the six women chosen to become the first computer programmers. The women initially were not allowed to work in the same room as the machine because of the secrecy of the computing project, so they had to do all their programming on paper and test it on the computer later. Yet when ENIAC was announced to the public, the work of the programmers was not mentioned, so few people knew of their important work. McNulty married John Mauchly in 1948 and stayed with him until he died. They had seven children together. Kay married photographer Severo Antonelli in 1983.

7. Adele Goldstine Dr. Adele Goldstine assisted in the creation of the ENIAC, one of the world's first electronic digital computers, at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1940s. She made a lasting contribution to the project by authoring The Manual for the ENIAC in 1946. This was the original technical description of the ENIAC and it detailed the machine right down to its resistors. Goldstine was a key member of a team of seven women who were the first programmers of the ENIAC. Along with Jean Bartik, she led a group that implemented John von Neumman’s “stored program” computer. This solved the problem of the programmers having to reconfigure all of the cables for each equation that the machine solved. “It [Eniac stored program computer] was a son-of-a-bitch to program.” Adele Goldstine

8. Rózsa Péter Rózsa Péter(originally Politzer) made major contributions to mathematical theory for which she received some recognition in her lifetime, but her name, which should be written together with the names of the founders of computational theory (Gödel, Turing, Church, Kleene), is all but forgotten today. In this, she no doubt shares the fate of other Eastern European scientists of the same period. She graduated from Eötvös Loránd University in 1927, Péter lived by taking tutoring jobs and high-school teaching. She was told about Gödel's work on the subject of incompleteness, whereupon she devised her own proofs focusing on the recursive functions used by Gödel. She received her Ph.D. summa cum laude in 1935. Péter continued working during the war years despite being forbidden to teach by the Fascist laws and being confined to a Budapest ghetto. After the war in 1945, she obtained her first regular position at the Budapest Teachers' College. In 1955, she became a professor at Eötvös Loránd University, until her retirement in 1975. In 1976, she published Recursive Functions in Computer Theory. “The facts are only good for bursting open the wrappings of the mind and spirit.” Rózsa Péter

9. Lydia E. Kavraki Lydia E. Kavrakiis the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Bioengineering at Rice University. Kavraki received her BA in Computer Science from the University of Crete in Greece and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. Her research contributions are in physical algorithms and their applications in robotics (robot motion planning, assembly planning, micromanipulation, and flexible object manipulation) and computational structural biology and bioinformatics (modeling of biomolecular interactions, molecular design, computer-assisted drug design and the large-scale functional annotation of proteins). Kavraki has authored more than 80 publications and is one of the authors of a new robotics textbook published in 2005 by MIT Press. Kavraki was the recipient of the 2000 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Grace Murray Hopper Award for her technical contributions. She has also received an NSF CAREER award, a Sloan Fellowship, the Early Academic Career Award from the IEEE Society on Robotics and Automation, a recognition as a top young investigator from the MIT Technology Review Magazine in 2002, and the Duncan Award for excellence in research and teaching from Rice University in 2004. Kavraki is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and a Fellow of the World Technology Network.

10. Dame Stephanie “Steve” Shirley Dame Stephanie “Steve” Shirleyis a highly successful entrepreneur turned ardent philanthropist. She arrived in Britain as an unaccompanied child refugee from Germany in 1939. She started what is now Xansa on her dining room table with £6 in 1962. Shirley adopted the name "Steve" to help her in the male-dominated industry. In 25 years as its Chief Executive she developed it into a leading business technology group, pioneering new work practices and changing the position of professional women (especially in hi-tech) along the way. Since retiring as honorary Life President in 1993, her focus has been increasingly on philanthropy based on her strong belief in business people giving something back to society. Her main interests are autism (her autistic son Giles died age 35 in 1998) and making better use of IT in the voluntary sector. She is also much in demand as a keynote speaker at international conferences. “My work and life were never, ever balanced. Work is the ultimate seduction…Work isn’t something you do when you’d rather be doing something else.” Dame Stephanie “Steve” Shirley

11. YuanyuanZhou Dr. Yuanyuan Zhouhas made significant contributions in the interdisciplinary area of architecture and operating system. She is one of the first to create an architecture and operating system support for software debugging and to apply data mining to program analysis for bug detection. Her work has received wide attention inside and outside the architecture and operating system research community. She has received an NSF Career award, an IBM Faculty Award, an IBM SUR award, and the Anita Borg Career award. In addition to her research contributions, Dr. Zhou actively reached out to women in computer science at all levels. At UIUC, she helped organize the first annual Undergraduate Women in Engineering camp in 2003 for first year students. In 2004, she participated in the CRA-W's DMP project and hosted 2 women undergraduate students in summer projects. Additionally, she joined with several other women faculty members at UIUC to push the department to set up child-care grants for women with small children to travel to conferences.

12. Chieko Asakawa Chieko Asakawa is responsible for the research and development of IBM software and applications that significantly improve web accessibility for the visually impaired and others with special needs. Her contributions to the field of accessibility research include making the internet and other web resources available to the visually impaired via PCs by automatically converting text and icons on the screen to voice. She was a key technical leader in the development of the IBM Home Page Reader (HPR), which allows people to surf the web using numeric keypads instead of a mouse. It is now produced in eleven languages and distributed worldwide. Asakawa-san developed a digital Braille system and three key applications for the visually impaired. She also developed the Braille Dictionary System and the IBM Braille Forum Network. Asakawa-san teaches at Tsukuba Engineering College, focusing on human interface issues. She was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 2003. Blind from the age of 14, she leads by example, demonstrating that the impossible is never out of reach.

13. ShirleyJackson The Honorable Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson, a theoretical physicist, is the eighteenth president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Dr. Jackson’s career prior to becoming Rensselaer’s president has encompassed senior positions in government. Dr. Jackson is a Life Member of the M.I.T. Corporation (the Board of Trustees). She has served on a U.S. Department of Energy Task Force on the future of its multipurpose National Laboratories, and on a number of committees. Dr. Jackson is the first African-American woman to receive a doctorate from M.I.T. – in any subject. She is one of the first two African-American women to receive a doctorate in physics in the U.S. She is the first African-American to become a Commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. She is both the first woman and the first African-American to serve as the Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and now the first African-American woman to lead a national research university. Dr. Jackson was inducted into The National Woman’s Hall of Fame in 1998 for her significant and profound contributions as a distinguished scientist and advocate for education, science, and public policy.

14. ShirleyJackson ShirleyJackson ShirleyJackson ShirleyJackson ShirleyJackson ShirleyJackson ShirleyJackson ShirleyJackson ShirleyJackson ShirleyJackson ShirleyJackson ShirleyJackson

15. ChiekoAsakawa ChiekoAsakawa ChiekoAsakawa ChiekoAsakawa ChiekoAsakawa ChiekoAsakawa ChiekoAsakawa ChiekoAsakawa ChiekoAsakawa ChiekoAsakawa ChiekoAsakawa ChiekoAsakawa

16. YuanyuanZhou YuanyuanZhou YuanyuanZhou YuanyuanZhou YuanyuanZhou YuanyuanZhou YuanyuanZhou YuanyuanZhou YuanyuanZhou YuanyuanZhou YuanyuanZhou YuanyuanZhou

17. Dame Stephanie Shirley Dame Stephanie Shirley Dame Stephanie Shirley Dame Stephanie Shirley Dame Stephanie Shirley Dame Stephanie Shirley Dame Stephanie Shirley Dame Stephanie Shirley Dame Stephanie Shirley Dame Stephanie Shirley Dame Stephanie Shirley Dame Stephanie Shirley

18. Lydia E. Kavraki Lydia E. Kavraki Lydia E. Kavraki Lydia E. Kavraki Lydia E. Kavraki Lydia E. Kavraki Lydia E. Kavraki Lydia E. Kavraki Lydia E. Kavraki Lydia E. Kavraki Lydia E. Kavraki Lydia E. Kavraki

19. Rózsa Péter Rózsa Péter Rózsa Péter Rózsa Péter Rózsa Péter Rózsa Péter Rózsa Péter Rózsa Péter Rózsa Péter Rózsa Péter Rózsa Péter Rózsa Péter

20. AdeleGoldstine AdeleGoldstine AdeleGoldstine AdeleGoldstine AdeleGoldstine AdeleGoldstine AdeleGoldstine AdeleGoldstine AdeleGoldstine AdeleGoldstine AdeleGoldstine AdeleGoldstine

21. Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli

22. AdaLovelace AdaLovelace AdaLovelace AdaLovelace AdaLovelace AdaLovelace AdaLovelace AdaLovelace AdaLovelace AdaLovelace AdaLovelace AdaLovelace

23. ValerieTaylor ValerieTaylor ValerieTaylor ValerieTaylor ValerieTaylor ValerieTaylor ValerieTaylor ValerieTaylor ValerieTaylor ValerieTaylor ValerieTaylor ValerieTaylor

24. AnitaBorg AnitaBorg AnitaBorg AnitaBorg AnitaBorg AnitaBorg AnitaBorg AnitaBorg AnitaBorg AnitaBorg AnitaBorg AnitaBorg

25. Grace Murray Hopper Grace Murray Hopper Grace Murray Hopper Grace Murray Hopper Grace Murray Hopper Grace Murray Hopper Grace Murray Hopper Grace Murray Hopper Grace Murray Hopper Grace Murray Hopper Grace Murray Hopper Grace Murray Hopper

26. JenniferRexford JenniferRexford JenniferRexford JenniferRexford JenniferRexford JenniferRexford JenniferRexford JenniferRexford JenniferRexford JenniferRexford JenniferRexford JenniferRexford