Chair’s Message

Welcome to the December, 2015, issue of ACM-W Connections. We’ve got lots of news from ACM-W Europe and report from ACM-W India about the Grace Hopper India conference. I hope you enjoy reading about all of these activities.

News from Networking Networking Women

We wanted to share this news from N2W (Networking Networking Women.

We are very excited to announce the inaugural list of “10 women in networking/communications that you should know”. Over 150 people around the world submitted nominations for this list, and many of these people submitted several names. These nominations created a very impressive list of approximately 140 women in the networking/communications fields. The women nominated amaze us and inspire us. It was quite hard to only choose 10 …

The “10 women in networking/communications that you should know” list will be an annual list. For this 1st list, we decided to focus on the most senior women in our field, all of whom have had a major impact in networking and/or communications. We also wanted a list that represented our diversity, e.g., diversity in the area of networking/communications and, thus, chose the list accordingly. For 2015, in alphabetical order (by first name), here are 10 women in networking/communications that you should know!

Andrea Goldsmith
Anja Feldmann
Deborah Estrin
Jennifer Rexford
Klara Nahrstedt
Lixia Zhang
Muriel Medard
Polina Bayvel
Radia Perlman
Sally Floyd

Details on these amazing women, as well as quotes from one of the many people who nominated these women, are available at: http://sites.ieee.org/com-n2women/files/2015/12/Top10-20151.pdf

Where’s ACM-W This Month?

As I’m writing this, I’ve just left Oxford University which hosted the Ada Lovelace Symposium on December 9 & 10. It was a wonderful event with a great mix of literary scholars, historians, mathematicians, and computer scientists. The livestream is available at http://livestream.com/oxuni/lovelace and I absolutely recommend that you watch it. As a computer scientist, I was humbled by the extent of research the scholars from the humanities disciplines have done. They have faced a significant big data problem, reading letters and diaries from multiple people that spanned decades, drawing connections between them, using calendars and newspapers to confirm and clarify details. This work is fascinating, and it was great fun to see a few of the original documents on display at Oxford’s Bodleian Library.

We’re also very excited about the first Canada-wide ACM-W celebration, coming up later in January. If you are interested in more information, head to http://www.can-cwic.ca.

Thanks for your interest in ACM-W, and thanks for supporting women in computing!

~Valerie Barr, ACM-W Chair