Chair’s Message
Welcome to the November issue of ACM-W Connections. Our issue is a bit small this month, but well worth reading all the same: wonderful news about the new ACM-W chapter at Pacific University, a write-up about the poster competition winners from our ACM-W Celebrations of Women in Computing, and a very comprehensive article by Kathryn McKinley about building your research community. Kathryn’s article has information for researchers at all levels, from graduate student on up.
In other news, Big Dream film premiered last week, and the Big Dream Movement site is live. Please check it out at http://www.bigdreammovement.com/. ACM-W is a supporter of this effort to help provide girls with examples of people like them who have followed “their passion in science, math, computing & engineering”. Check it out, and consider hosting a screening for a group of girls near you!
There were two ACM-W Celebrations in October, one in Ontario, Canada, and one in the Rocky Mountain region, US. We hope to have reports about these in our December issue of ACM-W Connections.
On a personal note, I was happy to be able to attend last week’s ACM event that followed the announcement that, henceforth, Turing Award laureates will receive $1 million. The program included a showing of the new film about Turing, The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley. If you are planning to see it, skip to the next paragraph now! I liked the film, but it isn’t perfect. The important role of women codebreakers is reduced to a single character. And Turing, as brilliant as he was, is portrayed as much more of a hardware genius than seems warranted. I also thought they went a little ahistorical at the end. They have Turing building a computer in his flat in Manchester. I’m a software person, but am I wrong to think that nobody in 1951 would have sufficient electricity service in their flat to run a computer? If you see the film, let me know what you think.
Finally, if you are on Facebook, please Like the ACM-W page, https://www.facebook.com/women.acm.org. We put up a lot of links to current stories about women in computing and women in technology. There’s a lot of activity these days with many groups generating interesting information and interventions.
Thanks, as always, for supporting ACM-W and women in computing. More next month…..
~Valerie Barr, ACM-W Chair