the Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org,
features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLoG@cAcm
community. in each issue of Communications, we’ll publish
excerpts from selected posts.
follow us on twitter at http://twitter.com/blogcAcm
DOI:10.1145/1646353.1646358
http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm
connecting Women
and technology
Guest blogger Valerie Barr writes about highlights of the ninth Grace
Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference, including
keynote speeches by Megan Smith and Francine Berman.
from “Grace hopper conference opening session: Part 1” http://cacm.acm.org/ blogs/blog-cacm/43989 The theme of the ninth Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) of Women in Computing is “Creating Technology for Social Good.” This is a
theme that has clearly resonated with
many people as the conference totally
sold out, with 1,608 attendees! There
are 178 companies represented, 23
countries, and 728 students. There
were more than 100 people who volunteered for the 16 committees that
helped organize different aspects of
the conference. One- quarter of the
attendees, 430 people, are involved in
presentations of panels, papers, workshops, and Birds of a Feather sessions.
In addition to the usual conference
type of activities, one of the sessions
on Wednesday was a resumé review—
the volunteer reviewers read more than
300 resumés.
A wonderful element of GHC is the
emphasis on networking. At the con-
challenged attendees to make the
most of this aspect of the conference
by introducing themselves to at least
five new people per day. For the un-
dergraduates in particular, Heidi gave
a wonderful example of an elevator
speech, demonstrating how they could
capture all the key details about them-
selves in just a few sentences.
from “Grace hopper
Keynote 1: megan smith”
http://cacm.acm.org/
blogs/blog-cacm/44258
Thursday’s keynote address was by
Megan Smith, vice president of new
business development and general
manager of Google.org. She has been
at Google since 2003 and oversaw the
acquisitions that resulted in Google
Earth and Google Maps. In her talk Me-
gan focused on the interconnectedness
of CS, using four examples of areas that
demonstrate this.
