Category Archives: Hopper – Anita Borg Institute

The Hopper conference
announced its acceptances yesterday. I just finished
collecting review results from Sun’s submitters. Sun staff submitted
or were part of groups which submitted 19 proposals to Hopper 2009 and
13 were accepted (69%) – Sun’s best acceptance rate ever! This includes
Susan Landau’s invited technical talk. The 2009 Sun presenters are from a very
broad range of Engineering disciplines: Microelectronics,
Software, Storage, Sun Labs, and the Systems group.

GHC 2009 will be held:

Tucson, Arizona

September 30 – October 3, 2009

Sun will be a

Platinum Corporate Sponsor for the Hopper conference again this year.

Also, my daughter Jessica
sent in two GHC 2009 submissions, both of which were accepted. This is
Jessica’s third Hopper conference and her second as an accepted presenter
(she started out on my

Girl Geeks panel in 2007). Jessica has just finished her Sophomore year
at Carnegie Mellon University.

Sun’s accepted submissions are:

1. “Bits and Bites: Explaining Communications Security (and Insecurity) to Washington and Brussels” invited technical talk by
   Susan Landau
2. “3D Collaborative Environments for Social Good” (Sun Proposal – accepted as a poster),
   Gilda Garreton and
   Nicole Yankelovich
3. “Designing for the 100+ Year Archive” (Sun Proposal – accepted as a poster), with
   Cathleen Wharton
4. “Developing sustainable technologies for an improved future” (panel submitted by Intel), includes Sudesna Dash
5. “Formal verification on leading edge microprocessor design” (Sun Proposal – accepted as a poster) by
   Catherine Ahlschlager, Pamela Parish, and
   Shrenik Mehta
6. “From Spec. to Silicon: Successful Validation of a Server-class SoC Microprocessor” (Sun Proposed Presentation), with
   Manisha Hardikar
7. “Open Source Community Development” (Sun Proposed Panel), includes
   Valerie Fenwick,
   Teresa Giacomini, and others
8. “Solving the Two Body Problem: Creating Technology While Maintaining Your Social Life” (NASA Proposed Panel), includes
   Katy Dickinson
9. “Speed Mentoring for Latinas in Computing” (IBM Proposed BOF), includes
   Gilda Garreton
10. “Technical Mentorship and Sponsorship: Why You Need It and How to Find It” (Google Proposed Panel), includes
    Cathleen Wharton
11. “The Value of Awards & How to Get Them” (Sun Proposed Panel), includes
    Katy Dickinson
12. Video blogging (Sun Proposal – accepted as a poster), includes
    Deirdre Straughan
13. “Women and the Flat Connected World” (Sun Proposed Panel), includes
    Meenakshi Kaul-Basu

Some Hopper 2008 Photos:

Jessica’s Poster

Sun Reception

M Kaul-Basu

Susan Landau interview

Images Copyright 2008 Katy Dickinson

I just got home after attending the successful first

Savvy Geek Chix event, put on by the
Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology
(ABI). On this celebration of Ada Lovelace Day,
it seems appropriate to have attended an event for women in computing.
There were 110 women present. I learned some, talked with old friends,
and met some very impressive new friends whom I look forward to knowing
better. It was a typical ABI event – interesting, well managed, and a
valuable use of my time.

ABI was named in honor of
Dr. Anita Borg (1949-2003), whom I had the honor to meet several times during
the last years of her life. Sun Microsystems was one of the companies which
provided Anita Borg with funding
to start the organization now known as ABI. In addition to starting ABI, Anita
also created the
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing
conference and the Systers
email community of technical women in computing. With Anita’s example before me,
it is hard to say “it can’t be done”.

Image Copyright 2009 by Katy Dickinson

I have spent the last few days reviewing drafts for submissions to the
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in
Computing (“GHC”). Hopper will be held in Tucson, Arizona: September 30 –
October 3, 2009. Sun will again be a Platinum conference sponsor (thanks this year to
generous funding from the Women@Sun-West internal-to-Sun group). All conference
submissions are due tonight.

Not counting invited talks and presentations submitted by other
groups which include Sun staff, I think Sun will finish with about a dozen proposals
for panels, BOFs (Birds of a Feather discussion topics), posters, presentations, and
workshops on topics including:

• Creating an open online community for student developers (BOF)
• Designing for the 100+ Year Archive (Presentation)
• Dual-Career-Couple Problem (BOF)
• From Spec. to Silicon: Successful Validation of a Server-class SoC Microprocessor (Presentation)
• How environmental and economic factors are changing manufacturing and
  supply chain designs (Panel)
• Leveraging the Power of Your Women’s Network (Panel)
• More Than Just Coding: Alternate Careers in Computing (Panel)
• Open Source Community Development (Panel)
• The Value of Awards & How to Get Them this is my own panel!
• Women and the Flat Connected World (Panel)

I have also reviewed two Hopper submissions by my
daughter Jessica:

• Playing with Alice After School (Workshop)
• 
  Poetry and Prose Performances Project – p4 (Poster)

Jessica has already been on a Hopper panel (GHC 2007’s “Girl Geeks”), and she
presented the poster
“How to Combat Plagiarism in Academia (and How Not To)”
at GHC 2008.

GHC 2009 selection decisions will be announced on 18 May 2009.

I was very interested to read the article

“Women in Computing – Take 2” in the February 2009 issue of the
Communications of the ACM (Association
for Computing Machinery). This is a follow-up to an article written in 1995.
“Women in Computing – Take 2” is by Maria Klawe (President, Harvey Mudd College),
Telle Whitney (President and CEO of the
Anita Borg Institute or ABI), and Caroline Simard
(Director for Research at ABI), all of whom I have known and respected for
many years. I have two favorite parts of the article: First, the quote from
Jean Bartik (Eniac Programmer):

“The best advice I’ve ever heard about how women should compete in the
workplace was spoken by Betty Snyder Holberton, the first of my three
favorite work partners:
‘Look like a girl. Act like a lady. Think like a man. Work like a dog.’.”

Second, the reference to my own
SEED Engineering mentoring program. If you go to p.75 you will see:

“Some of the successful approaches that companies may use for recruiting,
retaining, and advancing more women in computing, as well as in other
technical professions, include:…

Implement a mentoring program. Indeed, make mentoring which
positively impacts career advancement and satisfaction, a basic part of the
organizational culture. Sun Microsystems’ SEED program, for example, is
is regarded as a major step in this direction.”

The article even includes a footnote to

“Five Years of Mentoring by the Numbers”, my 2006 presentation
to the Grace Hopper Celebration of
Women and Computing.

I spent Thursday night and all day Friday with the other members of
the ABI
Board of Advisors and staff in our annual meeting. Here we are in
what is I think the first-ever ABI Advisors’ photo:

Left to Right – Back

Caroline Simard, Carol Muller, Allan Fisher, Chandra Krintz, Katy Dickinson,
Kathy Richardson, Robin Jeffries, Kim McLeod, Deanna Kosaraju, Jody Mahoney,
Pamela Arya, Nina Bhatti, Carole Dulong, Tracy Prentiss, Jerri Barrett, Ruth
Stergiou, Amy Clark, Rachelle Siskin

Left to Right – Front

Kathy Gee, Rebecca Norlander, Telle Whitney, B.J. Wishinsky

Image Copyright 2009 Katy Dickinson

Ira Pramanick (of Google),
Kristin Yvonne Rozier
(of NASA), and I visited Girls’ Middle
School yesterday to kick off the MAGIC mentoring pilot term. Ira, Kristin,
and I are three of the five member
MAGIC core team. We have been working this last year to set up the
MAGIC program and test it out in the GMS pilot.

Yesterday, we met with the first ten GMS girls to sign up as MAGIC mentees.
We distributed MAGIC pencils and business cards and played a game to
introduce ourselves. The girls are a mixed group, between 6th, 7th, and 8th grades.
This was their first chance to ask questions and for us to meet them together.
The girls will start meeting with their new mentors next month.

Here is MAGIC’s core team:

Dr Ira Pramanick

Katy Dickinson

Foz Saeed

Dr Kristin Rozier

Meenakshi Kaul-Basu

For those who are just starting to appreciate how wonderful the annual

Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is for your Engineering
organization’s networking, technical education, morale building,
and recruiting, here are some tips. Sun Microsystems has been a Hopper conference
sponsor for many years. Earlier this month, at GHC 2008, Sun was a Platinum
sponsor and had 37 staff participate, including 14 presenters and panelists.
(We met some
Sun Campus Ambassadors and former
Sun interns at Hopper
as well!) There were companies which sent more staff to Hopper 2008, but not many!

Dr Sheueling Chang

Dr Gilda Garreton

Valerie Fenwick

Dr Susan Landau

Catherine Ahlschlager

How did Sun get so many people to Hopper 2008?

• Hopper asks for panel, presentation, poster, BOF and other proposals
  long in advance of the conference. (The deadline for Hopper’s October 2008
  conference was in March 2008.) Sun submitted many more proposals than were
  accepted. Start working on ideas now for Hopper 2009!
• In these tight money times, many managers feel that they should not
  spend their travel budget, even for a CTO-sponsored conference.
  I have found that Sun’s CTO organization offering a limited number of
  free registrations plus matching funds for travel puts Hopper in a new category
  and encourages Sun managers to approve the balance of the travel funds.
  Winning a travel scholarship is seen as an honor.
• Papers required for travel vary a great deal from country to country.
  Check out the
  Visa Network Requirements page for details. It can help (and sometimes is
  required) for a non-US traveler to have a formal letter of invitation from the
  organization they will visit in the USA. With a travel scholarship award to
  someone coming from outside of the USA, I always offer to write them a formal
  executive letter of invitation to support their visa.
• Frequent email communication giving information on conference preparation can
  be of great help. “Frequent” means once or twice a month starting about 9 months
  in advance, increasing to one or two emails a week in the month before the conference.
• Not everyone is an experienced traveler. Some travel advice that proved
  valuable:
  • Remind newbies that they may need to order business cards weeks in
    advance so they are delivered in time to pack. Provide information on how to
    order cards.
  • Send out weather information so travelers know what to pack.
  • We started from many places (Beijing, San Francisco, Boston, San Diego)
    but all flew at the same place (Denver, CO). A Wiki page listing
    arrival and departure times allowed us to share shuttles, rental cars, and companionship.
  • One of the airport shuttle companies was much cheaper than the others
    – providing this information in advance saved Sun travel money.
• Having a single Sun internal web page listing Sun’s speakers (with talk/panel
  titles, dates and times, room names, etc.) with photos, names, and titles of all
  participants helped us plan our time and find each other during the busy event.
• Having one person be the contact on key topics (like shipping giveaways,
  posters, and other exhibit table stuff) makes for less confusion.
• Sun provided great tshirts (soft, well fitting, and well designed) for
  both staff and giveaways. We encouraged Sun staff to wear their shirts at Hopper
  – this is good advertising plus we were easy to see in a crowd.
• Sun’s table in the Hopper exhibit hall served as a central place to
  find people, leave or pickup messages, and find current information.
  Next year, I want to follow up on a suggestion and offer a sign on Sun’s
  table listing where Sun staff are speaking.
• We had professional recruiters with us but most of those staffing
  Sun’s exhibit table were Sun Engineers or executives, who could answer
  questions from their own experience in software, microelectronics, systems,
  storage, research, systems, networking, security, and operations.
• If possible, I encourage more than one person per country to attend – so
  they have support and someone familiar to talk to and maybe travel with.
  This may be particularly important for younger staff who like to travel in packs.
• 
  Dr. Greg Papadopoulos (Sun’s CTO) is executive sponsor of Sun’s participation
  at the Hopper conference but I ask other executives to get involved and show their
  support by funding Sun’s reception, giveaways, or part of the sponsor fee.

Dr Sukyoung Ryu

Katy Dickinson

Foz Saeed

Tarik Ono

Meenakshi Kaul-Basu

Some of Sun’s Giveaways:

Sun’s Hopper 2008 Shirt

OpenSolaris Student Pack

Images Copyright 2008 by Katy Dickinson