Tech industry outlines women's day initiatives
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Launches F_email Cisco has jumped on Thursday's International Women's Day bandwagon with the launch of F_email - a project to improve women's technology skills.â¦
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A number of signs point to increasing demand for tech workers, but not all the clouds have been driven away.
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A lack of women in academic computer science positions as well as barriers to corporate advancement is creating a talent vacuum in the U.S., according to speakers at a conference on emerging technology taking place this week at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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By TERENCE CHEA  MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - A coalition of technology companies and environmental groups led by Google Inc. and Intel Corp.
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At first glance it is not immediately  obvious why a sewing machine, handbag and pedometer would be  useful to engineers at Internet giant Yahoo, but organizers say  anything goes at &quot;Hack Day.&quot;
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The European Union marked International Women's Day on Thursday with a pledge to fight discrimination and domestic violence against women.Comment
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(InfoWorld) - Power consumption, parallelism, and the rapidly-expanding world of mobile communications are among the leading areas of research and development currently being investigated within some of the IT world's largest companies. Taking the stage at MIT's EmTech Conference (formerly known as the MIT Emerging Technology Conference) on Monday were top researchers from Cisco, HP, and Intel who shared their visions for the products of tomorrow by unveiling some of their leading areas of study and experimentation today. From the growing impact of mobile computing devices to the push to make IT eco-friendly, along with new efforts to take advantage of parallel data processing capabilities, researchers from the three technology bellwethers spoke of commons threads woven through all their work and in what directions they believe the results of those efforts will subsequently drive future technologies. Following a panel discussion on social networking tools that also focused heavily on the impact of mobile devices, Andrew Chien, vice president of research at Intel, said that the chip giant is also focusing heavily on the changes in IT usage and consumption that are being driven by handheld machines. However, despite the rapid development of the mobile space, Chien said Intel feels that wireless device, applications, and service providers are still falling short in terms of how "intuitive" and "seamless" their technologies currently work. "We have a healthy amount of concern about the amount of effort that these technologies require from all of us today," said Chien. "To that end, we're very excited about the idea of inference in the context of small mobile devices, about the richer senses and analysis of data that can be realized based on the body of techniques currently lumped under the umbrella of machine learning." Among the specific examples of the types of mobile applications that Intel envisions taking root in the near future are systems that offer "seamless presentation" of more useful information than those available today's handhelds, including tools that use geolocation and onboard sensors to give users data that is pertinent to their personal condition and immediate surroundings. Both Cisco and HP also count mobility among their leading areas of research, the panelists said, with Cisco looking into ways to merge "telepresence" with its recently acquired WebEx collaboration tools, and HP working on ways to more tightly link handhelds with back-end datacenter systems. Prith Banerjee, only six weeks into his new post of senior vice president of research at HP's Labs division, said that the company's work in mobility, green IT, and parallelism are converging in its larger efforts to make large data centers more efficient in general. In some cases, the work is oriented toward improving performance, such as through the use of photonic interconnects -- advanced electromagnetic technologies -- to allow datacenters to communicate more quickly. In other cases, HP Labs is looking at datacenter power consumption, using sensors built into its prototype servers to reduce costs and headaches associated with cooling the massive hardware farms. The challenges of parallel computing As for parallel computing -- roughly defined as the simultaneous execution of numerous program instructions on multiple or multi-core processors -- Banerjee said that HP is hoping to use its research efforts to help clear some of the software programming obstacles that exist on the market today. "We're very aware in our research of the challenges of making parallel software applications; we need engineers who can start writing code designed for multi-cores and to help transition software designed to run on a single processor," said Prith. If some of those roadblocks can be pushed aside, the benefits could be enormous, according to the HP researcher. "We're imaging a world where you plug in a computer and all the applications work automatically, and users don't have to worry about patches and updates," he said. "We're imagining a world where software is automatically updated and maintained so that environment for end-users will be completely automated and allow them to increase productivity. That is a very difficult problem to solve, but we're going to try to solve it." Another area of focus for all three organizations is the process of refining their internal research and development operations. Under Prith, HP will attempt to lower its overall number of research projects by folding them into larger efforts, the executive said, and Chien added that Intel is having success with "lablets," groups of researchers it sponsors at academic institutions to augment its internal R&D work. At Cisco, the massive networking company is attempting to inject an air of entrepreneurialism into areas of research that it believes can be turned into revenue-producing businesses rapidly, as evidenced by the launch of its physical security and telepresence product groups over the last several years, said Guido Jouret, CTO of the firm's Emerging Markets Technology Group. "We're trying to re-create the start-up atmosphere inside Cisco. So far, we've announced four different units, and the goal is to create one every several months," Jouret said. "We'll also continue to do small acquisitions where we can gain vital technologies or teams to help flesh out our ideas. The idea is to create an interesting mix of entrepreneurial drive." Along with security and telepresence, the company has launched a digital media group s part of the effort as well as a business devoted to replacing the static product displays found in retails stores today with "digitally-driven network displays." Jouret said that the telepresence group is working to mesh device geolocation with collaboration tools and multimedia-sharing systems. "We want to combine video with collaboration platforms for rich multimedia interaction, tools that allow companies and consumers to interact in ways that we can't even imagine yet," he said.
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Company's employees have been posting their thoughts on tech topics.
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According to a recent U.K. study, women own only slightly fewer tech gadgets than men -- and they're not interested in pink gadgets and Hello Kitty keyboards, either.
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Several organisations will celebrate Saturday&#39;s International Software Freedom Day by hosting open source events around the country.
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Chile's first female president marked International Women's Day on Thursday saying women were in politics "to stay," while German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Europe must do more to bring about gender equality.
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A coalition of technology companies and environmental groups led by Google Inc. and Intel Corp. launched an initiative Tuesday to conserve electricity and curb global warming emissions by making the world's computers and servers more energy-efficient.
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Uncovering tomorrow's industry leaders today.
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Notable developments in the IT industry, present and past.
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Companies will demonstrate how their technology will work together.
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(InfoWorld) - Discrimination against women and minorities is putting the U.S. at a disadvantage in technology innovation, according to the chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley. Robert Birgeneau said of the top 50 university computer science department jobs in the U.S., not one is held by a woman of color. "How embarrassing," he said. "It's an astounding waste of talent in an increasingly competitive world." Birgeneau was the keynote speaker at a workshop on women in technology as part of the Emerging Technologies Conference being held at MIT this week. He said that while the number of women and men enrolling in undergraduate and post graduate technology programs has evened out somewhat, women are far behind their male counterparts when it comes to academic positions. Birgeneau cited a study released last fall by The National Academies titled "Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering." The study said that at the top research institutions, only 15.4 percent of the full professors in the social and behavioral sciences and 14.8 percent in the life sciences are women, "and these are the only fields in science and engineering where the proportion of women reaches into the double digits." The study also showed that women will likely face discrimination in every field of science and engineering. "We're at a drastic disadvantage in the United States, which is outsourcing to other countries like India and China, who are working madly to compete with us and who are investing deeply in education," he said. Karen Vogel, founder of The Women's Congress, a women's business-to-business conference, said one factor contributing to the lack of advancement for women in technology jobs and faculty positions is that women often don't support other women when it comes to workplace advancement. Not everyone agreed. Ilene Lang, president of Catalyst, a New York-based nonprofit corporate research and advisory organization, said during a conference session on workplace culture that preliminary data from an online survey of U.S.-based corporate women found barriers to advancement mostly include a lack of role models, too few corporate leaders who would champion women, and little access to business networks that could plug them into corporate decision-makers. The survey included two groups of women: Those working in nontechnical roles in high-tech companies and those working in technology positions in companies other than high-tech. Lang said that the same barriers come up year after year in Catalyst's surveys. "One of the key problems women raise is that they do not get direct feedback on how they can improve. Feedback is always indirect and dances around the edges," she said. She said there weren't major differences in the results between the two groups of women that made up the 471 respondents in the survey, "except women in technology roles said they intended to stay in their roles longer." The detailed survey results are due out some time next spring, Lang said. Some women at the conference spoke about their personal experiences with discrimination, including a lack of women in high-level managerial and executive positions. Ying Li, general manager of applied research and data mining at Microsoft, said during a panel discussion that there are few women who are senior technical leaders at her company. Claudia Bauzer Medeiros, who was the first woman professor of computer science at the University of Campinas in Sao Paulo, Brazil, said she was able to advance in her career because she never thought of herself as a woman when it came to her job. "If you start thinking of yourself as a minority, then you start getting a complex about it," she said Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate
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Using new technology, injured or disabled workers can talk their way to productivity.