Brief: IBM veteran becomes first woman to win the Turing Award
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The prize's sponsor, the Association for Computing Machinery, cited Frances Allen's work in automatic program parallelization, which allows software to use multiple processors to improve speed.
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The woman credited with establishing Cobol as the language of business, would be pleased to know it still underpins applications.
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An amateur cryptographer who beat the World War II machine in a code-cracking challenge is honoured.
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By Dean Takahashi, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.  Sep. 12--Ted Hoff, one of the inventors of the first Intel microprocessor, was catching yellow jacket wasps with plastic cups.
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Irresistable Professor Wendy Hall, head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, will today receive the Anita Borg Award for Technical Leadership at a ceremony in San Diego.â¦
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Computer Associates International Inc. is expected today to name John Swainson, a 26-year veteran of IBM, its chief executive following a winter transition period, sources said.
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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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JUDITH Murray, 91, was oldest in computer class at Tiverton, Devon, until sister Joyce, 93, joined.  (c) 2007 People, The; London. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning.
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Women bosses in technology get plenty of bragging rights in a new Wall Street Journal ranking of the "Top 50 Women to Watch." [Missing Links]
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roundup Plus: Cray signs two supercomputing customers...MSN Messenger beta leaks onto Web...Level 3 to buy Sprint's dial-up business...Cisco CEO's salary shoots up from $1...SanDisk ups capacity on flash memory cards.
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IBM Corp. on Wednesday said it has developed the world&#39;s fastest computer - a 16,000-processor version of its BlueGene/L supercomputer.
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IBM, a while back, showcased its supercomputer, Blue Gene/L, at Top 500 supercomputer contest. At that time, the company was behind in performance by a Japanese firmâs supercomputer that managed to take away the first place crown.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM Corp. has taken a large stride in its race with Intel Corp. to make faster, smaller chips by building silicon transistors from a rare combination of metals. Both companies announced in January that they had discovered theÂ special materials needed to build "high-k metal gate" transistors. The special materials are much better insulators than standard silicon dioxide, a crucial trait as chip designers struggle to fit more and more transistors on each microprocessor, since electricity tends to leak from the closely-packed wires, making them hot and inefficient. Until now, neither company had announced the ingredients of this new mix of materials. But IBM researchers said on Monday they had used their Blue Gene supercomputer to model 50 combinations of hafnium dioxide and basic silicon. The company plans to build chips based on the new mixture in 2008. The new material looked good in theory, but IBM engineers had to create simulations of different mixtures to avoid any surprises when they added it to semiconductor production lines, said Alessandro Curioni, a supercomputing expert at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory. Curioni was one of three authors who published this research in a paper published in the January edition of the scientific journal Physical Review Letters. The team used new algorithms and a Blue Gene/L supercomputer with 4,096 processors to crunch the numbers. The program took about five days to run a simulation for each combination of ingredients, modeling the interaction between individual particles for the 600 atoms in every model. If the researchers had used a typical notebook PC, the 250-day job would have taken them 700 years, he said. Despite IBM's advance, Intel insists it is on track to reach markets first with chips using its own type of "high-k metal gate" transistors. Intel plans to use the technology in a family of 45-nanometer architecture chips scheduled for launch later in 2007, the company said. Â
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IBM's (NYSE: IBM) Blue Gene/L, which is being installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, recaptured the supercomputer speed record that Silicon Graphics' (NYSE: SGI) Columbia system at NASA held for barely a week.
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In a Feb. 21 story about the first woman awarded computing's Turing Award, The Associated Press, relying on information from IBM Corp., erroneously reported her age. Frances E. Allen is 74, not 75, IBM now says.
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NEW YORK - IBM Corp. claimed unofficial bragging rights Tuesday as owner of the world's fastest supercomputer...
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InfoWorld - The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has awarded the A.M. Turing Award to Frances Allen, a computer scientist at IBM and the first woman to receive the prestigious prize.