Congrats to the three winner’s of this year’s Women of Vision awards from the Anita Borg Institute.

UCLA computer science Professor Deborah Estrin is the founding director of the Center for Embedded Network Sensing. CENS, a National Science Foundation project, aims to develop wireless sensor systems. The uses of this new technology include military, ecological, seismological, and security-related:

ENS systems will form a critical infrastructure resource for society–they will monitor and collect information on such diverse subjects as plankton colonies, endangered species, soil & air contaminants, medical patients, and buildings, bridges and other man-made structures. Across this wide range of applications, Embedded Networked Sensing systems promise to reveal previously unobservable phenomena.

Also, Purdue University Dean of Engineering Leah Jamieson co-founded the Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) program. It helps students and their advisors to devise engineering projects to solve problems in their communities. And Duy-Loan Le is the first woman to be named a Senior Fellow at Texas Instruments, and only one of six people to hold that title.

In today’s NY Times food section, there’s an article (”Kitchen Chemistry Is Chic, But Is It a Woman’s Place?”) that asks where the women are in the male-dominated world of molecular gastronomy, the application of science to culinary practice. (Never mind that the same thing was done by women in the late 19th century when it was called “home economics” and not at all the big rage in restaurants.)

Anyway, the article begins with the premise that using too much precise chemistry in the kitchen is not very soulful, and therefore women won’t take to it. But then they round up a few young women who are working in top molecular gastronomy restaurants, and they’re taking to it just fine, thank you very much:

Pamela Yung, for instance, didn’t have to steel herself to face a hostile French kitchen, nor did she train in California. She didn’t train anywhere. After majoring in computer science and design at the University of Michigan, she was working in a Detroit design firm when she saw a notice on eGullet, the food-maven Web site. Mr. Goldfarb was about to open Room 4 Dessert and needed a stagiaire, or trainee, who would work long hours for low pay. “On a whim, I e-mailed him,” said Ms. Yung, 24.

(more…)

Rock on! Retired IBM programmer Frances E. Allen was the first woman to win the prestigious Turing Award, worth $100,000. When she joined IBM in 1957, the company was trying to recruit women on college campuses by circulating a brochure called “My Fair Ladies.” She joined right after John Backus’ team had just developed Fortran. Allen developed techniques to optimize the performance of compilers, which translate programming languages into binary code. Says Business Week:

The point of Fortran was to develop a system that could operate a computer just as efficiently as previous “hand-coded” approaches directly assembled by programmers. Allen recalled Wednesday that her task at IBM was to replicate the achievement on multiple kinds of computers.

“I had the good fortune to work on one big project on good machines after another,” she said.

Her work led her into varied assignments, including writing intelligence analysis software for the National Security Agency. More recently she helped design software for IBM’s Blue Gene supercomputer.

Backus got his own Turing Award in 1977, but it’s taken 40 years for a woman to receive the honor:

Allen called it “high time for a woman,” though she quickly added: “That’s not why I got it.”