Microsoft, Faculty and Women

What do these three have to do with each other?

I've spent the last three days at the Microsoft Faculty Summit, hosted by the Microsoft Research organization, which is headed by one of our board of trustee members Rick Rashid. As all of you know, budgets have been cut many places over the last few years, and I support Microsoft's continuing commitment to bringing together some of the best and brightest faculty. Yes of course the attendees learn about Microsoft, but the agenda continues to be focused on important research topics such as eScience, Multi-cores and Concurrency, AI, and Computing Education. To their credit, Microsoft included a diversity of women throughout the program. A poll in the opening session said that 33% of the attendees were women, and most of the panels including the plenaries, had at least one woman. It matters to the attendees to include top notch female speakers, and I know of many conferences where the organizers did not take the time and the thoughtful approach. that this summit committee obviously had

One of the highlights of the conference was the talk of Mark Guzdial from Georgia Tech who is using Media in very interesting ways to introduce Computer Science principals not only to first year undergraduates, but to everyone on campus. You should check out the project from his main website to see some of the examples. Georgia Tech is one of the academic institutions leading the overall charge of many Computer Science departments to change to approach of teaching Computer Science, and Mark is clearly one of the leaders. His approach is one that definitely reaches out to more people, and particularly women.

We previewed a panel that will be at the upcoming Grace Hopper Conference, with the leaders of several of the organization we work with regularly - ACM-W, CRA-W, and NCWIT. Although sometimes these sessions are preaching to the converted, I was pleased to see by a show of hands the number of attendees new to these organizations.