Gaming and Mathematics: A Cross Curricular Event (Get Your Game On)

This is a post about Gaming and Mathematics: A Cross Curricular Event (Get Your Game On), a panel at Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, October 2012 in Baltimore, MD.

Sharon Jones, teacher
Renada Poteat
Beth Frierson

Agenda:

• Common core overview
• What is BYOB? (The gaming software)
• After school workshop showcase
• How to build a BYOB guessing game
• Relating common core back to the workshop

Beth: There has been a big push in K-12 education to include a common core type of activity in STEM fields, including computer science. In doing common core training, we had brainstorming sessions where we investigated combining concepts in one class to another, so students can better relate what we are trying to teach them. Because CS and Math are so closely related, we decided to bridge the gap between these two related fields. We produced a review game for math, so that the math students could review for their final exams with it.

The benefit of math ability to academic performance in college computer science programs was confirmed in this study (Fan 2002)

Renada: Build Your Own Blocks (BYOB) is an advanced version of Scratch, but lets you build your own function and blocks in an object-oriented way. Students learn to solve problems

Sharon: We have been working on a CS curriculum called "The Beauty and Joy of Computing." A few different colleges have picked it up.  At UNCC we wanted to take the college-level curriculum and scale it down to high school students. We wanted students to take something away from the three-day after-school workshop that they could call theirs. Also we gave them snacks.

• Day 1: Pre-survey; play math games; begin BYOB
• Day 2: Learn BYOB; start creation of math games
• Day 3: Complete math game; play games; take post-survey

The questions were actual questions that we got from the math teachers, came from the curriculum and helped them prepare for their final exam. Students were very excited about computer programming, even if they had never interacted with computers before.

"I don't know how to create a computer game, and I came into the workshop to learn how to make a computer game." (TJ, football player)

Of the 20 participants in the workshop, 100% of the students did not know how to use BYOB or what it was. Also 100% of the participants agreed with "I am sure I can learn programming." UNCC students taught the workshop.

"It's not half-bad. I'm actually enjoying the creation of this. It's also a lot simpler than VisualBasic." (Aaron)

Now, we're going to call Antonio via Skype. Antonio learned BYOB and taught it to the other students.

Antonio: BYOB is a really good software. It's not complex; it's essentially drag and drop. It's a software you can use inside or outside of class. The students really adapted to what they were given. The whole concept of BYOB is a good foundation.

Questions for Antonio

Q: What does Antonio plan on doing after graduation?

Antonio: Attend East Carolina or UNCG to major in computer science.

Q: Have you used BYOB for areas other than gaming?

Antonio: You can use it as a tool to model mathematics. You can use BYOB for things other than entertainment.

Sharon: The whole concept of BYOB is for gaming.

Q: Have you used BYOB since the workshop?

Antonio: Yes, I programmed an algebra game for the algebra team; the teacher wants to see if we can use it again this year and see if I can make a game for geometry.

Q: Has BYOB inspired you to learn other languages?

Antonio: I am open to all languages. I will make things happen with all languages.

Renada: One of our students used BYOB to make a flash card language learning program to teach Haiti to English. So that's another way to use BYOB without making a game.

[ End call ]

Sharon: Antonio has begun to see the full circle as we've taught him different levels of programming

Beth: Learning programming through BYOB fosters critical thinking skills. Antonio has grown from an introverted person to the chair of the homecoming committee and helping with the prom. The knowledge this gives them is more than just academic.

Sharon: Post survey questions were all positive! Everyone enjoyed the workshop and found it useful.

Renada: I wanted to run a quick demonstration and give you an idea of how BYOB works.

[ Demo of prompting user for name ]

Sharon: Sounds are also really cool.

[ Demo of adding "Got Inspiration" song ]

Sharon: The kids really liked this game. [ Game with Alonso following the mouse cursor and being eaten by fire-breathing dragon.]

[ Handout of the Algebra Guessing Game tutorial ]

Beth: A computer is like a man. You have to tell it what to do, and you have to be very precise. For Valentine's Day I teach a matchmaking game. We use CS Unplugged, having students write directions to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. We have class debate on current events related to technology. We use GEO boards, which are building blocks using shapes.  We storyboard the program that they're working on to draw up algorithms they need to implement. We ask the students to write an editorial article to their local newspaper or technology journal. And we have students blog on specific thematic content.

Sharon: For some sports (e.g., NASCAR) the fanbase is shrinking because they're not engaging students. We had students write letters.

Q: Can we access the algebra game online?

Sharon: sjonespob.webs.com

Q from Leanda: You guys are selling yourself short. There is an entire modeling strand in the common core. Science teachers could really apply the National Academy common core standards much better. For example, recursion is an Algebra I standard. Writing journals is nice but let's be specific. Let's focus on the math skills specifically. 

Sharon: This is pilot work. It was hard to get this far.

Beth: We have a STEM team at our school that teaches forensics. We are working on other concepts as well and working to get the curriculum up to date.

Q: You are working on getting a CS course. If you were to do that, would you use BYOB or other formal languages?

Sharon: We're using principles from a pilot project from five college called the Beauty and Joy of Computing. BYOB is one of the platforms. We're going to do GameMaker, App Developer, Alice, and web development. We did a little bit in Photoshop (even though it isn't a language). We will talk about artificial intelligence in conjunction with FIRST robotics.

Beth: We will also teach Visual Basic (.NET) and entrepreneurial courses so that students can make their websites e-commerce ready.

Q: What about visual arts as a mathematics theme? I also do a workshop with similar results, but my observation is that I am attracting mostly boys that are all excited by games and computer science already. How do you recruit people that aren't necessarily in that demographic?

Beth: We struggle with that. We tried to do a weekend workshop to try to get girls in. You have to do a song and dance and feed them and have t-shirts and try to tie in how technology affects them on a daily level..

Sharon: We want to do a workshop that is girl focused (girl power). I try to promote NCWIT in my classes in particular. That has worked really well. There's an article in Glamour magazine that ran in October of last year. I've given it to every girl and that seems to work. Glamour does blogs about fashion and they say, "Oh, I can do that."

Q from Miko: My question is related. There was a successful Kickstarter called Goldiblocks that found that narrative is really strong with young girls -- that's what they're interested in. Do you see girls making different things and what are they making?

Renada: The girls would use it more to make plays or sketch out a scene, change the backgrounds, and tell a story. The boys wanted to create war and warcraft.

Sharon: Mine loved the music. They would play songs. They liked the idea of changing the color. But I agree that it's about plays, there's lots of color and flowers. That's what I like too. But then you go next door and "BAM!" and then a red screen.

Miko: Your experience supports that.

Sharon: We took the Alice course. One of the things the instructor said is that Alice works well with girls because it's more about narrative (it's not so much about the killing and the warcraft). It's more like a play stage.

Audience member: We have a girls camp and boys camp for middle-schoolers. We used Alice. The boys did shoot-em-ups and the girls did stories.

Miko: You could do choose-your-own adventure. Like a book.

Q: As a parent, I think it's great that you teachers are doing this. I've come across a discrepancy between younger teachers who are really trying to do this stuff, and older teachers that are resistant to it. How should I get involved?

Sharon: That's my dissertation work. The majority of teachers is over 40. What I have found is that if you can show a teacher one element -- one thing -- that they incorporate in their curriculum then they will reach out to you asking if you have other ideas. I once had 25 e-mails from teachers: "Can you show me that again? Do you have any other tips?" SlideRocket. Prezzi. PuppetPals. The kids were ecstatic about it. It's gotta be free, though. The other problem is that we teachers can be blocked from downloading things, so it should be free and in the cloud.

END

What I wish I Knew When Applying To Graduate School

This is a post about What I wish I Knew When Applying To Graduate School, a session at the Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing, October 2012, in Baltimore, MD.

Judy Hoffman at University of California, Berkeley in Computer Vision. She went to the same school for undergraduate.

Katya Gonina at University of California, Berkeley in Parallel Computing. She originally applied as a MS student but switched to PhD.

Kristin Stephens at University of California, Berkeley in Computer Networking and Online Learning Education. Her undergraduate studies were focused in industry.

Aude Hofleitner at University of California, Berkeley in Machine Learning. She did her undergraduate education abroad in France, and last year served on the admission committee.

Elena Caraba at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in Scientific Computing. She was on the admission committee at UIUC for both PhD and MS, and she switched advisors in her 3rd year of PhD work.

Application Components

1. Standardized tests (i.e., GRE, TOEFL)
2. Recommendation letters
3. Research statement
4. Personal statement, for some schools
5. Transcript and GPA from your undergraduate institution

What makes a good application? This list is geared towards a PhD application

1. Research experience, or industry experience that can transcend to research life
2. Good recommendation letters
3. Transcript and GPA
4. Solid research statement

Research

• By far, the most important thing to get involved in
• Find out if you like doing research
• Find opportunities early (in your sophomore or junior year); do internships
• Try to get a publication, in any form, including a poster symposium in your school, a workshop paper, a poster in a conference, a conference publication, or a journal article
• Reflect your research interests and experience in your research statements.

Recommendation letters

• Typically professors at your university or managers from job/internship. 
• Ask, "Can you write me a great letter?" You don't want a good letter. You want a great letter.
• Find a person who knows you well
• Ask professors who are in the area for which you are applying -- and include 
• Ask early, and follow up (e.g., weekly: "By the way! Did you get to that letter for me? It's due XXX.")

Transcript

• Also very important
• Take higher-level calasses in topics in which you are interested
• Great way to explore grad school topics
• Do well in the classes you choose

Research statement

• Your chance to tell: a) Why you want to go to this particular graduate school, and b) What you want to study.
• Discuss your research or work experience.
• Why do you want to go to this particular school? Why should they want you to go there? Tell them why you are a good match for each other. Look up the professors you want to work with, and name-drop in your applications.
• Get feedback from other students that have written research statements. Then get feedback from the people writing your letters of recommendation.

Other components of your application

• Standardized test (GRE and TOEFL) -- don't look illiterate in the verbal
• Personal statement -- women in computer science already stand out, so go ahead and ride that wave. If there is anything else unique about you, use it to your advantage
• Funding -- If you have applied for funding (even if you do not know if you got it), committees look favorably on students that take the initiative to seek their own funding. NSF has funding for graduate students (e.g., NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program).

Rough application timeline

• May -- August (end of Junior year)
• Take GRE
• Think about recommendation letter writers
• Research schools and professors
• Narrow down research focus
• September -- October (beginning of Senior year)
• Ask for recommendation letters
• Write research statements
• Fill out applications
• Fill out NSF GRFP application
• November -- December
• Submit applications
• Submit NSF GRFP
• Follow up about recommendation letters
• February -- March
• Hear back from schools

Question and Answer

Q: For international students: When applying to graduate schools, how often is it that your application is rejected because of lack of funding (e.g., need-based funding)? Does applying for funding diminish your chances of getting in to graduate school?

Aude: It won't affect your chances of getting in. If you get accepted for a PhD you will get financial aid. At the MS level it's different: if you're good then they will accept you; if you're in the top 5% you may get financial assistance.

Q from Holly from University of Waterloo: What are some of the courses that you really really wish you had taken but didn't have the chance to, or didn't think to at the time?

Katya: It's never too late to pick up a topic that you feel you missed. I did not take computer science in undergraduate. If your interests change you can get back on it. It is good to get advice from graduate students in your school to find out what they feel the core classes are and who the good professors are.

Judy: If you really like something, don't be afraid to delve deeper and take a graduate course as an undergrad. It will give you a godo idea if you really like that topic, and will help you to look good on an application.

Q: When you ask a professor for letters of recommendation, do you have to tell them the list of schools they are writing the letter for? Do they have to write a separate letter for each school? What if I'm still in the narrowing-down process?

A: The professor can help you figure out which universities to apply to. You can have a conversation with your professor.

Q: How many schools should you have when you're applying?

A: I did it wrong. I applied to Top 3, and then Berkeley. Don't do just four. Remember when you were in high school they told you to apply to the really high ones, the middle ones, and the ones you know you'll get in to.

Judy: I applied to 9 schools. I think that was good. Because the schools are so specialized it's hard to know which one you'll fit in to, which one has nice professors, the school size -- you can't get a good sense of this stuff from just reading their website -- until you visit.

Katya: Apply for your dream school. You might as well. Dream school, middle schools, and safety schools.

Aude: You will likely live 5-6 years in the same location. So visit the school. If you can't stand the cold weather, don't go there, because you will be miserable.

Audience professor: Some schools will let you continue modifying your online application even after the deadline.

Q: How do you know what's a safety school, what's a top school?

Elena: I went to my professor and asked. You should apply to just one safety school. It should still be a good school but not highly ranked.

Q from Jesse from Rice University: When is a good time to go to grad school? Work experience in industry or right after undergraduate?

Elena: Some people have a hard time going back to graduate school after having been gone for a while. You go to grad school, the stipend is not that great compared to industry pay. Having to do homework. It is good, though, to go to industry to get perspective on what you want to do

Judy: Some companies will sponsor you to go to school. There are companies that will send you to school with the understanding that you will work for them for a few years afterwards. Some schools offer a 5th year option that grant you a Master's degree.

Elena: It's something you should get lots of opinions about, so that you can form your own opinion from those.

Q: Thank you for being here to give us precious tips on how to apply for graduate school. I am a graduate student, but also: Surprise! I'm here to tell us about my school. I'm from University of North Texas. We have a dozen funded PhD positions in different domains and areas.

A: A plug for going to graduate school. It's awesome and where I learned to ski.

Q: Another general question related to the admission process. Should I get a MS before a PhD?

A: Having a Master's will increase the expectation that people will have of you. If you have an outside interest, you should take 

Q: Is it good to put things that make you stand out, for example, screenwriting?

A: YES. That's something that will go in the personal statement.

Q: Should you get a Master's and a PhD in the same school or in different schools?

A: You apply to an MS/PhD program in many schools. It's possible to get a Master's in one school and go to another school in a PhD. But in many

Q: Is there anything of value in getting a Master's degree? Would you recommend it?

A: You want the escape pod. If you decide that you don't want to do the PhD, getting the Master's is a way to show that you spent time in graduate school.

Judy: If you get there and decide you don't like it, you can leave after you have your Master's. So you can apply for a PhD and know that there is an option.

[ Break out sessions ]

END

Letter to my younger self: Things I wish I knew when I first started working

This is a post about Letter to my younger self: Things I wish I knew when I first started working at the Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing conference, October 2012 in Baltimore, MD.

Moderator: Chiu-Ki Chan (Square Island LLC)
Panelists: Rupa Dachere (CodeChix.org), Christina Schulman (Google)

The audience in the session was about 50% undergraduate students -- and Chiu-Ki said that most of the material is intended for undergraduate students.

Christina: Learn from your co-workers.

• Read their code, participate in code reviews. Do not work in isolation if you can help it. A fancy title does not count as leadership experience; strive for something more.
• Ask about company and group processes in interviews. Companies with bad processes give you bad habits that are hard to break. Code reviews are a good sign. A lack of automated processes is a bad sign.
• Work on things you do not already know how to do. Grow your abilities. Do not get stale. 
• Even if you are the perfect person for the job, it doesn't mean that it is the perfect job for you.

Chiu-Ki: What is the difference between school and work? In school, you take courses and you do exams. You have a clear path and you know when you are done: there is an end goal: graduation. At work you may not have that end goal. It may be clear. Another difference is at school, you have an advisor and professors helping you; at work, nobody is making sure you are growing and taking charge of your career. At school, you get grades so you know if you need to work a bit harder -- for example, if you get a B. At work, you have to figure out how you are evaluated. Your work does not speak for itself. If you are working hard, make sure that other people know what you are doing. Tell people what you are doing. An e-mail, for example, saying "Just a quick update on X" or "Took me a while to figure out how to do X but I figured it out and here is the solution." Answer e-mails right away. Even if you are not 100% sure of the answer, and even if you should probably verify -- just outline the steps that you would take. As your name appears more and more in a team setting, people come to associate you as someone that knows the answers. Learn to say no. In school, you cannot say, "This week I will not do this project." But at work, you have a say in the work that you take on. Question your projects and make sure they align with your goals. Defend your position and you will earn respect with your team.

Rupa: I will tell you the lessons I have learned on how to grow yourself.

• When I started programming, I thought that writing beautiful, modular, efficient code was the key to doing well. But writing code is not enough to get a project done end to end, but getting a project done end to end is incredibly important. You need to grow yourself from a sous chef to a head chef. Be the person that glues the project together by appeasing people on both sides of the project. 
• Next, figure out your manager. Is s/he a morning person? What is her/his personality type? How will you help your manager help you? Learn to manage your boss.
• Your review. This is the most difficult and stress-inducing things in our industry. 
• First, set concrete goals for every quarter. For me, my manager and I meet every quarter and discuss my goals. You never know what might change (the market, the economy, technology, ...). If your goals are not aligned with your manager's, you need to align them. Next, find out how your project and your team is viewed by your peers, your manager, and others. Mangage the perception of your accomplishments.
• Know your review universe. Think of a Venn diagram and draw your review circles inside it. Is it your manager? The guy in the next cubicle that knows your personality? Do folks you worked with in the past have a say in your review? Network very well and understand the pieces that come together to affect your review.
• Be genuine and be helpful.

Christina: Networking.

• You have to build your network before you need it. I am not saying that you have to go out and hold a big party every other month -- that is exhausting. But I am saying that the power of knowing a friend of a friend of a friend is powerful. Then you will never be looking for a job -- your next job will be looking for you.
• Networking is about helping other people. Plan to put more into it than you get out of it. Most of the time you will be helping to connect people across your network. It's little benefit to you, but will be hugely beneficial to someone in your network. Don't be the person that is always asking for a favor -- call to say hello, or thank you, or invite to lunch. Your network should be broad and lacking in holes.
• Carry a business card, dammit.

Rupa: Negotiate your job offer

• Figure out what is most important to you. Is it base salary, benefits, vacation time, commuter passes, free food, maternity leave, location, etc.?  Rank these.  Then, gather as much information as you can about things like base salary for the position based on your location and experience.
• Keep calm. Be confident. And be really polite.

Skits!

Act 1

A software engineering position to Rupa at Foosoft.  Rupa wholeheartedly accepts.

[ Audience boos ]

Act 2

Rupa negotiates: Can you do something about base salary, bonus, vacation, stock options, a pony... Christine says no to everything and they settle on the original offer.

[ Audience cheers ]

(You asked, and you didn't get it -- but you still got the original offer)

Act 3

Rupa negotiates again, with a higher competing offer. The details of the offer are confidential.

[ Time passes ]

Christine comes back with a better offer and more stock but not as high as Rupa wants. Rupa now negotiates some more. Asks for a month of paid vacation.

[ Time passes ]

Christine offers a signing bonus. Rupa wholeheartedly accepts.

[ Audience cheers ]

More information is online at http://bit.ly/ghc12-letter.

Question and Answer

Q from Emily from Portland State: How do you go about handling competing offers coming at vastly different times?

Rupa: Rate the places you interviewed from most interesting to least interesting, and wait until you have an offer from the most interesting place.

Christine: Larger companies are aware that you will not graduate until June, so even with, say, a February offer you will not be expected to start until June.

Q from Jo at LinkedIn: I have a problem where I'm incredibly transparent about my enthusiasm. I have no poker-face. I can't negotiate. I'm just happy to do this job, and they can see it all over my face. How do I negotiate if it's so clear that I want it?

Rupa: What is your next step -- what are you trying to achieve? Change fields slightly? Set your goal and 

Christine: I didn't negotiate my offer from Google because I got an offer from Google. Just ask, even if you're crying tears of happiness.

Chiu-Ki  You don't have to be unhappy with an offer. You're just saying, "Can you do better?" Tell yourself to just do it. Ask. If that doesn't work it's a learning lesson. It's a back and forth.

Jo: This is very helpful for someone that is not a student and has gone through

Q from Jana at Columbia: What are disparities in pay between women and men like in tech, and how do you battle it?

Rupa: Go to those sites that I mentioned and find out the expected salary in your region. When you look up those numbers, put in a male name. That is one way to know what the going salary expectation is. These sites have a lot of information on the numbers and also the benefits.

Christine: Part of the reason that this disparity exists is because women don't negotiate. There is a good book called Women Don't Ask

Q from ??: It is hard for me to think about making a mistake, translated into being overly cautious. I don't want to come across as silly or unaware.

Chiu-Ki  That's the whole reason we had Act 1 and Act 2 for you. Nobody is going to say, "Oh, my gosh, she is so aggressive" for the rest of your career.

Rupa: I'd recommend that it's how you ask. Be polite. Use terminology that is not overly aggressive, but ask.

Christine: Research the heck out of it. Ask your fellow students what kind of offers they're getting and compare. Get them drunk first if you have to.

Chiu-Ki  I practiced technical questions and presenting myself as a professional by going to interviews for jobs that I didn't care for. Then I had competing offers on the table so I had some data about what companies offer. If you don't care about the job, you'll be more comfortable asking questions and making mistakes.

Rupa: You should picture yourself as male. Fight for it like a man would do.

Chiu-Ki: I tried to push the boundary and realized that the boundary was not there.

Rupa: With a recruiter it's okay to be aggressive. They expect it.

Q from Lauren from University of Richmond: Is there a limit in the appropriateness of negotiations depending on the position that you're applying for?

Rupa: If you are, say, in a state that you are being expected to work full time but will be unable to fulfill the obligations, don't lie.

Christine: Are you asking if there's a number that is perceived as obnoxious? I'm an engineer; everything is less terrifying when you have data. It is perfectly reasonable to ask what is the range for this position, when you apply.

Rupa: Go to GlassDoor.com and read reviews on what companies are like to work for. Look up the atmosphere for the group as well.

Q from Liz from ?? College: What would you tell someone that's entering the job market for the first time, that doesn't know what to get into?

Christine: It is hard to give a blanket statement. Work with people that know more than you do. The good thing about a start-up is that you have to do everything. In one place, I had to build my own desk; in some places, there are people that keep your computer running.

Rupa: My personal recommendation is, unless you are super entrepreneurial right off the bat, I would recommend a slightly mid-sized company so that you can learn the ropes. Once you learn the ropes, you can switch into a start-up where you have to know the ropes day one.

Chiu-Ki: My take on this? Internships. That's what they're for. Do one at a big company and do one at a start-up; then you have data.

Q from June from Indiana University of Wilmington: ???

Christine: Ask the company how many shares they have standing and what their valuation is. Do not believe them when they say their stock will split many times when they go public.

Q from ??: How do you balance being aggressive with being diplomatic?

Christine: Own your inner bitch.

[ Applause ]

Chiu-Ki: Most of us are leaning toward the non-aggressive side. It will be a long time before you become a bitch. You don't wake up in the morning and go, "Am I bitchy today?" Unless you have been told that, it is not a valid concern.

Q from ??: What is a polite way to reject an offer?

Rupa: I had 45 interviews in 3 months. I would talk to the recruiter and say, "I am very sorry, I have a competing offer that I just cannot refuse. You understand; the market is really hot. I would like you to keep me in mind and I hope we can talk again at a later point."

END

A rant on single-blind peer review

Let's say you write something novel and clever and technical, and you submit it to a conference for consideration. If the paper is accepted, you will go to present the paper, and (depending on the conference) it can be published in some digital or paper proceedings. To determine if your paper (or poster, or whatever) is accepted, it undergoes what is called peer review. The program organizers electronically corral experts (or budding experts) in the field to read the submissions and provide critical feedback. These are your peers because they are in the same general field as you are. Some reviewers have more experience than you do, and others have less.

There are usually three or more reviewers per paper, and the reviews are usually in the following format.

• There is a score which correlates the degree to which the reviewer thinks the paper should be accepted. For example:
• -3: Strong reject
• -2: Reject
• -1: Weak reject 
• 0: Neutral
• 1: Weak accept
• 2: Accept
• 3: Strong accept
• There is a narrative describing the paper's strengths and weaknesses, suggestions for improvement, layout and organization, and critique of the bibliography. Reviewers answer the question of whether the paper makes a significant impact or contribution to whatever field the paper is representing.

Sometimes there is a meta-review, provided by another peer, which synthesizes the other reviews into a short blurb.

Selecting papers for publication goes something like this. The reviewers' scores are tallied for each paper, and the papers are ordered from highest to lowest score. The program organizers decide how many papers to accept, and that number of the top-scoring papers is selected. If the reviewers provided any notes to the program organizers, or made specific suggestions for accepting or rejecting a paper, these submissions are taken on a case-by-case basis.

There are two types of peer review that are used most frequently: single-blind and double-blind.

For single-blind peer review, you submit your paper as it would be published, with your name and affiliation at the top. Reviewers can see this. But when you receive your paper reviews, you do not know who wrote which review because the reviewers' names are not provided. It is single-blind because it is blind to you, the author.

In double-blind peer review, you remove your name and affiliation from the paper, and try to anonymize it as much as possible. For example, if you write somewhere, "Our previous work at University of Waterbucket, our home institution," you would take out the reference to your institution's name. Reviewers are discouraged from trying to infer the authors of the paper, and thus should (in theory) not be biased based on your identity and the identities and affiliations of your co-authors. The reviews are also anonymous. It is double-blind because it is blind to the reviewers, and also to you, the author.

There are two reasons that I dislike single-blind peer review.



Because you are remembered


Pretend for a second that a particular reviewer has a chip on his (or her) shoulder about your research area. Or about specific methods which you might have used. For example, the researcher hates video games and thinks that people that play games are worthless in society, and your paper is about a game to examine social interactions, such as Prom Week (which is a fun and lauded new Facebook game; if you have not tried it yet, do). The review will say something like this.

Rating: -2 (Reject) -- The authors present a video game that lets the player make and break friendships in the week before the high school prom. The authors failed to cite relevant literature regarding the misuse of gaming technology and associated aggressiveness in players. The proposed game promotes poor behavior and sensationalizes high school relationships which are fundamentally flawed. Arguing for not accepting this paper.

Now, you can get a review like this even with an anonymous paper. But what can happen next is that the reviewer remembers your name or affiliation -- consciously or otherwise. And when your name comes up again, either in another conference for which he (or she) is peer-reviewing, or dropped in conversation when networking, or presented as a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, the reviewer will remember you for the paper he (or she) rejected. Your name has been associated with That Thing He (or She) Hates (With a Passion). Even if you write on another topic entirely, you are remembered for the paper that was a flop.


Because of the discourse


The second reason is that when you receive this angry or scathing or unfair review following the single-blind process, there is nothing you can do. When you do not know who he (or she) is, you cannot engage the reviewer in conversation; you cannot further the discourse of your disagreement. And when you do not know where he (or she) lives, you certainly cannot mail the reviewer a box of flaming poop.

Clinical data management: My response to a new technology

Meanwhile in Austria, at the USAB 2011 conference on eHealth, hundreds of health and technology professionals gather to discuss topics relevant to information flow, patient empowerment, and clinical decision-making.

The first of four (four!) keynote presentations was given by Vimla Patel of Columbia University, whose interests lie in quality of eHealth data.  In the talk, Cognitive Approaches to Clinical Data Management for Decision Support: Is It Old Wine In a New Bottle?, Dr. Patel argued that indeed it is new wine in a new bottle.  This post chronicles my reactions to the talk.  Dr. Patel, if you happen upon this post, please know that I am quite jet-lagged and had had three of the complimentary espressos, in rapid succession, shortly before your talk.  I do not intend this as an apology, but as an explanation, and as a hope that you will not hate me for expressing my views so plainly.  I don't buy it, and here, I explain why.


Patients are in danger!

The problem was outlined thus: Information technology impacts patient safety.  There is simply not enough evidence that current information technology systems are good for patient safety -- in fact, they might be detrimental.  One of the reasons is that there is no accountability for these systems.  According to Dr. Patel, in many cases, systems are designed and deployed by engineers without consulting with clinicians or patients, and without proper responsibility for upkeep of the systems for new ideas and trends.


Federal regulations

A way to address this?  Dr. Patel suggested: Technology should be monitored by an agency or government; there should be federal regulations on software released for eHealth purposes.

Pardon me while I gather my jaw from the floor.  Right off the bat, I can think of at least two reasons this will never work.

First: The design-development cycle would be too cumbersome.  Can you imagine being the poor programmer that has to succumb to federal regulations, to laws and restrictions, to government-imposed checks and balances?  Can you imagine trying to add a new feature, a new decision flow, or a new interaction method?  I thought the Apple Developer cycle was bad; this would be murder.

Second: Regulations on software are restricting.  No, I don't have a citation for this, you overachiever.  I know from my experience and from the experiences of all of my colleagues that regulations are inversely proportional to success of a software product.  While it is true that some restrictions spark creativity, what we are talking about here is a severe impediment to the development process.

Here's a bonus:  Third: Every hospital, every office, every provider has different requirements.  How do you federally-regulate this difference and custom instances of the same product?  It is a nightmare.


Why Electronic Health Records (EHRs) suck

Problems with current electronic health record (EHR) system include the following.

In EHRs, information is structured temporally, which is how clinicians come about gathering the data.  As a clinician, you see a patient, you take notes; you see the patient again, you take more notes.  Over time, this presents a time-oriented view of the patient's health.  But the problem is that clinicians do not think about patient health in this way.  They think in terms of symptoms and relationships between symptoms, tests, and diagnoses.

So the question is how to store the data in a way that is fundamentally useful to clinicians, and how to retrieve and display it in the same way that they think about the data.  There is too much data, too much redundant data, and too many sources of related data.  There is a mismatch between cognitive processes of clinicians and the way the data is stored and represented.

The result Dr. Patel drew is that there is poor usability study and requirements gathering for these EHR systems.  By involving users (i.e., clinicians) in the process early and often, she argued, we can explicitly retain the relational structure in software that clinicians use in real life: a complex mental model of vital signs linked to symptoms linked to potential diagnoses.  A directed graph of thoughts and decisions.  Understand what people want, she said.  Test iteratively with users, she said.

I thought: Don't be afraid to say participatory design.


User study is not enough

Dr. Patel never outright said it, but it is a question of tagging and metadata and, most certainly, provenance.  In effect, the question is the same as in any large-scale file system (think peta-scale): how can you predict which data the user will want to retrieve?  I refer the reader to work done by the Storage Systems Research Center which has been tackling the problem in full force.

Sure, representing the data is important.  As with any file system (let's face it; that's what we are talking about here), we can know everything about what users want, but it may be fundamentally impossible to deliver this kind of system.  Big data have an inherent bottleneck at retrieval; they have an inherent bottleneck at storage and archival.



Nobody likes to be wrong

In real life clinicians draw logical conclusions in a guess-and-check fashion: given a set of symptoms gathered from charts, nurses, attendings, and other sources of information, they make a mental model of the potential problems and solutions which can be confirmed or refuted.   In the ideal scenario, the clinicians would chart these decisions and potential diagnoses.  They would chart, in this system, anything that they considered potentially important in the future.

Oh god!  So many problems!

First, think about the paperwork overhead.  Electronic paperwork, whatever.  Sure, in the ideal world with infinite time and infinite memory (as they say in computer science), doctors would save all of their thoughts.

Second, think of the liability.  I am not even talking about not wanting to be wrong, which, of course, everyone feels.  It is well-studied in elderly patients with dementia: they will not admit to forgetting appointments or missing meetings.  People won't chart wrong guesses.  Being wrong is bad.  For a clinician, being wrong leads to liability.  Mis-representing a symptom that can lead to a missed diagnosis leads to liability.  How can you prove your motives were good, when the patient's health was compromised?

Third, is this another way to minimize patient interaction?  Look, in labor and delivery in the US, the average doctor spends something like 2 hours, 41 minutes with her patient, total, throughout her entire average 10-month pregnancy and including the 24-hour birth.  With such a system, will it mean that a doctor no longer needs to spend quality time with her patient, but instead spend this time mining data?  I do not argue that in aggregate, data gathered over time in a particular facility can be powerful.  But what happened to patient-centered care?


It's different on paper

Electronic health records have a different set of abstractions and information flow (and hence, a different set of mistakes one can make) than paper-based ones.  For paper-based health records, it goes basic concepts (such as vital signs) : intermediate constructs (what to do with the vitals: e.g., compare to normal, compare to expected, compare over time) : heuristics (visualization and diagnosis).  Concrete to abstract.  But most experts do not bother writing down some basic concepts because it is inefficient, much in the same way you do math in your head or play chess without writing down the possible moves.  For EHRs, the flow goes heuristics : intermediate constructs : basic concepts.  Abstract to concrete.  The overlap is at intermediate constructs, and the question is how to move them from the head to the computer.

I imagined WebMD, the website that spits out a list of things that could be killing you subtly or not-so-subtly, given an input of real or imagined symptoms.  The output from WebMD is potentially useless.  You have a stomach cramp and a head ache?  It could be a brain tumor and pregnancy.


Disempowered

Of course, the tool Dr. Patel described would need to be understood by a doctor, or someone else medically trained.  In fact, she said, in some cases, you do not want the patient to know at all.  There are cases that the patient should not have access to these private thoughts of doctors.  With the exception of one situation which I do not have training to understand, namely, adolescents seeking psychiatric care (if I were said patient, I would damn well like to know what the doctor thinks!), I thought that it was a huge oversight that the system would be unusable by anyone without proper training.  Make it understandable, she said, for the doctor.

What about patient empowerment?  What about patient information?  In Germany, a doctor will sit alongside the patient to look through a clinical workflow, and they will decide together, collaboratively, on the proper treatment.  Why is there not more of this worldwide?  And why not just teach the patient?

Dr. Patel said the goal is to move towards patient-centered cognitive support for the clinician.  I realize that this is the goal, but with this technology, I worry that we are removing real interactions between the clinician and the patient in favor of data collection.  We are in a digital age where we teeter on worshipping data: in some ways, we hold data above all other things. We hold data collection, for example, above the real-life interactions, the real time that doctors and nurses used to spend with patients, that now they spend writing down things about their brief encounters.

Finally, and then I will stop ragging on this keynote, what about evidence-based medicine? Why has it never been mentioned, alone or in conjunction with "patient-centered" care?  Why are we increasing the burden on care providers while decreasing the burden on the very people that are meant to do well -- by removing them from the patient and treating their thoughts, education, and logic, which makes them unique and valuable, as interchangeable with any other doctor, clinician, or robot?

Now, take this with a grain of salt because my triple caffeine buzz is wearing off.  I was pretty excited about this talk when it began: the initial idea was that medical technology, and electronic health record systems in particular, are possibly doing harm to the patients they intend to serve.  But near the end, it was clear that the only take-away, for me, is that more user study is needed for electronic health records, to determine what doctors need to make them disposable.  As a patient and as a researcher, I feel disempowered.

But it is an interesting file systems problem.

How to get my number at a tech conference

In technology, the male-to-female ratio strikingly favors the males.  Of course, it depends on the specific field how rough it is: game design, for example, has more women than semiconductor research; human-computer interaction has more women than systems and security.

Having just had come from Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing I was keenly aware that  at Supercomputing 2011 the ratio was not 2:2900 (I think there were a few men at Grace Hopper) but more like 150:11.  Yup, I counted, sitting in the back of the room where my workshop was being held.  Interestingly, there were five of us students from the same university at this workshop, and four of us were women.

My talk was third in a block of three, and the latter two were similar in that they stemmed from the same set of interviews and touched on similar topics.  After my talk, there was discussion in the audience, and when I rejoined my university's group of students, we began being approached by researchers interested in our work -- with comments, suggestions, and questions.

A young man, probably a few years younger than me, in a white and green graph-paper-patterned shirt, wearing dark-rimmed glasses on his long nose, and his hair cropped in the typical defense-industry fashion, approached me and my female colleague.

"I work on the very system you were studying," he said.  "I'm the guy.  I run everything, set the policy, and have tons of data on it."

"Hang on! Stay right there!" we exclaimed in unison.  In a flash, my colleague and I ran off to retrieve our business cards.  Tons of data!  An expert in the field we are studying!  This was very exciting.  I ran back to my chair where I had left my laptop and bag, grabbed a stack of cards, and ran back, nearly knocking over chairs in the process.  I saw my colleague also rushing and rummaging.  

I made it back first.  Presenting my card to him (American-style), I said, with a smirk, the first thing that came into my head:

"You just discovered the best way to get two women's numbers at the same time."

He looked at my card, and looked at me, and I could see that he was trying to determine whether what I had said was shocking or funny.  I laughed.

Just a disclaimer that it was a joke.

But if you meet me at a tech conference, now you know how to get my card.

The Thin Line: Advising vs. Supervising

This is a post about the session The Thin Line: Advising vs. Supervising at Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

The panelists:  Laura Dillion has spent decades advising students at three different large universities, and spent time as department chair.  Susanne Hambrusch has experience dealing with situations between students and advisors that went from bad to worse.  She says that just knowing that a situation can occur is important.  Lori Pollock has had experiences being the unbiased mediator between graduate students and their advisors.

Can I be co-advised by two professors? Can I switch advisors?

Sometimes switching advisors is controversial both in terms of your own work and in terms of the political climate of the department or school.  Consider your own work, which may or may not move with you to the new advisor or department.  It likely won't.  Figure out if you will still have a project, and enough to do in order to graduate with a big dent in the new field.  If there are concerns (and there should be), find someone that doesn't have a stake in the problem, and ask him or her for help.  Someone unbiased can provide valuable advice.  It could be a former instructor, a graduate advisor, or even more senior graduate students.  Some students don't ask for help.  In some places there is no help.  That's where you should turn to other sources: e.g., friends' advisors, family, the Systers mailing list.

How and when do you ask about the author order and/or about presenting the paper?

Talk about it early.  It can change, but know before you invest a ton into a paper how much credit you'll get for the work.  Three possibilities are alphabetical order, percentage of writing done, and switching author orders if you expect more than one publication.

How do you know what your research contribution is on multi-authored work, and what you can present as your own work?

This is a good question in interviews, so make sure you have a well-reasoned answer: your research is your identity.  The abstract of your dissertation, and your introduction, should make it very clear the different roles.  Co-authored and multi-authored work can become "background" for a dissertation, and some papers never make it into anybody's dissertations.  Think ahead: the part that's yours is the part that you will continue when you graduate. Be scrupulously honest.

My advisor keeps giving me more work, and I want to schedule my dissertation and graduate.

Ask.  Sit down with your advisor(s), and have the conversation.  Don't wait until after you've done the additional work to ask, but ask right then.  Show your credentials: the number of papers you have, your advancement proposal which has been fulfilled, the chapters you've written, etc.  It may the case that you aren't ready to graduate, but it may be that you are.  It may be that you have differences in expectations (e.g., your advisor thinks you want to go to an R1 research institution, but you want to go into industry) which have serious differences in preparation for graduation.  You won't know unless you have that conversation with the advisor.

What if my committee doesn't think I'm ready, but my advisor does?

Your advisor is your advocate.  He or she needs to convince the committee that you're ready.  There are no hard-and-fast rules to follow: you may want to look for a mentor for an outside, unbiased opinion.

What if my advisor is a total jerk? (This question was truncated and summarized.)

Find someone that can advocate for you.  Go to the other faculty.  But don't go straight to the dean, going over the head of the senior faculty and department chair, because this can cause bad feelings and really burn bridges.  Learn about what's possible in your university and what resources you have.  Sometimes it takes intervention for your advisor to do change; sometimes you have to switch departments and get your work to count toward your new affiliation.  But get support from the senior people in the school that have influence. 

What if my advisor lost his or her funding, and has no more money?

Understand that this could very well be true: the faculty member may have thought he had secured money but the money didn't come through; he or she could have overanalyzed the financial possibilities for the quarter or the year.  Sometimes the money just disappears, such as with government contracts.  It is embarrassing to the advisor, especially when the advisor had already made plans on the money (such as by promising you funding).  Consider going to the chair or graduate director.  Take up a TAship, teach a summer class, or find other sources of funding around your department or even in a different department.

How do you transition from being a student to being an advisor?

First you have to find a job in a supportive environment.  Attend the CRA-W workshop for junior faculty in which they teach you how to be a good mentor and advisor.  Have a mentor in the department that you join, that can help you along.  Don't do it as trial an error, one student at a time. As a graduate student you can work with undergraduates in the summer on collaborative projects, and practice advising and mentoring.

Connecting the Disconnected: Improving Internet Access for the Other Four Billion

This post is about Connecting the Disconnected: Improving Internet Access for the Other Four Billion with Professor Margaret Martonosi from Department of Computer Science at Princeton University, at Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

Information technology is an enabler.  It is an enabler in education - for people to learn, through online courses, articles, and things in the public domain; in health care - getting an ultrasound when needed; in agriculture - the ability to find out why your crops aren't thriving; and in open and fair government - the ability to discuss politics openly with other people.

This presentation was about C-LINK, a type of  delay-tolerant vehicular network.  (Note: This vehicular network is an example of Sneakernet, though I don't think Margaret ever called it this.)


The current state of universal connectivity

Sure, the US is connected.  Over 75% of the country has wired or wireless access.  But there's the digital divide. The digital divide means that the places that need this technology the most are the places with the most impaired access to it.

The three factors influencing universal information technology access includes relevant and accessible software, using effective and affordable hardware, and have universal connectivity.  C-LINK, Margaret's project, was influenced by all three.

The problem with affordable hardware is the "last mile" problem: it is easy to connect the majority of the people, but in the last mile, you have to extend connectivity to rural or hard-to-reach regions.  This can be complicated, and costly.  In rural Africa (for example), the last mile is of a whole different scale.  So then we consider wireless technology, which is expensive, we need to think about how it still needs a wired backbone, requires ongoing maintenance, is subject to corruption or salvaging (because copper sells), and it needs political support.  On the other hand, wireless technology is leapfrogging wired connectivity (especially in developing regions).  Mobile and cellular is a big growth area and are increasingly penetrating the world.  But even though there is so much cellular technology going on, that doesn't mean that it's cheap.

Let's look at effective and affordable hardware.  Although there are efforts to build cheap hardware (such as the hundred-dollar laptop made by the One Laptop Per Child organization), it's not taking off.  It's just not pervasive -- most of Africa and Asia have less than 10 computers per 100 people.  That's even when you consider microcontrollers as "computers."  So what is the world's computer?  The world's computer is a cell phone.  About half of the world's adults own one.  There are more cell phones in India than credit cards -- and cell phones, even when they're not smartphones, are chock full of interactivity.  (Note: Can you imagine an accessible Qwiki for developing nations that works over SMS?  I can.)

Connectivity

Wired connectivity: availability is increasing and costs are dropping.  For example, transit prices in Kenya have dropped to $120/Mbps -- which are similar to US prices in 2003.

Delay-tolerant network: Imagine a big city with a broadband connection, and a nearby village.  Imagine that the village is on some rural bus or taxi route to the city.  Now, imagine that the bus has a laptop inside, with a large hard drive and a wireless access point.  People (and goats and chickens) board the bus in the village, send some requests on the laptop.  Although the laptop isn't connected to the broadband, it can queue the request and send it when it reaches the city, and bring back the reply when it returns to the village.  If the bus visits the village every 5 hours, that's a 5-hour latency -- but at least it is access to information.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon carrying tapes hurtling down the highway. -- S. Tanenbaum 

The vehicular delay-tolerant network is very low-cost, easy to deploy, and has a very high data carrying capacity.  Villagers can collaborate on their queries, and the results can be available to others in the village doing similar web searches (called collaborative caching).  The system can also be improved by clever prefetching -- the computer on the bus can be thinking hard over the next several hours about what else can be proactively fetched based on the current queries.  Clearly, prefetching all of the links on a page would be smart, but maybe so would translating a page from a local language to a more commonly-used language.  This isn't a microcontroller with a tiny cache.  This is a big hard drive.  If the hard drive is huge, there is no worry about performance loss in prefetching things that will not be used, but the overhead of not having things that may be useful is huge.


"Come back tomorrow. Your data will be on the bus."

The authors designed, built, and tested C-LINK, the vehicular delay-tolerant network, over a week in Nicaragua.  The city was Somotillo, Nicaragua -- no skyscrapers, but there was a school with a computer cluster and wired connectivity and a small, expensive Internet cafe with 2 computers.  Participants were school children, invited to come in and browse the highly-delayed web.  About 80% of the participants in the project had never used the Internet before.  One of the cool things that the project looked at is when participants sent at the same query, or searched collaboratively.  With each successive trip into the village, the bus brought back more data.  As the village's cache filled up, users' miss rates plummeted.  Data were on their computers or on the computers of their collaborators -- remember collaborative caching?  The authors found that highly correlated access patterns provided strong incentive for collaboration.  Oh, and we can evict old data or data that has not been accessed recently.  Any cache eviction policy will work here.

Then Margaret and her team considered using laptops and other mobile computing devices and, despite the worry of data loss, found that going mobile wasn't so bad.  If anything, it made for more kiosks -- little hubs for collaborative information.  Then, they found that the requests for data were fairly small, so it was possible to exploit cellular connectivity, where available.  They looked at data brought back by the once-a-day trip into town, by the 5-times-per-day bus ride, and a hybrid data retrieval mode by combining these with exploiting SMS.


Look around you

Other software that the authors found interesting and noteworthy included these.

• TEK is an e-mail-based web browser.
• M-Profesa helps Kenyan children prepare for the secondary school test through SMS.
• Ushahidi, also originally Kenyan, helps with crowd-sourcing of information.

Getting more involved

Imagine what you could do if you could alleviate teacher shortages by having better distance learning technologies.  Imagine what you could do if you could have better information flow and expose corruption in the government.  Get involved in Engineers Without Borders and attend Development conferences, such as ACM DEV 2012.  Make a company.  Build stuff!

Community College Women in Computer Science: A Study's Preliminary Results

This is a post about Community College Women in Computer Science: A Study's Preliminary Results at Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

The authors present their preliminary results from studies from community college students around California, aiming to answer the question what makes community college students transfer to 4-year university?  That is: What factors determine whether community college students enrolled in a CS1-like course intend to study computer science at a 4-year university?

True or false?  There are different motivations for males and females in pursuing computer science as a major, and women just don't value computing.  The answer is false.  Men were found to have great expectations for success with computing, but there were no gender differences in how much students value computing.

True or false?  Family support is critical in choice of major and parental pressure is based on gender stereotypes.   Also false.  Family support was not critical, but peer encouragement was very important for both women and men in pursuing science.

True or false? Women's under-representation in computer science majors is due to lack of computer use an lack of computer game play.  This one is true.  Intention to pursue computer science was very important, and exposure to computing and computers (including gaming) was associated with intention.

The authors presented work collected over a true longitudinal study over two years, looking at demographics as well as social factors that may influence students' staying in computing after community college.  They sampled the students three times: at time of enrollment, half-way through the program, and at the end of the two-year program.

Women were more likely to be older, have had a degree already, have a mother working in computing, and have had a programming mentor when enrolling in the introductory programming course, compared to male students.  Whether or not a woman was comfortable talking to her professor did not affect her intention to pursue computing (and the other way around).  Women thought computer programming was like thinking.

Men had a greater intention to pursue computer science at a four-year university, were more likely to play video games longer, and have mothers with no BS/BA, compared to female students.  Men thought computer programming was creative.

How do we increase the number of women in computer science?

1) Men see computer science as creative, but women don't -- they see it as thinking.  How can we bring creativity to women?

2) Men are influenced by computing experiences, including video games, in their intention to pursue compter science.  How do we use games to help intention to pursue a bachelors (or higher) degree in computing?  How do we get gals into games?  How do we provide early programming opportunities to gals?

3) Men report that they get more support from their peers.  How do we encourage peer support for women?

And this leads to the awesomest idea of the conference:

How do we use video games (especially competitive ones) to bring early interventions to women?
I'm envisioning a League of Legends clan for high school girls!

What if... You Thrived on the Tenure Track?

This is a post about What if... You Thrived on the Tenure Track? at Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

Ceclia Aragon took a 14-year leave from graduate school.  In the time, she had two kids, was a stunt pilot (yup, in air shows), and worked for NASA.  When she was a little tired with the life of a badass rockstar, she finished her PhD and got a tenure-track position (she is now tenured).  She gives some advice about organic networking: It's easy to say that you should hang out with important people.  But what do you do when you're shy?  "I hang out with my friends, and now, guess what -- my friends are now important people."  She says that the life of an academic suits her perfectly because it lets her pursue the things that are interesting and to truly find balance in her home.  Jobs are more flexible, interesting, and fun at the top of the food chain, she says, and you work just as hard as in lower-level, less interesting jobs.  "Life balance works well when you have that kind of autonomy."

Magdelena Balazinska has a lot of accomplishments, but also a lot of failures: grant rejections, paper rejections, proposal rejections.  "Just don't list those," she says.  Focus on the positive.  She shows pictures of the house she and her husband designed and built, and her two children in various stages of infancy and toddlerhood.  How does she manage?  "I get help from anyone who's willing to help!  I do what I have to do, and I ask for what I need."  She flashes photographs of her husband with a baby during one business trip, and her mother with a baby during a conference in Greece where she had to present.  NSF panel in Washington, DC?  No problem -- a photograph of her and a baby outdoors with an explanation:  "You can just call in, and then nobody sees how you nurse your baby!"  Magdelena says, "I don't try to be perfect.  I just do what I can."

Following a different path, Anne Condon was an assistant professor when she was barely 25 years old -- and now her daughter, whom she had when in her first faculty job, is attending Grace Hopper Celebration.  "For me personally, the combination of the academic life and the family life is fantastic."  Anne gives some advice:

• Work on important problems, because the unimportant ones aren't interesting and just aren't worth your time.
• Communicate effectively -- and if you need to bulk up your public speaking skills, it's never too late.
• Enjoy teaching others.
• Build strong research support networks.  The research community is just not that supportive, she says.  "You might give a talk at a conference and there might be 20 people in the room, and 19 of them are on their laptops."  I think she looked at me, here, as I typed out that phrase.  Oops.
• Persist in the face of challenges; and, of course, go for it!

Natalie Jerger just finished her 3rd year review on her way to tenure.  She suggests that one of the most important things is to find a supportive partner.  Next, set your priorities.  For her, she and her husband always eat dinner together -- this is an important thing for her.  Last priority?  Cleaning the house.  "Both me and my husband are professionals.  We don't have time to clean the house.  We don't have time to argue about whose turn it is to clean the house.  Hire a cleaning lady."  Professionally, seek out and work on problems that you find interesting -- problems that you are passionate about.  Develop a support netwrok and find good mentors, those whose interests and priorities align with yours.  Finally, practice saying "no" so that you aren't stuck in a situation that you don't enjoy.

Jodi Tims, when she was 4, taught her friends about arithmetic -- that's how early she knew that she would be a professor.  Like Magdalena, Jodi took a decade to finish her PhD.  Violating all her advisors' rules about what one should do while in grad school, she worked full time as an instructor, did her academic research, and had two children.  "You just find a way to balance that together," she said.  Her advice for aspiring academics:

• Accept advice of good mentors.  This is as much about receiving good mentoring as it is about learning how to give good advice: "One day you wake up and realize, 'I'm the mentor!'"
• Don't underestimate your potential
• Focus on your students.  Mentoring your students is a form of teaching, and this is a service that you need to provide to your students.
• Know your institution. You don't have to make it work if your expectations are not met.
• Get involved beyond your institution.  This is where opportunities come from, to grow as a person and as a researcher.
• Appreciate life beyond work. Family and friends make life worthwhile.
• Enjoy the ride!

Questions were presented on index cards from the audience.

Q: How did you make the choice to go into academia?

Cecilia: In academia, you get to determine what is important.  You choose to perform research that has impact.

Magdalena: Apply everywhere, and make the decision with an offer in hand from both industry and academia.  The interviewing process is a lot of fun.  The reason I went into academia because the interview in academia was more fun than in industry.  One of the huge advantages in academia is not only that you get to pick what you work on, but also who you work with.

Q: We all know that tenure-track positions are hard to get.  Should we accept non-tenure-track positions (postdoc, industry), or hold out?

Cecilia: In 2004 I wanted to be a faculty member, but I wasn't ready (by publication count and preparation).  I took a job in an industry lab not really knowing if I would make the transition.  But I worked on making my CV look like I was an academic while keeping up in my industry job.  I wrote papers and attended academic conferences that came out of novel research in my job.  Choose the industry position or the post-doc that will be most suited to your goals. Have a deliberate plan.

Jodi: There are lots of schools out there that are not the R1 institutions.  If you really want to get into academia, consider going to lower-tier institutions.  Maybe the pay isn't as good, maybe you start on a non-tenure-track position, but keep your mind open to other options.

Q: Do you really need a post-doc nowadays to get a tenure-track position?

Anne: As someone that went straight into such a position without a post-doc, I think it's a good thing to do.  There is a maturity process that happens over that time; you meet different people and you investigate other institutions.  I encourage you not to rush through things if there is no reason not to.

Cecilia:  That's a great answer.  I have seen people that have gone straight through.  If you do it right from the very beginning of your PhD program -- you are publishing 2 papers in top conferences, you're networking with the top people in your field for 5 years -- then yes, you can get such a position.  But if you're like everyone else, you don't have the pedigree in your publication record, then yes, take a post-doc.  But make sure you choose your postdoctoral mentor carefully: they can make or break your career.  A post-doc is an apprenticeship.  You're getting paid less than you're worth.  But on the flip-side, you're getting priceless mentoring from someone that's going to show you the ropes and make you very marketable.

Q: How do you make the choice between academic offers, or between a research lab versus a university?

Magda: If you have no other constraints (e.g., personal ones), go to the best university, because you will work with better students.  The better the students, the easier it is for the faculty to do well.

Ioana: Go where the smarter people are and where there are more opportunities.

Cecilia: I put together a matrix of things that were important to me.  Vacation locations, startup package, what my family liked.

Natalie: The people.  Colleagues.  Also, my husband was leaving his job so I wanted to go somewhere that he had a choice

You have to go home every night and still be happy.

Q: Cecilia, you are shy. How do you overcome this and how does it impact your career?

Cecilia: Yeah, I am shy.  I miss important connections, and I just accept that.  I know that when I started interviewing, I did not mention certain rare accomplishments that few academics achieve, and I didn't mention my highly technical background in mathematics and algorithms.  The unsurprising feedback was that I wasn't technical enough, and I didn't get an offer from this institution.  I told myself that for future interviews, I'm going to brag, even if I don't like doing that.  I felt like I was acting kind of like a jerk, but I got offers.  It works.

Q: How do you publish, write grants, mentor students, etc., in your first years?

Natalie: At first, it was terrifying.  Teaching can suck up a lot of your time because it's the most urgent thing.  The hardest thing is to make time for the thinking, to think about problems, solutions, and what you're going to do next.  I think I messed up my first student.  And have someone in your life that can give you practical advice when you're stuck.

Q: How do you deal with stress?

Jodi: It's actually a very important question.  If you don't deal with it, it will impact everything that you do.  I have to get out and do something: ride my bike, go to the gym, jump on the treadmill.  And then I go do something else, make myself some space to think about something else.  Then things fall into place and things don't look so bad as when you left them.

Magda: I talk -- to my husband, my family, my friends.  But not colleagues.  That's why it is so important to have family and friends.

Q: Family is my first priority.  I want to be a professor, but the 7-year tenure time is prime baby time. I'm afraid that my male department won't like my priority of family dinners and baby-having.

Cecilia: Men, when they have to take care of a family obligation, they say, "I'm busy."  Women say, "I'm busy, I have to go take care of my kid."  So when you have to go take care of a family obligation, be more like a man, and say: "I'm busy."

Magda: I work and work and work, and at 5, I say, "I have to go."  And I leave.  And guess what, a lot of my male colleagues have to go too.  And after the kids are in bed I work and work and work.  Maybe I don't sleep always as much as I used to, but it works for me.  And when I need to, I do sleep.

Ioana: Having family as a priority is not a problem.  Being confident and admitting that is the way to go.  I wouldn't want to be hired by a family-unfriendly institution.  I was very open about my 2-body problem in my job search.  The places that were not very accommodating, I did not consider.

Q: What advice do you have for someone applying for a tenure-track position with a partner?  It's a 2-body problem with a similar area of computing.

Anne: I think it's good to bring it up reasonably early with the institution.  If one of you has got an interview, that is a good time to bring it up.  You may want to wait until you have an offer, but it is better to let them know sooner so that the university can work on this issue.  Institutions need time for this.  There are other options: a short-term position that can turn into something more permanent; maybe there is industry nearby.  Be flexible but know what you really want.  For the university, if you can attract two great people to your institution, it's amazing.

Q: What are you proud of that you have done outside your academic career that you wouldn't have been able to accomplish without an academic career?

Jodi: My academic career allows me to be flexible to do things like pursue mentoring with ACM-W and Grace Hopper Celebration

Anne: I got to take on many projects of national scope, such as the distributed mentor project and work through the Computing Research Association (CRA).

Grace Hopper '11 checklist: Five things to do at GHC11

Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is basically a giant lady-party in which all of the conference attendees are gorgeous, brilliant, and interesting.  But you already know this, because I have blogged about Grace Hopper in my post about do-overs next time I go, and in my post from my attendance in 2009.  That is not totally right -- it is not just a party.  It is an opportunity to showcase your work, learn about other women's research, find out ways to bring more women into our field and make it more woman-friendly, meet new people, and build lasting relationships.

Here are the top five things that I wish to get out of attending Grace Hopper Celebration this year, in 2011.

5. Reconnect with old friends

It has been a year -- in some cases, more -- since I have seen old acquaintances, friends, and mentors.  From my first room mate, to the professor that has changed how I see myself as a researcher, to the group of 200 women that have given me the gift of working with my rockstar undergraduate student, I look forward to seeing these ladies again.

4. Find a collaborator

Researching alone can be dismal.  Would it not be fun to meet someone with similar interests, in which we can complement each others' strengths?  I have this rosy dream about collaborating on a paper with someone I had met once (maybe twice) at Grace Hopper.

3. Meet a new mentor

My career will soon be in flux: next year, I will be dissertating while on the academic job market. (Note: Even though Blogger doesn't think "dissertating" is a word, it totally is.) I imagine I will be in need of new guidance -- of help finding appropriate job openings, navigating the complicated job-seeking and application system, and finding the best way to present myself to particular universities.  What better place to meet someone that can potentially help me than at Grace Hopper?

2. Make a new mentee

(Note: Blogger doesn't think "mentee" is a word, but if it isn't, it should be. It's who mentors advise!)  As a senior graduate student in her final throes, maybe -- maybe -- my experience can be valuable to someone.  I have an undergraduate degree with two majors, I worked in industry for 3 years, I had a baby pre-advancement in graduate school, and I work in a highly interdisciplinary field doing research of my own invention.  I write grants, I write blog posts, I invent eHealth learning methods, and I play video games.  Surely I could be a resource to somebody!

1. Say thanks

I am pretty lucky that in four years of attending Grace Hopper, I have never paid for the visit myself. In three years, I have never paid for child care.  In two years, I have contributed to the program at Grace Hopper, hosting sessions and panels.  I feel privileged that I have helped shape the community of women that I am about to see again, meet, or just observe.  So, at Grace Hopper this year, I plan to say thanks for accepting me as a part of the package of women in computing, of technical women.



If you will be at Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Portland, please find me and say hello!  I will be tweeting as @lexyholloway.

Five do-overs since my first Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing

Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing is an annual event bringing together thousands of women from different technical computing specialties and at different stages of their career.  Attendees include undergraduates considering computer science as a major, graduate students choosing their research direction, recent graduates looking for a job, women in industry, professors, researchers, and recruiters.  It is a diverse, funky, exciting, inspiring, and nurturing environment of two thousand women, all of whom are smart, brilliant, beautiful, and different in their own right.

This year will be my fourth time attending, which makes me a Grace Hopper veteran.  I first heard about Grace Hopper Celebration from my room mate from CRA-W Grad Cohort -- a similar but much smaller mentoring program for graduate student women -- when I asked my room mate how on earth she knew all these people.  She was saying "Hi," calling people by name, and giving hugs to everybody!

"How do you know everyone already?" I asked her.

"Some women I know from last year's Grad Cohort," she replied.  "But some women I see basically twice a year: at the Grad Cohort and then again at Grace Hopper Celebration."

"What's that?" I asked.  Casually hiding her surprise that I had neer heard of Grace Hopper Celebration, she explained it to me, and that night in our hotel room I looked it up and bookmarked it.

When Grace Hopper Celebration came around that year, my advisor asked if there are any women that would like to go, because our university was a sponsor and received a few spaces for student attendees. Of course, I replied immediately in the affirmative, and off I went!

Now that I have been three times to Grace Hopper Celebration (this year will mark my third time as a contributor) and twice to the CRA-W Grad Cohort, I can look back on my first Grace Hopper Celebration visit a bit critically.

My first year, Grace Hopper Celebration was held in Keystone, Colorado, a small resort town situated in the mountains among an aspen forest.  The trees were just starting to turn in ones and twos: blots of color among a sea of green leaves.  I was driven from the airport in a shuttle and looked out onto the picturesque landscape with wide eyes.  I was young, impressionable, and pregnant.

Yup, I was about 24 weeks along in my pregnancy.  I knew I was carrying a boy, and I had just returned from a trip abroad -- a delayed honeymoon -- before having time to buy clothes that fit me.  My belly had just started getting too big for my pants.  It happened so suddenly that I was ill-prepared, wardrobe-wise, for the change in my figure.  I was a hot mess, unbuttoning my jeans and praying that my fitted t-shirts did not bust into holes stretched over my growing belly.  When my mother saw me at the airport on my return from Grace Hopper, she was shocked at my fashion sense, but at the time, I figured that is just an extension of the typical graduate student lifestyle.  Right?  Please tell me I am right.

Anyway, back to the point -- I could have done a better job.  As an early(ish) graduate student, my main role was to be receptive to mentoring and to meet people that would help me in my career path.  I see that now, in hindsight, but at the time I did not recognize these goals.  Here were my top five mistakes from the first year.  Every year I go back, I get a do-over and do my best to avoid these.



Do-Over #5.  Eat lunch and dinner.

At CRA-W Grad Cohort, one of the rules was that no two women from the same university could sit together at lunch.  You had to learn to network, and to meet other women.  But here, at Grace Hopper Celebration, there was no such rule, and even if there was, there is no way to enforce it with 2000 attendees.  So attendees would sit with the people they knew more often than not, and I, seeing this social norm, followed suit.  Not a good idea.  Now I know that it is best to sit at a table where you know no one.  Even better: sit at a table where you know no one, and everyone is different from you.  Is everyone older?  They have more experience.  Is everyone younger?  Maybe they have questions.  But if everyone is exactly like you, there is no way you can broaden your experience.  Challenge yourself.

Do-Over #4.  Use the room mate.

I was at Grace Hopper Celebration on an underwriter scholarship, and, like all scholarship recipients, I had a room mate.  Actually, in this year, we were in a three-room cabin in the mountains of Keystone, Colorado, and I had two house mates.  My house mates were amazing.  They asked me about pregnancy and married life, about the proverbial work-life balance (as if there is one), about what I will do once I have the baby (hint: stay in school).   On our last night in Colorado, we all went shopping to the outlets nearby and my lovely room mates bought me a shirt that actually covered my entire front.  Maybe it is silly, but I was moved.

But most of the day, my house mates (who knew each other) would be off on their own, and, in pregnancy-related discomfort (more on this later), I left them to themselves.  I did not go to see their posters at the poster session; I did not ask for introductions to other women; I did not sit with them and their colleagues at lunch.  But this was wrong.  Use your room mate (or room mates, if you are lucky enough to have two) -- use them as mentors if they are more experienced at Grace Hopper Celebration than you are; use them as friends if they are new like you; use them as a sounding-board for your elevator pitch for your research.

My room mates approached me on the second day and said, with a sly grin, "We are thinking of taking a drive up to the summit, instead of one of the sessions.  Are you in?"  I considered for a moment, wondering if it is OK to skip sessions, and if we could leave the conference grounds without arousing suspicion among the organizers.  Hesitating a little, I said that it sounds like great fun, and that I would certainly come.

As we arrived to the summit, the weather shifted dramatically, from cool and clear autumn to cold and foggy winter.   Not another person and not another vehicle was within sight: it was just us.  It began to snow in large, fluffy flakes.  The electricity in the air made our hair stand straight up, and lightning bolts noiselessly crashed all around us.  We giggled and photographed and huddled in our insufficient jackets -- and bonded.  We formed relationships which would survive the test of time and geography -- relationships we could later fall back on in our professional and personal lives, because we had this shared experience.


Do-Over #3.  Couch potato networking.

During the course of Grace Hopper Celebration, my baby, whom I called Galahad ever since knowing I was pregnant, grew as well.  I would like to think it is because of my rock hard abs that, one day into the Celebration, I started getting rib pain.  My ribs were expanding to fit my high-carried fetus and I was in pain from the pressure in my ribcage from about noon until I went to bed every night.  I did not tell anybody (except my amazing room mates) because I had never enjoyed complaining, especially to strangers.  Even strangers that are there for the express purpose of caring for and mentoring me.

Half the day, my ribs would hurt so much that I could not sit up.  Sometimes I would go back to my room and lie down; other times, I would sprawl out sideways on one of the low arm chairs in the conference area and try not to moan.  Both of these were missed networking opportunities.  Now I see that it is OK to sprawl in pain rather than attend a session, as long as I am doing something to further my career.

See, I had no idea where my academic career was going.  Here I was, not even half-way through my first pregnancy, not even two years through grad school, and with no idea where my research interests were.  Every class I took was fascinating for the first three weeks; every project I undertook was interesting only for the first half.  I knew I was a fantastic teacher but had never undertaken any serious research project.  I knew I wanted to be a professor eventually -- but a professor of what?  How do you find the one thing that really turns you on?

These are all questions that, though they cannot be answered by someone else, they can point you and your mind and heart into a direction.  Other women's experiences can influence how you experience yourself.  Maybe I am getting a little hippy-dippy.  But my point is that I was not using this time to the best of my abilities.  I could have been meeting women in a higher position than myself and asking for advice; I could have been meeting my future mentor; I could have been learning with others, rather than suffering alone!


Do-Over #2.  Tell your secret.

Maybe it was the pregnancy hormones talking, but I posted an anonymous advertisement on the bulletin board:

Looking to connect with other pregnant graduate students and those with kids.

I added my e-mail address and hoped for the best.  The truth is that I did not know what I was looking for.  Support?  Advice?  Encouragement?  I did not have any concrete questions but I wanted to know that I was not alone, that my experience was not unique.  In some ways, I suppose, I wanted validation.  I wanted someone to say, "I know things will get rough, but you can do it, because I did it."  Though I did receive a few notes, mainly by other participants pinning replies to the same bulletin board, I never replied to them, in part because I did not know what I wanted to say, and in part because I did not want to give away my secret.

I had only told my room mates, and mentioned it once at lunch.  One of the women, another student, lit up: "Do you have maternity leave at your university?"  I answered honestly that I did not know.  She persisted: "You know, it should be covered by the union.  They bargained for it just last year.  It is brand new this year.  You should look it up."  After lunch, she and I both went to the computers and found the relevant sections.  She was glad to help me, and I was glad for the help, because until then, I had never considered my rights and my future as an employee of the university.

It was not until the last hour of the last day, when several of us were loading the bus, that I told one more person about my pregnancy.  She was a young woman with a large baby, and introduced herself as a professor.  We chatted briefly about pregnancy, and exchanged information.  It seemed so natural and inconsequential at the time -- especially as I had such a reverence for professors because of what I now see was mild impostor syndrome -- but I was calmed by her easy nature and friendly manner.  This small event which I had put out of my mind as an impossibility because of the difference in rank, this easy exchange of words and information, this event was probably the best thing that happened to me at Grace Hopper Celebration that year.  Today, the professor who befriended me continues to mentor and support me through my final years of graduate school.  I told my secret to the best person I could possibly meet.


Do-Over #1.  Meet the speakers.

I had attended a great many talks, but one in particular still speaks to me today.  It was a talk I had heard before, at CRA-W, given by a graduate student that had changed direction several times in the course of her studies.  She was explaining the same feelings I was having:  She would take an introductory class and enjoy it immensely, but not enjoy the follow-up class.  It took her a long time to find a dissertation topic.  She explained several ways that dissertation topics come into existence: the extended course project, the advisor's list of unfinished work, the stroke of genius, and others.  She struck me as someone I would love to be friends with -- but she was so smart! so accomplished! What would I have to offer by speaking with her?

Wrong, wrong, wrong!

Now that I am also a speaker at Grace Hopper Celebration, I know that speakers are people too.  I love it when people attend my talks, and I love it even more when they stay afterwards to tell me that the talk was useful to them, my nervousness did not show, or even that my animation skills in the slides were top-notch.  Which, I assure you, they are not.  I love it when people tweet about my talk.  I love it when people come to ask me for advice, or ask for my contact information in the case they have questions about something I said.  I love just knowing that someone, somewhere, was affected by my talk.

I did approach this particular speaker, and I told her that I had heard her talk before and I really admired her.  She was surprised: "What, me?"  Laughing heartily, she chatted with me about grad school, clearly expressing that she considered us equals.  She and I are still friends today.

Since then, I make it a point to meet every speaker that inspires me.  Even if she is the president of some fancy corporation, or the first author of an influential paper, or simply the woman that said something that really resonated with me.  I introduce myself and say, "What you said just now, I really took to heart.  Thank you for a great talk."  If we happen to meet again, I can say, "We met at Grace Hopper last year.  I loved your talk."  This usually leads to an invitation to join her lunch table, which -- by the way -- I always gladly accept.