Yesterday was Day 2 of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, and I’d like to reflect on two of my favorite sessions of the day.

Keynote Speech by Megan Smith: Vice President, New Business Development & General Manager, Google.org

Google is in a position to gather a lot of data. By collecting the terms that people search for and recording the times and dates that these search terms are used, they can tell what the world is concerned about and notice the patterns of social interest. One example that Megan gave had to do with health care and disease spread. Now-a-days, when you feel ill, you turn to your computer and search out medical information on the symptoms you have. Do you need to go to the doctor or do you just need chicken-noodle soup? When the people at google realized that they had this collection of data on current medical issues, and could trace trends in the search terms used, they were able to determine and predict the spread of illnesses like the flu faster than the current methods being used today. When you go to the doctor to report your symptoms and ask for help, it takes over three days for this data to reach the national institute of health who then has to interpret and present the data. When you search for your symptoms on google, they have that data in a digital form as soon as you enter it. Megan felt that this put Google in a place to do a lot of social good, and that potentially difficult medical issues could begin to be solved from interpreting this impressive amount of data.

Megan also gave some great examples of how the digital world has created more transparency in politics. For example, in many African countries there is corruption, and this corruption is well known in the communities. Also, while desktop computers are not used frequently in emerging countries there is a large number of mobile phones. Some brilliant individuals in South Africa made an iPhone app that would help you find directions to other towns and record the places where you would likely find police or have to pay a bribe. This application provided a place for communities to share information about corrupt government entities, and also brought the corruption into the public view. As Megan said, by shining a light on these places of corruption, the corruption starts to disappear. Another example of this was the use of Twitter during the recent Iranian elections. The people of Iran were able to get their message out to the rest of the world, a message that would usually be repressed by the government, and by bringing it to the attention of the world the world was able to respond.

Technical Executive Plenary Session - What you need to know on the road to Becoming a Technology Executive.

This panel was packed with high-up executives in a variety of big technical companies including: Linda Brisnehan, VP in Lockheed Martin; Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon; Nora Densel, VP in Intuit; and Sophie Vandebroek, CTO of Xerox. The panel was led by one of my favorite “regulars” of GHC, Maria Klawe, the President of Harvey Mudd College.

The panel was structured informally, in that Maria started by asking the panel to give a brief description of themselves and how they got to the position they are in, and then took questions from the audience. In particular, the panelists were asked to give us examples of when they lost the “invincible” feeling you have when you are young. Werner (of Amazon) said that he lost his “invincible” feeling when his company was first starting out. He started to see how incredibly vulnerable his company and dream was, that his success depended on other people who may not have his same passion, and this was something difficult to deal with. Sophie (of Xeorox) said she first lost her invincible feeling when she changed jobs in hopes of finding something better, found out it was a bad decision, and had to beg for her previous job back. Both Sophie and Nora (Intuit) described your career path as less of a path and more like an obstacle course. The important thing to realize is that you have to take risks, you have to confront obstacles, and if its a career you are meant to pursue then you will get a buzz and energy from over-coming these obstacles. If you find yourself drained by every obstacle you come to, then you should consider switching courses and changing directions.

The panelists were also asked if they felt women in technical fields took on enough professional risks, to which they replied, “absolutely not.” If you want to succeed, if your dream is to be at the top and in charge, then you are going to take risks. You may often fail, but there is no other way to get there. Linda (of Lockheed Martin) in particular felt that women were less likely than their male peers to “put themselves out there” and take the big risks.

Dancing!

I was once told by a friend that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, but the way to a woman’s heart is through dancing. As always at GHC, the second day of the conference was punctuated with an awards ceremony and dancing. (They take the “celebrating” part very seriously.) There is nothing quite like dancing with other computer science students, CTOs in technical companies, college administrators, and even Turing Award winners that are (almost) all women! Mark Zuckerberg (Founder of Facebook) was out on the floor for a moment because he was forced to by Maria Klawe, and a couple of the male recruiters from Microsoft stayed out dancing till the party shut down. The VT girls were definitely in force on the dance floor, as we always are, and it was a perfect end to an enlightening and full day.