She did a lot of cool work on compiler optimizations in the 1960s, and work in the 70s on parallel systems. She’s also the first woman to receive this award since the ACM started handing them out in 1966. It’s cool that a woman finally received it, but an unfortunate comment on the state and history of our field. It’s interesting, for example, that John Cocke (who she co-authored numerous papers with) received the Turing Award fully 20 years ago. We can hope that honoring her is a sign of the slow process of change, but we’ll obviously need to continue to actively work on broadening our community.
Category: Research
Greetings from Seattle!
I’m happily ensconced here in Seattle for GECCO 2006 (one of the major conferences in evolutionary computation, my primary research area), and managing to sneak in a few pictures now and then. The photograph above isn’t a great one, but it shows the mighty mountain in the distance, which isn’t something one sees all that often. The shot below is of the Seattle Public Library (the white glass building in the foreground), which is one cool building.
And I’m missing WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy’s World Cup party tomorrow, all in the name of science :-).
