‘Google-ing’ something would never have occurred to men without her: Karen Spärck Jones
The search engines we use daily rely on the natural language processing discoveries made by one female computer scientist, Karen Spärck Jones. She was recruited to Cambridge into the “Language Research Unit” by another female professor, the computational linguist Margaret Masterman.
Jones’ most notable achievements laid the groundwork for the sort of information retrieval we use today. She introduced the use of thesauri into language processing, allowing for computational recognition of similar words. And she also introduced the idea and methods of “term weighing” in information retrieval, which helped queries determine which terms were the most relevant.
A pioneer of computer science for work combining statistics and linguistics, and an advocate for women in the field.
When most scientists were trying to make people use code to talk to computers, Karen Sparck Jones taught computers to understand human language instead.
In so doing, her technology established the basis of search engines like Google.
A self-taught programmer with a focus on natural language processing, and an advocate for women in the field, Sparck Jones also foreshadowed by decades Silicon Valley’s current reckoning, warning about the risks of technology being led by computer scientists who were not attuned to its social implications.
“A lot of the stuff she was working on until five or 10 years ago seemed like mad nonsense, and now we take it for granted,” said John Tait, a longtime friend who works with the British Computer Society.
Sparck Jones’s seminal 1972 paper in the Journal of Documentation laid the groundwork for the modern search engine. In it, she combined statistics with linguistics — an unusual approach at the time — to establish formulas that embodied principles for how computers could interpret relationships between words.
By 2007, Sparck Jones said, “pretty much every web engine uses those principles.”
Women’s many contributions to technology are frequently left out of the history books. But lately, that’s been changing — at least a little
Stories of far too many of the women who drove innovation in the 19th, 20th, and into the 21st centuries — these key technological architects of modern life — have long gone unheard, their praises unsung. What about the woman who created the Palm Pilot, the woman who made working from home a reality, the woman who invented online dating, or the woman who helped Obama save the internet? (Yes, they were all women.)
In honor of International Women’s Day, here are some great ladies of technology you really need to know about.
1. The women who cracked the secrets of the universe with computation: Williamina Fleming and the Harvard “Computers”
In the late 1800s, men at the Harvard College Observatory were busy gazing at the sky through telescopes, gathering data about the stars and the planets. But what to do with all this raw information?
The head of the Observatory, Edward Pickering, needed someone to crunch the astronomical numbers in order to calculate relationships and effectively measure the universe. Men reportedly turned down their noses at this “clerical” work. So Pickering asked his housemaid, Williamina Fleming, to work as a “computer” at Harvard.
Fleming agreed, going on to lead a team of more than 80 women who did the computational work that’s responsible for how we understand the universe today.
2. The first computer programmers: The Women of ENIAC
The idea that computation and programming was tedious women’s work extended into the 20th century (right up until men found out how cool it was).
In the first half of the 20th century, Harvard’s “computers” grew into a unit of female mathematicians at what would become NASA and its Jet Propulsion Laboratory, working during World War II on behalf of the U.S. Military. The calculations they did plotting ballistic trajectories were time consuming and exceedingly complicated. Two men decided to build a machine that could carry out these calculations. It was called the ENIAC, and it’s now considered the first electrical computer.
But it was the women mathematicians who actually programmed the ENIAC. The ENIAC builders recruited six women who became the world’s first coders, manipulating the ENIAC to calculate missile trajectories.
For many years, people thought the women in ENIAC photos were models. Nope, they were the women actually doing the programming.
IMAGE: CORBIS/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES
The work they did for the army in the 1940s resulted in the first software program, the development of computer memory and storage, and the beginnings of programming language.
3. The ‘mother of computing’: Grace Hopper
“The mother of computing” also got her start in the military. In the late 1940s, Grace Hopper worked at the Harvard Computation Lab as part of the Navy Reserve, programming the Mark 1 computer that brought speed and accuracy to military initiatives.
Later, she transferred to the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp, where she worked as a senior mathematician. She helped develop the UNIVAC I computer, the first business-oriented machine. Her accolades include creating the first compiler: software that translates arithmetic into language and unifies programming instruction. She was one of the architects of a “new compiled computer language” called COBOL, which is still a standard of data processing today. Most notably, she’s credited with the idea that computer code could be written and read like language.
4. The woman you have to thank for hybrid car batteries: Annie Easley
Annie Easley made the jump from “human computer” to computer programmer while working at the mid-century agency of what would become NASA. Running simulations at a freaking “Reactor Lab,” she was one of only four African-American employees. She is well known for her work encouraging women and people of color to enter STEM fields.
Later, her work as a programmer involved energy conversion systems. According to NASA, she “developed and implemented code” that led to the development of the battery used in the first hybrid cars. You’re welcome, Prius drivers.
The Raspberry Pi isn’t just a great platform for building Internet of Things project: It’s a super platform for learning about the IoT.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is, arguably, the hottest topic in IT. Every organization wants to participate in the IoT, and many IT professionals want to know how to add IoT skills to their resume. There are lots of options for learning about IoT, but nothing really beats the hands-on experience.
One of the key learning platforms for IoT is the Raspberry Pi. The RasPi is a popular platform because it offers a complete Linux server in a tiny platform for a very low cost. In fact, one of the most difficult parts of using Raspberry Pi for learning about IoT is picking the right projects with which to begin.
If you go out and look on the Web you’ll find thousands of projects based on the RasPi. Some are ambitious, many are silly, and some are great for learning about both the Raspberry Pi and common components of the IoT. I went out in search of projects in that last group.
What makes a great IoT learning project? In my opinion it takes a few things. The first is the use of some common sensor or controller types. I like custom-built hardware as much as the next geek, but for an education project you don’t really want to go wild with the hardware builds.
Next, the project should have something interesting going on in the control software. While I don’t think you need an epic development project for a meaningful learning experience, you should really do more than just call pre-existing scripts and applications.
Finally, the projects should be interesting and, dare I say it, fun. There’s nothing worse than training that feels like drudgery. Good training projects should make trainees really want to move forward with their education.
That’s what I went looking for, and I found a variety of projects that met my requirements. Here are 10 of the ones that I thought were best. We start with one that takes the RasPi to new heights.
Click the link below to look at these 10 project ideas that incorporate IoT in it:
