As many of you know by now, I am super passionate about how we are going to double the number of women and ethnic minorities in computer science and informatics across the world. As part of my efforts to take on this achievable but daunting task, I have hired two outstanding women (who are pursuing their PhDs) as my interns this summer: Katie Doran and Meagan Rothschild. This month, Katie will tell you about her research and her experience working with me to grow more women and ethnic minorities in computing. You will hear from Meagan in December when we get closer to completing her research findings.

Before we hear from Katie, let me tell you a little about her. Microsoft Research intern, Katie DoranKatie Doran is pursuing a PhD in computer science at North Carolina State University with an emphasis on educational technologies and serious gaming. She is particularly interested in exploring how emerging games technologies, such as augmented reality and ubiquitous features, can facilitate novel interactions among players and increase learning potential. Katie is heavily involved in the Broadening Participation in Computing Community and leads multiple science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) outreach programs. I had the opportunity to meet Katie during the poster session at the CRA-W Grad Cohort event that Microsoft Research sponsors. I am excited to have her working with me on evaluating ChronoZoom as an educational tool. ChronoZoom is a web-based, interactive visualization of Big History, the broadest possible view of the past stretching from 13.7 billion years ago to today. Our vision is to enable innovative ways of teaching Big History and its various components, and empowering interdisciplinary studies. I’d like to hand this blog over to Katie now to tell you about the exciting projects she’s been working on. —Rane Johnson-Stempson, Principal Research Director for Education and Scholarly Communication, Microsoft Research Connections

In addition to my work on ChronoZoom, which has included hands-on sessions with more than 60 students, I have taken the lead on multiple outreach initiatives. Twice, I was able to bring student groups to the Microsoft Redmond campus for hands-on demos of TouchDevelop and IllumiShare, panels with successful women from across Microsoft, and tours of the Microsoft Home. The first group was all middle-school girls from Girls Gather for Computer Science, a summer camp focusing on hands-on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) activities. Our second group was from the University of Washington’s Math Academy, a program for high-school students from underrepresented groups who are on track to complete the highest level math requirements at their schools before graduation. Both groups of students were phenomenal and left campus with an entirely different perspective on what it would be like to have a career as a computer scientist—especially here at Microsoft. Watching the students’ reactions—as they heard about the breadth of work being done by Microsoft employees here in Building 99, across campus, and around the world—was very encouraging. At the end of both sessions, I went home knowing that each of those students had been exposed to opportunities they never even knew existed. My third outreach event of the summer was attending STARS Celebration 2012 in Hampton, Virginia. STARS, which stands for Students and Technology in Academia, Research, and Service, is an National Science Foundation-funded Broadening Participation in Computing project that focuses on professional development for university students in STEM fields as well as outreach with elementary and high-school students to build and reinforce interest in studying STEM topics. This event was particularly fun for me, because I have been an active member of STARS since 2008. At STARS Celebration, I was able to present on my own work—STEM outreach in Haiti, evaluating outreach, and outreach with game design and development—and the significant work being done by Microsoft Research to promote an interest in computer science! I presented two sessions on Microsoft tools for outreach use and both were standing room only.

Everyone in attendance was impressed with the number of free tools that Microsoft makes available for outreach activities, such as TouchDevelop, Kodu, Pex for fun, and Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer. As a NASA Fellow, the highlight for me was getting to show off the incredibly adorable Mars Rover additions to Kodu. Based on the response I received, I expect large numbers of game designers and astronauts in about 10 years! My research and outreach work with Microsoft Research this summer has led me to the biggest annual event for women in computing—the Grace Hopper Celebration 2012 (GHC) in Baltimore, Maryland. I’ve spent the past few weeks working with Rane to organize Microsoft’s presence at GHC. It’s been a big undertaking because Microsoft has an incredible 165 people registered, including six executives and six senior women! It is inspiring to see Microsoft employees taking such an interest in growing the number of women in computer science. With the energy I put towards this effort, it is thrilling to know that the girls I help inspire can apply to a company that is eager to hire, retain, and support exceptional women after they complete their degrees. In addition to being overwhelmed with the amazing presence that Microsoft has here, I’ve been busy supporting Anita’s Quilt, a blog from the Anita Borg Institute that allows remarkable women in technical fields to motivate and empower one another through their stories. I’ve been handing out stickers and sharing the story of Anita’s Quilt since I arrived on Tuesday, but if we haven’t met yet, keep your eyes open for me—I’d love to give you a sticker and fill you in. I could also tell you about the wonderful young women I look forward to meeting at the NCWIT Aspirations in Computing Award Winners Reception tomorrow. They are an impressive group of brilliant, enthusiastic high-school girls who are going to go on to be the next leaders in computer science. You can find me, my mentor Rane, and a group of other talented, passionate Microsoft women volunteering at the Microsoft booth. Stop by booth #1315 to say hello, get information on internship and career opportunities, and to develop your own Windows Phone application! If you don’t have time to say hello, or you didn’t make it to GHC—you can find out about many of our initiatives at our Women in Computing website. I hope you’re all having as fantastic and inspiring an experience here at Grace Hopper as I am! —Katie Doran, Intern, Microsoft

Learn more at:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/hopper2012-100512.aspx

http://research.microsoft.com/en-US/events/women-in-computing2012/default.aspx

So another fiscal year ends at Microsoft and instead of having a New Year’s Resolution on January 1st, I like to create my Microsoft New Year’s Resolution on July 1st! This year I have committed to my family, friends and close colleagues:

• To travel less and be around more
• Continue to be committed to changing the world but take it on in manageable pieces
• No working on weekends
• Disconnect when on vacation and  to take more vacations
• Become a better paddle boarder and kayaker
• Blog more regularly
• Volunteer at a manageable level
• Have more ladies weekends
• Better tell the Microsoft Research story around the world and what we are doing and how folks can better work with us

In addition, I have gotten a haircut and it’s a new Rane, what do you think?

I think you can see a theme here. So after ten years at Microsoft and closing my first year with Microsoft Research, I continue to be drinking the cool aid as my husband says. As I tell all my family and friends, I feel like I have the best job in the company and who can go to bed every night knowing you are doing something that will make impact in the world and possibly change lives. It is so exciting to be working for an organization that is finding the cure for HIV through anti-spam algorithms, using the power of computer science to map the sugarcane gnome and using technology how can we better enable citizen science when it comes to endangered species and the environment. So many cool discoveries and innovations. It is almost unbelievable to me that I get to work with the top academic experts around the world to build a tool that bridges the gap between sciences and humanities and helps students all over the world to understand the history of everything better. Check out http://chronozoomproject.org if you haven’t yet. In addition, having the ability to create the strategy and how we as an organization outreach and grow the pipeline of women innovators in technology there is never a dull day. You can see this new strategy and what we are doing at http://research.microsoft.com/diversity. As part of this work, I am pleased to have the opportunity to work with famous social scientist and Microsoft researcher Dr. danah boyd and six top researchers on how we look at technology and the human trafficking of minors in the United States, see my blog post below and this video: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/?id=169416.

This year I have had the opportunity to meet and work with the most amazing people with the most amazing backgrounds and stories. Just a couple of ladies who are changing the world, if you don’t know I must tell you about:

• Lucy Sanders, CEO of the National Center for Women in Technology is one of the busiest women I have ever met. She has had the most amazing career and is doing everything possible to grow more women in technology and she knows everyone!   She is a Bell Labs Fellow with 5 patents, has been inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame and recently was named by the U.S. secretary of Commerce to serve on the department’s Innovation Advisory Board. Her energy and passion is contagious.
• Telle Whitney, CEO of the Anita Borg Institute and was the co-founder of the amazing Grace Hoppers Conference (the largest conference for women in computing in the world).   She has moved Anita Borg Institute from a small NGO of a few employees on grant funds to more than 25 employees being self-sufficient and thriving!  She serves on the advisory boards of Caltech’s Information Science and Technology, California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, and Illuminate Ventures. She has won so many awards similar to Lucy and I have to highlight that she was named in 2011 to the Fast Company Most Influential Women in Technology List. She constantly keeps me on my toes!
• Just recently I have had the pleasure to get to know Catherine Didion. She is a Senior Program Officer at the National Academy of Engineering, where she is responsible for      Diversity of the Engineering Workforce program.  She is the driving force behind the efforts to enhance the diversity of the engineering workforce at all levels including the diversity of those being prepared to enter the future workforce. In March of 2007, she became the Director of the Committee on Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine. Just like the ladies above her she has won so many awards and sits on so many committees and is constantly growing my knowledge and capabilities.

I wish I had the time and space to list the hundreds of amazing men and women in NGOs, academia and government I have worked with this year and will continue to work with in collaboration in 2012-2013. I truly hope we can move the dial this year in exciting more girls into the field of computing. If you were not aware, there are only 1800 women graduating with a BS in Computer Science in the United States every year with a total of approximately 10,000 total.  While today there are 200,000 more degrees being handed out to women than men in US colleges, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4654635.

Why is this such a big problem, some people ask me?  Let’s think about it for a second, technology influences all aspects of our daily lives and every discipline under the sun.  If it is healthcare, environment, finance, education, manufacturing, retail, volunteering in the community, and the list goes on there is some type of technology component.  There have been thousands of books written on the differences of men and women.  How we manage differently, think differently, are wired differently, this list too goes on and on.  If you are a fan or not we have to admit a lot of what is stated in “Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus” is true.  So given that, how can we truly be innovating if there are not enough women helping build the future innovations and technologies that will make our lives better, more efficient and more effective.  If there are not women in teams to ask different types of questions and look at making the solutions in different ways and understanding the needs of their audience that they belong to?   There is so much we can go and I hope to do with the best minds around the world to make a dent in this area.

Jumping subjects, what has been much amusement for me this Summer is my two fantastic PHD interns, Katie and Meagan.  I had the opportunity to meet Katie at the CRA-W Grad Cohort where she gave a fabulous poster session that excited me to her potential.  Katie hails from University of North Carolina at Charlotte and is very passionate about computing and education, what is dear to my heart!  She joined our ChronoZoom team to investigate if data visualization of BIG DATA can be a better teaching and learning experience for students and help them to better conceptualize data and information and learn 21^st century skills better.  She will also partner with me and Microsoft researcher Steven Drucker to examine more longitudinal use of a visualization within a classroom setting. While Meagan come from University of Wisconsin-Madison will be here for a 6 month internship, working with me and in partnership with  Alex Games from IEB.  Meagan will be focusing on studies of youth learning with 2 Way-TV, and of studies of student engagement  in STEM with Dakota.  In both cases, she will also do a deep investigation on Girls and Learning and helping us better reach Girls in STEM through XBOX, Kinect and Kodu. These ladies are brilliant, fabulous and will definitely change the world!

Katie has taken the bull by the horn and has helped me (really took the lead) in supporting two great programs that will enable young women and minorities to pursue careers in computing.  Katie organized two days at Microsoft for these young computer scientists to experience what it is like to pursue a career in technology and what is possible with computer science.  The students met with interns, heard from executives and visited the Microsoft Home of the Future.  The first group was sponsored by Pacific University, G2CS: Girls Gather for Computer Science (http://www.g2cs.org/) excite young girls across the state of Oregon to computing.  The young women learn about computer science careers, learn to code and do several different types of computing activities.  The second group came from University Washington where they have a great program called the Math Academy (www.uwmathacademy.org) where they help high school students get the math skills necessary to be able to pursue a degree in computer science and have the skills necessary to be able to apply to universities.

So as you can see it has been a fabulous year and I look forward to sharing with you the amazing people, stories and activities to come in 2012-2013.  Stay tuned and please share any stories, articles, publications and information you think I would be interested in to make a difference in education and growing young women in computing!

  In May I had the opportunity to attend  the NCWIT (National Center for Women & Information Technology) 2012 Summit on Women and IT, and what an amazing three days it was! The annual NCWIT Summit is a celebration of girls and women in technology, but above all, it’s an opportunity for leaders from education, industry, and government to explore avenues for recruiting and retaining women in IT roles.

For me, this year’s summit has not only been a tremendous resource for new ideas, it also provided a prime opportunity to promote Microsoft’s commitment to increasing women’s presence in computing. Microsoft has been a NCWIT sponsor since 2004, and an investment partner since 2006. In 2009, an additional Microsoft gift brought the company’s funding for NCWIT to US$2 million since 2005, an indication of our dedication to strengthening the U.S. IT workforce with an expanded, diverse pool of talent.

As further evidence of the company’s commitment, I am excited to report that we released our new Women in Computing website in conjunction with the summit. This site not only offers information about free tools, programs, and opportunities to support women in computing, it also summarizes our educational initiatives—which extend from grade school to graduate studies to faculty fellowships—and includes inspirational stories of women who are helping to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems through careers in computer science and technology.

The summit also gave me a chance to highlight our involvement in the launch of NCWIT’s Sit With Me campaign. This launch took place on March 9, International Women’s Day, and Microsoft marked the occasion by holding 50 events that spanned the globe, all celebrating women in computing. In addition, Microsoft Research labs around the world have begun to launch Sit With Me campaigns to grow the next generation of female researchers and inventors. Microsoft is also an active participant in the NCWIT Pacesetters program, in which senior leaders from corporations and universities commit to increasing their numbers of technical women.

One of the summit’s high points for me was assisting Microsoft Staffing Director Sean Kelly in presenting the first-ever NCWIT Pioneer Award, given to women who have forged new trails for women in computing. The recipients were Patricia Palumbo and Lucy Simon Rakov, two trailblazing programmers who helped the United States explore outer space and paved the way for women in computing. Read about their amazing careers.

The summit also recognized the Chicago-area recipients of the NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing, which honors female high-school students for computing-related achievements and interests. Microsoft Research is pleased to be a sponsor of this important program, and I was excited to meet two inspirational young women who want to change the world in their pursuit of a career in computing. They will both join us at Microsoft as interns this summer.

In addition, I was thrilled to join with Christine Alvarado (of Harvey Mudd College), Maureen Biggers (of Indiana University-Bloomington), and Margaret Burnett (of Oregon State University) to honor the 2012 recipients of the Microsoft Research funded Academic Alliance (AA) Seed Fund awards. This program provides AA members with funds to conceptualize and implement promising practices for recruiting and retaining women in computing at the higher education level. And since Microsoft is an active member of the Academic Alliance, my colleagues and I were busy participants in Alliance meetings at the summit.

One might think I’m exhausted after all these activities, but the summit has been so uplifting that I find myself energized. This has been truly an inspirational event. Now I just have to get some of that great Chicago pizza before I head back to the Northwest.

—Rane Johnson-Stempson, Principal Research Director for Education and Scholarly Communication, Microsoft Research Connections

Learn More

• NCWIT Summit
• Women in Computing
• How Microsoft Is Supporting the Sit With Me Campaign (video)
• Academic Alliance Seed Fund
• Workforce, K-12 and Academic Alliances
• NCWIT Sit With Me Campaign
• Microsoft Research Sit with Us Campaign