Communications of the ACM
Anita Borg Institute Announces 2012 Women of Vision Award Winners
Jennifer Chayes (left) of Microsoft Research, and Revi Sterling (right) of the University of Colorado at Boulder, are winners along with Sarita V. Adve of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of the 2012 Anita Borg Women of Vision Awards.
Credit: Microsoft, YouTube
The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology has announced the winners of the 2012 Anita Borg Women of Vision Awards. Jennifer Chayes, Distinguished Scientist and Managing Director of Microsoft Research New England; S. Revi Sterling, Director, Information and Communication Technology for Development Graduate Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder; and Sarita V. Adve, Professor, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will be honored for their accomplishments at the Anita Borg Institute's seventh annual Women of Vision Awards Banquet at the Mission City Ballroom, Santa Clara, CA on May 10, 2012. Registration is open until April 30, 2012. The event will feature keynote speaker Kara Swisher, co-executive editor of the tech news site AllThingsD.com.
The Women of Vision Awards honor women making significant contributions to technology in three categories: Innovation, Leadership, and Social Impact. This year's winners were selected from a field of highly qualified women, all of whom are engaged in technology professions in industry, academia, non-profits or government. Candidates for the awards are considered based on their records of (1) consistent, significant contributions to technology invention and application; (2) affecting positive changes in the ways in which technology impacts society; and (3) demonstrated leadership in the technology industry that extends beyond their place of work.
The Women of Vision Awards Dinner will also feature the 2012 Anita Borg Top Company for Technical Women Award winner, American Express.
About the Winners
Jennifer Chayes is the Women of Vision Award winner in the Leadership category. She is recognized for her work based on the impact she has had on computer science through her leadership in building research communities that bridge theoretical computer science, mathematics, physics, statistics, economics and computational biology. Through her founding and leadership of the theory group at Microsoft Research, and more recently the Microsoft New England Research Lab, she has influenced and mentored hundreds of researchers. In her own research she has spearheaded extremely important foundational work on dynamic random networks in theoretical computer science.
Sarita V. Adve is the Women of Vision Award winner in the Innovation category. She is honored for her immense contributions to hardware and software memory models. These models define the meaning of shared variables in parallel hardware and software and form the foundation for reasoning about parallel programs and optimizing them for performance. She co-developed the memory models for the Java language and for the new C++ standard, based on her early work on data-race-free models for hardware. Acceptance of these models required generating consensus among broad hardware and software communities in a field that had been surprisingly contentious for multiple decades. She has also made significant contributions in energy-efficient design, in reliable systems design, and in multiprocessor memory systems.
S. Revi Sterling is the Women of Vision Award winner in the Social Impact category. She is recognized for conceiving, implementing and leading programs that have had a direct, positive and lasting impact on the lives of women. She pioneered the development of a new participatory community radio technology that enables women to create content for broadcasting, even if they are far from the station. Variants of this have been deployed worldwide. Today, she is creating a new generation of "academic practitioners" who can create innovative technologies while solving difficult community development problems that continue to stymie the international development field. Revi realized the need for these practitioners based on her own research and fieldwork in Africa, India and South and Central America, where she has created and deployed appropriate and sustainable education, health and livelihood programs based upon a variety of innovative networking technologies.
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