GHC Community: Official Note Takers
Kimberly Blessing
Kimberly Blessing is a Web developer, standards evangelist, and technical strategist. At PayPal she leads the Web Development Platform Team and she runs KimmieCorp, a Web consultancy. Kimberly serves as co-group lead of The Web Standards Project, a grass roots coalition of designers, developers, and browser makers that fights for Web standards. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College (B.A., Computer Science) and The George Washington University (M.Sc., Computer Science), Kimberly is also an advocate for increasing the number of women in computing and technology fields.
Aanan Contractor
Aanan Contractor leads the web development team at PayPal. She is a web professional with master’s degree in Engineering Management and Computer Engineering. Aanan also leads recently started Women in Technology group at PayPal focused on unique needs of women in technology organization.
In her free time Aanan choreographs and teaches different forms of Indian dances, organizes charity events for non profit organizations and travels around the world.
Anna Koop
Anna is a graduate student at the University of Alberta. Her background is in machine learning, and she’s currently working on autonomous artificial intelligence, looking at how robots might be able to learn for themselves. She finds the intersection of cognitive science and computer science fascinating, thinks human behavior is intriguing, and promises not to bring on any sort of machine apocalypse.
This is her second year at GHC and first year as official note-taker. She lives in Alberta with her husband and two cats, settling in to Edmonton life after bouncing around the prairie provinces for many years.
Unoma Ndili Okorafor
Unoma Ndili Okorafor is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the electrical and computer engineering department at Texas A & M University. She received the M.Sc. degree in electrical and computer engineering department from Rice University, Houston Texas in 2001, and the B.Sc degree in electrical engineering from the University of Lagos, Nigeria in 1998. Her research interests include secure routing and connectivity analysis for directional and broadband wireless sensor networks. She is also a recipient of the Sloan Foundation fellowship for minority Ph.D. students and the AAUW Engineering dissertation fellowship. She also is a student member of IEEE, SPIE, NSBE and SWE.
Anna Topol
Anna Topol is an M.Sc. student in Computer Science and a graduate research assistant working with Dr. Jenkin at York University in Toronto, Canada. She holds a B.A., Spec. Hons. in Computer Science from York University. During her undergraduate studies Anna has worked at the University first as a help desk assistant providing technical support to the York community and then as a web applications developer designing and implementing software that automates manual tasks and converting paper-based practices into modernized web-based applications. Anna’s current research interests include Virtual Reality, Computer Vision, and Mobile Robotics. Her research work has appeared at SVAR 2007, CVDB 2007, ICCI 2007, and GHC 2007. Anna is the recipient of The Provost’s Award from York University in 2003 and the Best Student Paper Award at CVDB 2007. She is a member of IBM Women in Technology@York and Women in CSE@York.