2008 Conference Information: Keynote Speakers
Fran Allen
IBM Fellow Emerita and 2006 Turing Award Winner
Fran Allen first met Anita Borg in the early 1970’s as a student in Fran’s graduate course on Compilers at NYU. Anita later observed that: “Fran was the only woman professor I had in graduate school.” Anita Borg went on to change the role of women in computing and in the process became an inspiring role model and friend for Fran and many others.
Widely known for her work on compilers, compiler optimization, parallelism, and high performance systems, Fran Allen became IBM’s first woman Fellow - the company’s highest technical honor. Fran is also well known for her work as a mentor and advocate for women in computing. Active professionally, she has served on multiple boards including NSF’s CISE Board, the National Research Council’s Computer Sciences and Telecommunications Board (CSTB), CRA, and the ACM Council.
Now retired after 45 years in computing, Fran Allen is a Fellow Emerita at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Laboratory and continues her active involvement in professional, technical, and women’s advocacy projects. Current activities include serving on the IWT Advisory Board and the IWT Leadership Workshop committee. Helping to fulfill Anita Borg’s dream of having many women contributing to all aspects of IT continues to inspire Fran’s work.
Allen is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Fellow of the ACM, the IEEE, and the Computer History Museum and has two honorary doctorate degrees as well as several awards for her work for women in computing. She has been inducted into the WITI (Women in Technology International) Hall of Fame and, last year, received the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award from the Association for Women in Computing. For her work on behalf of women in IBM, the company established the Frances E. Allen IBM Women in Technology Mentoring Award in 2000 and made Fran the first recipient.
Mary Lou Jepsen
Founder and CTO, One Laptop Per Child
Mary Lou Jepsen was the founding chief technology officer of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), an organization whose mission is to deliver low-cost, mesh-networked laptops en masse to children in developing countries. In January 2005, she joined Nicholas Negroponte to lead the design, development and manufacture of the laptop, and for the entire first year of the effort was the only employee of One Laptop per Child. By the end of 2005, she had completed the initial architecture, led the development of the first prototype (which UN Secretary General Kofi Annan unveiled at a UN summit), and signed up some of the world’s largest manufacturers to produce the XO-1.
On December 31, 2007 she left OLPC to start a for-profit company, Pixel Qi, to commercialize some of the technologies she invented at OLPC.
Notably, Jepsen invented the laptop’s sunlight-readable display technology and co-invented its power management system, and has transformed these inventions into ready-to-ship hardware, integrated into the XO-1.
Previously Jepsen’s contributions have had world-wide adoption in successful head-mounted display, HDTV and projector products. She has been a pioneer in single-panel field sequential projection display systems. She co-founded Microdisplay, the first company whose sole effort was the development of microdisplays, in 1995, and served as its chief technology officer through 2003. Until the end of the 2004, she was the chief technology officer of Intel’s Display Division.
She has created some of the largest ambient displays ever. In Cologne, Germany she built a holographic replica of pre-existing buildings in the city’s historic district…and created a holographic display encompassing a city block. She also conceived, built mathematical models of, resolved the fundamental engineering issues, and solved some of the logistics - to create what would have been the largest display ever for mankind: images displayed on the darkened moon. She co-created the first holographic video system in the world at the MIT Media Lab in 1989, where the interference structure of the hologram was computed at video rates, and shown on her hand-made display. This system inspired a whole new field of holographic video and received numerous awards. Her PhD work combined rigorous theoretical coupled-wave analysis with lab work, in which she created large-scale, embossed surface-relief diffraction gratings with liquid crystal-filled grooves with high diffraction efficiency in un-polarized illumination.
She is slated to become a professor at the MIT Media Lab in September 2008, where she will found and lead a research effort in nomadic displays.