A former colleague, a talented and accomplished user experience professional, recently wrote excitedly of her intension to attend an upcoming UX conference. It was a bit of a throwaway line, likely written in haste, but made in a public forum for consumption by contemporaries and customers alike. Her meaning was clear; the cringe from at least some in her audience equally so. Continue reading
So what is Hour of Code? The Hour of Code is a global movement with a one-hour introduction to computer science, designed to demystify code, showing that anybody can learn the basics! Anyone anywhere can organize an Hour of Code event. No age limitations. No experience needed. By now, almost 1203 Hour of Code events were conducted in India. It is held every year from 7th Dec to 13th Dec. Continue reading
At the University of Connecticut, undergraduate students majoring in Computer Science studied Google’s PageRank algorithm as a practice on stochastic processes and their applications. After their research on the algorithm along with other search techniques that Google uses to rank websites, they have come up with some cool, and easy-to-implement, tips for website owners to organically increase their website rank. As the TA for that class, I felt thrilled with their awesome submissions and wanted to share some of their work on this study.
42 tips to increase your website’s rank based on understanding Google’s PageRank Continue reading
The Internet of Things as a field has been continuously growing since 1982, when it was first thought of. Such is its speed of growth, however, that according to predictions there will be over 50 billion devices as a part of the IoT by 2020. This makes it tempting, in speaking of the field, to only focus on its present and on its future development, but I reckon it is always wise to take a moment to also reflect on the past, and to remember the people who pioneered it.
An old and heteronormative saying claims that “Behind every successful man, there is a woman”. As a woman in CS myself, I don’t like that saying, but I espouse the thought of a similar one: “Behind every successful innovation, there is also a woman“. Given our modern ideals of gender equality and progress, it is not always enough to generically look back at the people who paved the way for the IoT; sometimes we have to specifically remember the media-overlooked women who did so, and to give them credit where it’s due.
The Internet of Things refers to the intelligent interconnection of various devices and machines to a larger network, or the Internet. While it comes with its own set of inherent risks, as does any technological innovation, it certainly aspires to make our lives simpler.
This was not the work of merely one man or one woman. The IoT came into existence because of the efforts of many different people, including women. Each person discovered or created something that enabled us to move one step closer to the Internet of Things as we know it today. For this simple reason, I have decided to dedicate this essay to not just one, but four different revolutionary female computer scientists, all of whom, I believe, were instrumental to the development of the IoT.