Modern Icons of Computing

Helen Mullings — Chief HR Officer at QuantumBlack

International Women’s Day offers a valuable opportunity to celebrate female achievement. Over the last decade the day has grown in prominence and it’s tremendous to see a wave of new events, announcements and initiatives happening every year.

Women continue to be significantly underrepresented in the technology and computing industry — but there are also fresh stories of inspiring female pioneers emerging every day. With that in mind, we asked QuantumBlack colleagues to name the contemporary computing heroes who inspire their work. We’ve included a snapshot below. While some of these names might be familiar to you, others may be less well known — but each has cemented their place in computing’s hall of fame. We hope these fantastic role-models will inspire everyone working in the industry today, and the next generation to come!

Audrey Tang — Digital Minister with an Activist Ethos

Audrey Tang’s career has focused on overcoming obstacles and breaking down barriers to collaboration, representation and fairer regulation. One of the world’s premier open source pioneers, she worked alongside Dan Bricklin to create EtherCalc, the free online spreadsheet platform used around the world to share and collaborate with data, while also revitalising global open source communities Perl and Haskell. She was appointed Taiwan’s Digital Minister in 2016 by the Taiwanese government, becoming the country’s first transgender official to take an executive cabinet position and openly advocates digital freedom. She contributes to Taiwan’s ‘gØv’ project, a programming coalition focused on creating tech tools for civil society.

Cassie Kosyrkov — Guiding safe, effective use of AI and data

Cassie’s journey has been remarkable — from a high school teacher in South Africa, to statistician, to Google’s Chief Decision Scientist and founder of the organisation’s Decision Intelligence Engineering division. She has trained more than 20,000 employees in machine learning and statistics and advises leadership teams around the world on AI strategy and building data-driven organisations. She works to democratise statistical thinking and machine learning so that everyone can harness and benefit from data.

Dr. Celeste Kidd — Data’s Silence Breaker

Dr Celeste Kidd champions diverse backgrounds in AI in order to generate a fairer industry and transparent discussion around how the technology shapes society — for good or bad. She received a standing ovation following her NeurIPS 2019 keynote address, where she spoke frankly about harassment in the data industry. One of TIME Magazine’s 2017 Persons of the Year, Kidd is recognised as one of AI’s first #MeToo ‘Silence Breakers’ for her extensive advocacy for better protections for students against sexual misconduct. A professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, she runs the Kidd Lab, combining technologically sophisticated behavioural experiments with computational models to better understand knowledge acquisition.

Chelsea Finn — Teaching the Next Generation of Machines

Chelsea Finn’s post-doctoral research in deep reinforcement learning has broken new ground in how machines acquire skills. She introduced a new gradient-based meta-learning algorithm, Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML), enabling deep networks to solve new tasks based on small datasets — similar to how human learning leverages prior experience, concepts and abstractions. The algorithms developed by Finn will enable robots to learn on their own, as children do, and are set to play an integral role in the upcoming generation of machines that acquire broader skillsets while requiring less programming.

Gladys West — Mathematical Trailblazer

Gladys West’s contribution to mathematical modelling was instrumental in developing satellite geodesy and GPS — but her decades-long story has only gained prominence in recent years. One of few African American women working at the US Naval Proving Ground in the 1950s and 60s, Gladys developed highly complex algorithms for astronomical study. Her computing work on modelling the Earth in the 1970s would help create the Global Positioning System — today used by every segment of society, from NASA and military to the telecoms sector and social media. Gladys was inducted into the United States Air Force Hall of Fame in 2018.

Leila Janah — Bringing the Digital Revolution to Those Most in Need

Leila Janah dedicated her career to harnessing technology to improve the lives of those living below the poverty line. Her company Samasource helped people in developing countries earn a living wage, training them in data AI input and outsourcing their services to global organisations. Janah brought the digital revolution’s economic benefits to those who needed it most, helping to lift more than 50,000 people out of poverty with freelance work. Samasource’s efforts in driving more complete and ethical training data sets helped generate fairer, better machine learning models. Leila sadly passed away at age of 37 in January 2020.

Rana El Kaliouby — Decoding Smiles, Smirks and Frowns

Most communication isn’t linguistic — we analyse facial expressions and other visual cues to tell how a person is feeling. Rana El Kaliouby is teaching machines how to undertake this sentient analysis. Raised in Egypt, Rana was in her twenties and already married when she earned a PhD at Cambridge. She went on to become an MIT research scientist — where in 2009 she co-founded Affectiva, an Emotion AI start-up harnessing facial recognition technology to analyse human subtext. Affectiva’s database of facial expressions contains more than 7.5 million faces from more than 85 countries. The technology is already being deployed in a variety of uses, including assistance for people with autism and helping to diagnose depression.

These women have helped redefine computing success in the modern world and many of them continue to develop pioneering research and technology — so we can expect to hear much more in the near future. However, we should remember that this list doesn’t scratch the surface of the female tech success stories taking place every day. Please do feel free to leave your own comments below — we would love to hear your suggestions for those contemporary computing icons that inspire you.