Friday, March 28, 2008

Wired: About Dr. Lisa Porter, IARPA

This month's WIRED Magazine introduces us Dr. Lisa Porter, the first director of Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, a unit to equipe the Intelligence field units with the most modern technology available, the American Q.

Read the short article here:

Dr. Lisa Porter worked for NASA before, (see here) and before that she worked for DARPA , the Department of Defense' Advanced Research branch.
"As a senior scientist there, she added things like "helicopter-quieting program" and "drag-reduction-on-naval-ships project" to her previously bookish resume." (WIRED)

Press Release by the office of the Director of National Intelligence Public Affairs Office on Dr. Lisa Porter

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Women in Technology

Ada Lovelace (Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace) (1815-1852): credited as the first computer programmer, she created a mathematical program to calculate a sequence of Bernoulli numbers.

Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910): known as the first woman physician. She founded the New York Infirmary for Women and Children and the Women’s Medical College.

Grace Hopper (1906-1992): an extremely gifted computer scientist. Early in her career she worked for the Navy on the Mark I Calculator, the first large-scale automatic digital computer. She worked on validation software for Cobol and its compiler. She also focused on standards for testing computers systems, which lead to compatibility among computer vendors.

Hedy Lamarr (1913-2000): actress turned inventor, she was influential in coinventing an early form of spread spectrum, a technology used for military purposes to help make radio-guided torpedoes more difficult to block or jam. More recently, spread spectrum has served the basis for CDMA devices such as cordless telephones and WiFi Internet connections.

Sandra "Sandy" Lerner
(1955- ): helped design the first commercially successful router, a device that enables once-incompatible computers in far-off computer networks to communicate. Cofoundeer of Cisco Systems.


Meg Whitman
(Margaret C. Whitman) (1956- ): is the president and CEO of eBay. Her experiences in brand marketing and consumer technology helped propel eBay into a leader in online commerce.