CACM Reports: How to Inspire, Recruit, and Retain Women for Computer Science Careers

NEW YORK, Feb 19, 2009 (ASCRIBE NEWS via COMTEX) --
TKET | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- While women's
representation in the computing field has improved in some
sectors, it is still far short of equal. In its cover
story, the February 2009 issue of Communications of the ACM
(http://mags.acm.org/communications/200902 - CACM) assesses
the progress of women in the field over the last 15 years,
and presents successful strategies and promising initiatives
to increase women's participation. The issue also reports
on how the growing Web is moving from a Web of content to aWeb of
applications; improving performance on the Internet
to accommodate fast, scalable, content-delivery systems;
differing paths to preserving network neutrality; and how
the first Internet president changed the way politicians and
the public interact. CACM, the flagship publication of ACM
(http://www.acm.org/) , offers readers access to this
generation's most significant leaders and innovators in
computing and information technology, and is available
online in digital format.

Responding to the question, "Why should computing
professionals be concerned that women and other groups are
underrepresented in the field?", "Women in Computing - Take
2" contends that diversity often leads to enhanced abilities
to perform tasks, greater creativity, and better decisions
and outcomes. The article is by Harvey Mudd College
President Maria Klawe, Anita Borg Institute for Women and
Technology President and CEO Telle Whitney, and Director of
Research Caroline Simard. It cites recent data that paints
a decidedly mixed picture of progress for women graduates,
undergraduates, professors and practitioners in computing.
The authors provide an extensive list of initiatives that
have shown success in overcoming the challenges to greater
representation of women and minorities in the computing
field.

In a Practice section article, Tom Leighton, cofounder of
Akamai Technologies, investigates the bottlenecks to
building fast scalable, content-delivery systems for the
Internet and identifies the culprit as the "middle mile" of
heterogeneous infrastructure. This complex "no man's land"
is owned by many competing entities, typically spans
hundreds or thousands of miles, and injects latency
bottlenecks, throughput constraints, and reliability
problems into the Web application performance equation.
Leighton proposes four approaches that are required for
effective delivery of content and applications over the
Internet.

In a contributed article, T.V. Raman, a research
scientist at Google, surveys Web 2.0, the current-generation
Web platform, and predicts what he calls 2w, a Web that
encompasses all Web-addressable information. Raman posits
that much of the impetus for the move from Web 1.0 to Web
2.0 and eventually to 2w is a consequence of the user's need
to consume information (i.e. aggregations, projections, and
mashups) in a form that is most suited to a given task.
With data moving from individual devices to the Web cloud,
he says that users today have ubiquitous access to their
data.

A Viewpoints article on rethinking the K-12 experience in
education, by George H.L. Fletcher of Washington State
University and James J. Lu of Emory University, explores
reasons why computer science has difficulty attracting
students. Acknowledging the role of career instability in
the fallout from the dot-com downturn, the authors attribute
the major problem to the misconception that computer science
is "just programming." They advocate an approach that
teaches computational thinking as a basic skill early in the
educational process, and introduces programming only after
students have had substantial practice acting and thinking
as computational agents.

Other February CACM articles:

- A News essay by technology writer Kirk L. Kroeker on
using computer vision, computer graphics, and applied optics
to bring new capabilities to digital cameras.

- A Viewpoints article by Ashish Arora and Matej Drev of
Carnegie Mellon University, and Chris Forman of Georgia
Institute of Technology on whether software development
laboratories will follow the production mills toward global
disbursement.

- A Policy Letter by Eugene H. Spafford, chair of ACM's
U.S. Public Policy Committee (USACM), on its priorities for
providing information to the new administration, including
privacy, reliability and security, voting, intellectual
property, and accessibility.

- An Inside Risks column by Peter G. Neumann on problems
with election integrity, transparency, and accountability.

For more information on CACM, click on
http://cacm.acm.org/ .

About ACM

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery
(http://www.acm.org/), is the world's largest educational
and scientific computing society, uniting computing
educators, researchers and professionals to inspire
dialogue, share resources and address the field's
challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession's
collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the
highest standards, and recognition of technical
excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its
members by providing opportunities for life-long learning,
career development, and professional networking.

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