Computer scientists code the programs that we use every day on our computers, tablets, and smartphones. Increasingly, more and more applications are powered by Artificial Intelligence, many are what you are using every day like Netflix and Amazon Alexa. What about the people who make it happen? The Women in Computer Science class looks at individuals who are making a major difference in this field. 

Week of 10/19: Grace Hopper
Grace Hopper (1906-1992) was a groundbreaking American computer scientist, United States Rear Admiral, and inventor of the first human language-computer code compiler. Grace Hopper's work with computers helped NASA communicate with Apollo astronauts, and still helps scientists keep track of far-flung spacecraft.

Week of 10/26: Fei-Fei Li
Fei-Fei Li, a pioneer in AI and professor at Standford University, is best known for changing the way researchers and laypeople think about machine learning. At a time when most researchers were focused on building the best algorithm, Fei-Fei Li thought the best algorithm wouldn’t work well if the data it learned from didn’t reflect the real world. Her solution was to build a better dataset. The resulting dataset, called ImageNet, is seen as the catalyst for the AI boom the world is experiencing today. 

Week of 11/2: Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) is regarded as one of the most important pioneers of computing. She published the first algorithm intended to be carried out by such a machine. As a result, she is often regarded as the first to recognize the full potential of computers and as one of the first to be a computer programmer.

Week of 11/9: Katherine Johnson
Katherine Johnson (1918-2020) helped confirm the accuracy of electronic computers used by NASA and performed critical calculations that ensured safe space travel from the 1950s on. She figured out the paths for the spacecraft to orbit (go around) Earth and to land on the Moon. NASA used Katherine's math, and it worked! NASA sent astronauts into orbit around Earth. Later, her math helped send astronauts to the Moon and back.

Week of 11/16: Adele Goldstine
Adele Goldstine (1920-1964) wrote the manual for the first electronic digital computer, ENIAC. Their system provided a 51-order vocabulary so that ENIAC programmers no longer had to manually plug and unplug cables for each step of the process. 

Week of 11/23: Megan Smith
Megan Smith (1964 - ) became the first female chief technology officer of the U.S. and served in the White House until January 2017. Smith, from Buffalo, New York, was a Google executive when she took the federal government role. In her position, she conceived the idea for a tech hackathon that resulted in improved protective suits for health workers fighting the Ebola virus. She also created a White House website dedicated to women in STEM and was the chief advocate for net neutrality, coordinating key meetings that helped lead to the protection of internet freedom.