PALO ALTO, CA — (Marketwired) — 07/31/13 — (ABI), a non-profit organization focused on the advancement of women in computer science and engineering, today announced the winners of the 2013 Grace Hopper Celebration ABIE Awards, to be presented at the 2013 (GHC) on October 5 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The ABIE Awards give the community of women technologists a chance to honor leaders in the categories of technology leadership, social impact, change agent, education, and emerging leader. Winners are nominated by their peers, and chosen by a panel of fellow technologists and past ABIE Award winners. This year, ABI received a record number of nominations for distinguished technologists in every category.
“The ABIE Awards are an important component of the Anita Borg Institute-s year-round mission to promote the advancement and contributions of women technologists,” said Telle Whitney, ABI-s president and CEO. “We value the women making significant research contributions, and working on the ground. These contributions help build a movement, and year after year, we look forward to acknowledging their achievements at our Grace Hopper Celebration, which represents the largest gathering of technical women in the world.”
The GHC 2013 Award Winners in their respective categories include:
Dr. Margaret Martonosi, Hugh Trumbull Adams -35 Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, is one of the foremost researchers in power-efficient computer architectures. Her work has greatly shaped computing-s response to the grand challenge of power dissipation. In recent years she has also developed mobile sensing systems and mobile networking technologies specifically suited to the developing world.
Tülin Akin, Co-founder of Tabit / Tarimsal Pazarlama Ltd. (Agricultural Informatics and Communication Technologies), is building an information platform to enable Turkey-s three million farm families, especially women, to fully and actively participate in the economy and society. She is bringing together two unlikely friends-Turkish farmers and information technologies, to provide farmers with up-to-date information, know-how, skills, and professional development, while also creating opportunities for them to reach alternative markets by bypassing traditional intermediaries.
Dr. Unoma Okorafor is founder and CEO of Working to Advance STEM Education for African Women (WAAW) Foundation, a nonprofit whose mission is to promote STEM Education for African women, and to ensure that talent is engaged in technology innovation in Africa. WAAW Foundation especially focuses on girls in poverty-affected areas with a goal to ultimately increase the pipeline of African girls entering STEM related careers.
Dr. Shikoh Gitau, champion in Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D), has created several health and employment mobile applications for use by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in South Africa and Kenya. She is passionate about the user experience of everyday people and creating technology systems to help them achieve their aspirations in life. Besides the ABIE Change Agent Award, Gitau is the first African to win the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship.
Violette Uwamutara, Country Director for Digital Opportunity Trust (DOT) Rwanda, is advancing the participation of Rwandan women in technology and introducing them to new opportunities and careers in technology, entrepreneurship, and socially responsible enterprise. Uwamutara created a unique DOT youth-led model that sends confident, young, local role models to train and coach their out-of-school, out-of-work peers and neighbors to become productive users of technology as they take charge of their personal development and livelihoods.
Dr. Christine Alvarado, Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, spearheaded the implementation and institutionalized the practices that changed the culture within the Harvey Mudd College Computer Science Department and lead to dramatic increases in the participation of women studying and pursuing careers in the field of computing. That culture led to a nation-leading rate of participation — over 40% of HMC computer science majors are women — that has been sustained since the incoming class of 2008. The results of this program are outstanding, sustainable, and clearly serve as a model of what universities could be doing.
Dr. Alice Pawley, Associate Professor in the School of Engineering Education and faculty member of the Women-s Studies Program at Purdue University, is helping engineering and computing develop as a more socially just profession in a global context, including making it more welcoming to diverse populations. Pawley is nationally recognized for her pioneering research, blending engineering education research with women-s studies theory and methods to provide new insights around inclusion to engineering educators.
This year-s GHC theme, “Think Big. Drive Forward,” is designed to encourage women technologists to dream ambitiously and push the envelope. The annual four-day conference featuring over 200 speakers brings together women at various phases of education and career, including students; women starting their professional careers; mid-career technologists; women entrepreneurs; and those in the highest technical positions at multinational corporations.
GHC is the largest gathering of women technologists in the world, and is expected to attract over 4,000 participants, from over 40 countries, in industry, academia, and government. This year-s distinguished keynote speakers include women at the top of their respective industries including Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook and founder of LeanIn.org; Maria Klawe, President of Harvey Mudd College; Ana Pinczuk, Senior Vice President of Services Transformation at Cisco; and Dr. Arati Prabhakar, Director of DARPA.
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The Anita Borg Institute works to advance women in computer science and engineering roles globally. ABI provides resources and programs that help industry, academia, and government recruit, retain, and advance technical women to meet the growing global need for technology workers and to increase technological innovation. ABI programs inspire technical women, foster community and provide tools to help them develop their careers. The Institute works with industry partners to make the global technology workplace more welcoming to women. ABI partners include: Google, HP, Microsoft, Cisco, Thomson Reuters, Amazon, CA Technologies, Dell, eBay, Facebook, First Republic Bank, IBM, Intel, Intuit, Juniper Networks, Lockheed Martin, Marvell, National Science Foundation, National Security Agency, NetApp, SAP, Symantec, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Broadcom, EMC, Neustar, Raytheon, Salesforce.com, VentureLoop, Xerox and Yahoo! The Anita Borg Institute is a not-for-profit 501(c) 3 charitable organization. For more information, visit
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Kate Carey
New Venture Communications
650-814-3088
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