Women in IT
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Elena Akhmatova and Mary Gardiner |
Once heavily dominated by men, Australia’s IT industry is experiencing a gender shift as greater numbers of women take up research roles and industry positions in the field.
Two women making names for themselves are Macquarie University PhD candidates Mary Gardiner and Elena Akhmatova. Both computational linguists, the women were finalists in the recent Google 2006 Australia Anita Borg Scholarship, receiving $1000 each for their achievements.
Named after the late Dr Anita Borg, who devoted her adult life to dismantling barriers that keep women from entering computing and technology fields, the Google-funded scholarship is an attempt to encourage more Australian women to study IT at university.
Natural language technology
Gardiner and Akhmatova are undertaking research in the area of natural language technology which involves getting computers to generate and process natural language. This technology is applied to applications such as spoken language dialog systems, intelligent Internet search engines, machine translation and automatic text summarisation.
PhD research
Gardiner is researching whether computers can extract emotion contained in language.
“It kind of surprises people that computers can extract emotion at all,” she says. “To the extent that they can identify whether newspaper items, for example, are opinion pieces or news pieces, or whether a review is positive or negative about the subject it is reviewing, they can do that kind of thing pretty reliably.”
Akhmatova is researching to what extent it’s possible for computers to automatically make reasoning over text.
Women in IT
Both note that being women working in IT sometimes has its challenges but that it’s always been rewarding.
“Sometimes being in such a male-dominated industry is hard but there are also many pluses as men have different perspectives on life,” says Akhmatova. “Self-belief is important – the only thing that matters is that you believe that you are the best.”
Google 2006 Australia Anita Borg Scholarship
In addition to their monetary prize Gardiner and Akhmatova were given the opportunity to spend two days at Google’s offices in Sydney.
“The best thing about winning the scholarship was the time spent at Google,” says Gardiner. “It was great to see that there are companies out there that are interested in employing smart researchers.”
Echoing Gardiner’s sentiments Akhmatova says: “Winning was a great opportunity to meet people such as technical directors of Google that I wouldn’t otherwise have had the opportunity to. It was also great to be able to meet up with the other finallists who are all bright interesting girls.”
IT careers
In the last 10 years, research in natural language technology has left the laboratory and has begun to make a significant commercial impact and employers are hungry for candidates with the necessary skills for software design and development in this area.
Both women are keen to forge careers in the industry in research and development. Gardiner has her eye on a position at Microsoft, Yahoo or Google while Akhmatova is considering returning to her home country of Russia to help develop natural language processing after a stint in the US.
For more information about Macquarie’s Centre for Language Technology visit: www.clt.mq.edu.au/ For more information about the Google 2006 Australia Anita Borg Scholarship visit: www.google.com.au/intl/en/anitaborg/