Profiles
Mateja Jamnik – Director of Women@CL
Mateja Jamnik has been a University Lecturer at the Computer Laboratory since January 2003, although she is currently on leave in order to hold the EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship "Automating Informal Human Mathematical Reasoning". She is interested in exploring and computationally modeling how people reason, in particular in mathematics. Broadly, her research is in, or is related to, the areas of artificial intelligence, automated reasoning, diagrammatic reasoning, theorem proving, proof planning, cognitive science, machine learning, human-computer interaction, knowledge representation, agent technology. She is married and has three children.
Shazia Afzal – PhD Student
I have a Bachelors in Information Technology and am currently a research student in the Rainbow Group at the Computer Laboratory. My research involves using nonverbal behaviour cues like facial expressions and head gestures to interpret a user's affective state in a computer-assisted learning environment.
I am actively involved with women@CL and really enjoy being a part of it. Whether its career workshops, outreach programs, industry tours, or the famous cakes, women@CL activities are great fun and an excellent way to network.
Jean Bacon – Professor of Distributed Systems
Jean Bacon was the first woman to be appointed, in 1985, as a lecturer in the Computer Laboratory and, rumour has it, the first who applied. She is a Professor of Distributed Systems and co-leads the Opera research group. She is a fellow of the IEEE and BCS, and a fellow of Jesus College. She was founding Editor in Chief of IEEE Distributed Systems Online from mid 2000, this was the IEEE Computer Society's first online-only magazine. She has been on the editorial board of IEEE Computer since 2008 and she was elected a member of the Governing Body of the IEEE-CS, 2002-2007.
Chloë Brown - Undergraduate Student
I'm a second-year computer science student at Jesus College. When I was younger I never thought that I would end up studying computer science at university - I imagined I might do maths, or even music - but I was on a team at my school taking part in the National Cipher Challenge, and for this wrote my first computer programs. I was bitten (hard!) by the bug, so to speak, and now I can't imagine having done anything else. In my first year at Cambridge I found the Big Sister Little Sister programme to be a brilliant antidote to the uncertainty it might be easy to feel as a girl starting university on a very male-dominated course, and I really hope that other 'little sisters' continue to find the same.
Ann Copestake - Reader
"I'm a Reader in the Computer Laboratory. My research is in computational linguistics: I work on formalising and implementing various aspects of human languages. People often think of computational linguistics as a `soft' subject, but this is far from true – developing systems that can process real language at reasonable speed means thinking hard about algorithm design and coding. Programming is a means to an end, but it's also something I enjoy. At its best, it's a form of puzzle-solving which leads to practically useful results. What really attracts me to computational linguistics is its breadth. I've collaborated with people with backgrounds in several different disciplines including linguistics, mathematics, philosophy and psychology."
Cecily Morrison - Research Associate, Department of Engineering
Cecily Morrison has always been interested in why people do what they do. She first explored this an anthropolgist before entering the field of Human-Computer Interaction to research how the design of information systems shapes how people communicate. Following a PhD which looked at in what ways Electronic Patient Records changed communication of medical teams in intensive care, she will start a post-doc in the design of healthcare processes in the engineering faculty.
Simone Teufel - Lecturer
I got interested in computational linguistics during my undergraduate degree in Computer Science at Stuttgart University (IMS), and did my master's thesis and some project work on the new field of German corpus tagging and searching. My PhD research at Edinburgh was into robust discourse analysis of scientific texts, with applications to summarisation and citation analysis. As a post-doc at Columbia University, I then worked on medical IR and multi-document summarisation. Since 2001, I have been a lecturer at the Computer Laboratory, working on – and teaching about – applied Natural Language Processing topics, including summarisation and information retrieval.
Laurel Riek - PhD Student
Laurel Riek is a PhD student in the Rainbow Research Group. Her research is concerned with natural human-robot interaction, which means making it as easy to interact with robots as it is to interact with other people. This includes both verbal and non-verbal communication (gesture, gaze, facial expressions, etc). Her work focuses on creating human-like facial expressions and gestures on interactive robots in order to help inform their future design. Before starting her PhD, she worked as a Senior Artificial Intelligence Engineer and Roboticist at MITRE, a not-for-profit research institution in the United States. She holds a BSc in Logic and Computation from Carnegie Mellon University.
Assel Zhiyenbayeva - Undergraduate Student
I am a third-year Computer Science student at Fitzwilliam College, originally from Kazakhstan. I have been involved with Women@CL from last year and have had a great experience, every event has a friendly atmosphere and I’ve really enjoyed every moment.
Beatrice Worsley (1922 – 1972)
Beatrice Worsley was born in Mexico and raised in Toronto. She studied at the University of Toronto and MIT. She came to Cambridge in 1949 and worked with Professor Maurice Wilkes on the early EDSAC machine which was then nearing completion. The EDSAC was first demonstrated in May of that year and an account of the first demonstration including flow diagrams, programs and output – a table of primes from 5 to 1021 (excluding for some unknown reason 2 and 3!) and a table of squares and first differences of the integers from 1 to 32. When the Ferut computer was installed, she was one of the persons who wrote Transcode, a programming system which allowed programmers to write programs in a simplified language that was then compiled into Ferut's quite arcane machine language. She continued her studies at Cambridge and received a Ph.D. in 1952. She was possibly the first woman to obtain a doctorate in the field of computers. She continued at the University of Toronto for some years before moving to Queens University.
Rana El Kaliouby – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Media Laboratory
Carole Goble – University of Manchester, School of Computer Science
Jane Hillston – University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics
Laura James – University of Cambridge, Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies (CARET) and AlertMe.com
Marta Kwiatkowska – Oxford University, Computing Laboratory
Mounia Lalmas – University of Glasgow, Department of Computing Science
Ursula Martin – Queen Mary University of London, Department of Computer Science
Hanna Wallach – University of Massachusetts Amherst, Department of Computer Science
Hanna received her BA from the Computer Laboratory in 2001, after changing into the Computer Science Tripos from Engineering during her second year. Her Part II project — Visual Representation of Computer-Aided Design Constraints — won the MISYS Award for the Best Computer or Computer Software Student in the 2001 SET Awards. Hanna then earned a MSc at the University of Edinburgh, specialising in neural computing and learning from data. She was awarded the 2001/2002 prize for Best MSc Student in Cognitive Science. In 2002, she started a PhD in Cambridge's Inference Group. Her academic interests include Bayesian inference, information theory, probabilistic modelling, machine learning and algorithms on graphs. She is currently spending a year in the machine learning group at the University of Pennsylvania. Hanna has no intention of leaving academia any time soon and intends to continue researching exciting areas of machine learning and probabilistic modelling. When not working on her PhD, Hanna spends an inordinate amount of time drinking coffee, playing with computers and updating her her blog.
