Profiles

Mateja Jamnik - Director of Women@CL

Mateja Jamnik

Mateja Jamnik is a University Senior Lecturer at the Computer Laboratory since 2002. From 2002 till 2012 she also held the EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship "Automating Informal Human Mathematical Reasoning". She is interested in exploring how people solve mathematical problems. Mateja computationally models this type of reasoning on computers to enable machines to reason in a similar way to humans. In particular, her research aims to investigate and mechanise some of "informal" human mathematical reasoning, such as the use of diagrams in proofs of mathematical theorems, and integrate it with classical formal techniques, like logics. Broadly, Mateja's research is in, or is related to, the areas of artificial intelligence, automated reasoning, diagrammatic reasoning, theorem proving, cognitive science, machine learning, human-computer interaction, knowledge representation. She is married and has three children.
Mateja's profile

Jean Bacon - Professor of Distributed Systems

Jean Bacon

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. After partially retiring in 2010 she is a Director of Research, continues to lead the Opera research group and to be involved in international conferences, especially DEBS (Distributed Event-Based Systems) and Middleware. She is a fellow of the IEEE and BCS, and an emeritus fellow of Jesus College. She was founding Editor in Chief of IEEE Distributed Systems Online, 2000-2007; this was the IEEE Computer Society's first online-only magazine and became the more broadly based Computing Now in 2008. She was elected a member of the Governing Body of the IEEE-CS, 2002-2007. She was on the editorial board of IEEE Computer from 2008 and moved to its advisory panel in 2012.
Jean's profile

Ann Copestake - Professor

Ann Copestake

I'm a Professor in the Computer Laboratory. I'm one of the two Deputy Heads of Department - I have reponsibility for Teaching. 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 aboutalgorithm 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.
Ann's profile

Simone Teufel - Reader

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.
Simone's profile

Chloë Brown - PhD Student

Chloe Brown

I was an undergraduate at the Computer Laboratory studying the Computer Science Tripos from 2008-2011, and now I am a PhD student in the NetOS group. As an undergraduate I found the women@CL Big Sister Little Sister events 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.
Chloe's profile

Karen Spärck Jones (26 August 1935 – 4 April 2007)

Karen Sparck Jones

Professor Karen Spärck Jones was one of the pioneers in information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP). She worked in these areas since the late 1950s and made major contributions to the understanding of information systems. Her international status as a researcher was recognised by the most prestigious awards in her field, notably, the Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award, the BCS Lovelace Medal, and the ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award, as well as by her election as a Fellow of the British Academy, of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and as a European AI Fellow. In the Computer Laboratory, Karen was involved in teaching on the MPhil in Computer Speech and Language Processing for many years and also taught information retrieval for the Computer Science Tripos. She had many PhD students, working in remarkably diverse areas of NLP and IR.

Karen Spärck Jones thought it very important to get more women into computing. Her famous slogan was: "Computing is too important to be left to men". Her position as a senior woman in computing was an inspiring role model to young researchers.

Beatrice Worsley (1922 – 1972)

Beatrice Worsley

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.

Charlotte Froese Fischer - Emerita Research Professor at Vanderbilt University

Charlotte Froese Fischer

Charlotte Froese Fischer is a Canadian-American applied mathematician and computer scientist who gained world recognition for the development and implementation of the Multi-configurational Hartree-Fock (MCHF) approach to atomic structure calculations, and for her theoretical prediction concerning the existence of the negative calcium ion.
Charlotte obtained her Ph.D. in applied mathematics and computing at Cambridge University in 1957 pursuing coursework in quantum theory with P.A.M. Dirac and working under the supervision of Douglas Hartree, whom she assisted in programming the Electronic Digital Stored program Automatic Computer (EDSAC) for atomic structure calculations. During 1963 - 64 at the Harvard College Observatory, she was the first woman scientist to be awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship. Since then she has become internationally known for her software for atomic structure calculations and her research in atomic structure theory. In 1991 she became a Fellow of the American Physical Society, in part for her contribution to the discovery of negative calcium, and in 1995 she was elected a member of the Royal Physiographical Society of Lund. She is the author of over 260 research articles on computational atomic theory, many of which became citation classics for their far-reaching impact in the area of atomic structure calculations. She is currently an emerita research professor of computer science at Vanderbilt University and a guest scientist of the Atomic Spectroscopy Laboratory at NIST.

Shazia Afzal

Shazia Afzal Shazia's profile

Rana El Kaliouby – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Media Laboratory

Rana El Kaliouby Rana's profile

Laurel Riek

Assel Zhiyenbayeva - Undergraduate Student

Assel Zhiyenbayeva

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.

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.