Calendar of Events: Women of Vision
2010 Women of Vision Awards
| May 12, 2010 | ||
| 6:00 pm | to | 9:30 pm |
The Women of Vision Awards Banquet, hosted by the Anita Borg Institute Board of Trustees, honors women making significant contributions to technology. One winner is selected in each category: Innovation, Leadership, and Social Impact.
MAY 12, 2010
6:00 – 7:00 pm ~ Reception
7:00 – 9:30 pm ~ Dinner Banquet
Mission City Ballroom – adjacent to the Santa Clara Convention Center
5001 Great America Parkway
Santa Clara, CA 95054
Please visit the Women of Vision page for more information.
Women of Vision Awards
| May 8, 2008 | ||
| 6:00 pm | to | 9:30 pm |
The Women of Vision (WOV) Awards honor women making significant contributions to technology in three categories: Innovation, Leadership, and Social Impact. Nominees are submitted by high-tech companies, universities, private industry, and the public, with one winner selected in each category.
Women of Vision Nominations Due
| January 26, 2007 | ||
| 3:00 pm |
The Women of Vision (WOV) Awards honor women making significant contributions to technology in three categories: Innovation, Leadership and Social Impact. Nominees are submitted by hi-tech companies, universities, private industry and the public, with one winner selected in each category. More outstanding women will be honored at the next Women of Vision dinner gala.
Women of Vision Gala Awards Dinner
| May 3, 2007 | ||
| 7:00 pm | to | 11:00 pm |
A gala dinner to honor this year’s Women of Vision award recipients will be held at 7:00pm on May 3, 2007 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, California. Tickets and tables may be purchased online beginning February 1, 2007.
Janie Tsao Acceptance Speech
Women of Vision Leaedership Award
Thank you.
Good evening. I am very fortunate to work in the center of the technology field, Cisco systems. I see many professional women who are devoted and leading their teams. Therefore, it is such an honor for me to be awarded tonight, because there are really a lot of women leaders out there doing wonderful contributions. So, I want to thank Anita Borg, and a lot of you that have supported me.
So, I took a step back to think “What made me deserving of this honor tonight?” The conclusion came very quickly to me that it has been the contribution and recognition that my entire organization Linksys and Cisco has received. I have simply been in a position to help drive the passion, expertise, creativity and vision. It has personally been a great honor to be apart of technology that has helped change the way we work, live, learn and play.
Seventeen years ago, my husband Victor and I started our own business from the garage after a few years of corporate experience. That is Linksys. It was a pure opportunity at the time. The experiment and adventure soon turn into passion, and eventually leads to a 17 years journey and is still going.
Some of you might be familiar with the name of Linksys. We connect your broadband service into the rest of the devices in your home by offering a gateway product and a lot of connectivity adapters. So, we help millions of broadband homes connecting the PCs, printers, stereos, TVs, phones, gaming consoles, and more. The key is that we not only connect, we also distribute the contents in your home. Content like photos, music, movies, phone calls, are touching our lifestyle and forming the way we live. So, the Linksys technology is not something remote, our technology is actually embedded into your new ways of living.
Let me give you a scenario that you are throwing a party Sat. night with a few good friends. You just want to share your last vacation and have a good time. All of your vacation photos and favorite song lists are all on your PC. We have a device connecting to your TV and stereo that will stream your songs to the downstairs stereo and the photo into a slide show onto the TV. So, you have the right atmosphere and your goofy vacation pictures are on TV slide show. But, the excitement does not stop here. We have better vision and more products that will fulfill your digital dream and shape the next generation’s lifestyle even more. With that vision, networking giant Cisco acquired Linksys over two and half years ago. Of course, I am bias when thinking Linksys is unique in its own way.
Unique, indeed. After the acquisition, we have been operating as an independent division of Cisco systems for over two and half years. In order to fit a 14-year old & 400 plus million totally entrepreneurial company into a large organization does take quite a few different elements to manage the operations. Because we are independent, we are measured of our own success. It is not like we suddenly gain ten thousand sales forces when we are part of Cisco. To take or not to take help from corporate, and balance the morale is a science and art of its own. And, it is even more critical that we keep our responsiveness because our market dynamics can change in a very short period. So, emerging our old culture to adapt proper process so the organization can scale into a multi-billion dollar organization takes more than just leadership. It takes everyone’s commitment to form and shape the right elements into our new culture.
Therefore, today, the leadership of this award comes from the company’s market position, our culture, our technology innovation that changes your and my lifestyle, our business model, and our can-do attitude of managing the day to day business and being successful. I have to admit that without my team’s dedication, and devotion, I would not be here standing before you this evening.
For the young audience that is here tonight thinking about getting into technology either by entering into a large organization or owning your own business, at certain time, you will be searching for a crystal ball to guide you and lead you to success. Let me tell you the bad news first. There is really no crystal ball. But, the good news is, that just because there is no crystal ball, that means we are all starting out at the same point with a dream of a successful and meaningful career. It is up to us individually to pull ahead and make something of ourselves. As women we must make use of our talents and our nature such as being more thorough on tasks, more detailed oriented on presentations or even more methodical on how we use our time and work space. By default of those nature & talents, wouldn’t you think that you have a head-start of the opportunities that come your way?
So, I want to share with you that for all the years of my career, I have been passionate and persistent in reaching my goal. I learn to listen carefully to understand the situation. With the passion, I get to devote myself and not let anything or anymore really discourage me. I earn my confidence by achieving one small goal at a time. To share this with you is because I want to encourage you to do something you really love for I promise it will show in the work you do, the relationships you build with others and the success you will have throughout your life. Trust in yourself, be honest and don’t give up on your dreams.
Thank you all again for this honor tonight. I wish a lot of our young audience here tonight with the best of luck.
Pamela Samuelson-Acceptance Speech
Women of Vision for Social Impact:
“Making a Difference in High Technology Law”I am not a computing professional by formal training. I studied history, political science, and law and did not initially intend to become a technology lawyer. Through the generous mentoring of many computing professionals, including most notably my husband Bob Glushko, I have had the opportunity to learn enough about computing to write about it intelligently. In the past twenty-some years, I have devoted my career to making a positive difference in the computing field in three ways: first, by developing ideas about how the law should adapt to meet the challenges posed by advances in information technology; second, by writing articles in computing journals such as Communications of the ACM and speaking at computing conferences to enable technologists to become more knowledgeable about intellectual property issues affecting their field; and third, by becoming an activist to work with others, including those in the technology community, to shape sound law and policy affecting the computing field.
As both a scholar and an activist, I have been engaged with many of the leading law and technology debates of the past two decades: fighting against the – look and feel – software copyright lawsuits, fighting for the right to reverse engineer copyrighted software for legitimate purposes such as achieving interoperability; questioning the appropriateness of software patents; challenging the Clinton Administration’s unwarranted extension of copyright protection, both domestically and abroad; working to stop ill-conceived database and information licensing legislation; persuading courts to interpret the DMCA anti-circumvention rules narrowly; and working to preserve the right of technology developers to make technologies capable of substantial non-infringing uses.
Like Anita Borg, in whose memory we meet tonight, I have strongly encouraged women to become active contributors to the computing field, although those I encourage do so more as computer lawyers than as computer scientists. I am pleased to report that there are many outstanding young women in the computing law field today, some of whom I have had the pleasure to teach and mentor. Like those among you who founded the Anita Borg Institute to carry on her mission, I have worked to build institutions to carry on my work. In addition to serving on the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and for several years on the ACLU of Northern California, I have been a member of an Advisory Board for the Electronic Privacy Information Center and on the USACM Public Policy Committee. I have also worked with various information technology industry associations and other activist groups.
Along with several Boalt students, I also helped to found a high technology law and public policy clinic that trains law students, as well as graduate students from computer science and the information school at which I hold my joint appointment, to work together to advance the public interest in high technology law. The Boalt clinic, which is like a mini-law firm within a law school, represents clients such as Consumers Union, the Internet Archive, and open source developers, through filing amicus curiae (or friend of the court) briefs in pending court cases, drafting legislation and testimony for legislative hearings, and participating in technical standards committees. The idea of a high tech law clinic, first started at Boalt, has spread. There are now high tech clinics at about twenty law schools, including Boalt, Stanford, Harvard, USC, and American University . As my husband Bob likes to say, the public interest in high technology law now has an army to fight for the public interest. It is a small army, but these clinics have been producing dozens of lawyers each year who have advanced the public interest in high tech law. Even when these students go off to work at law firms, they know that technology law has public interest dimensions.
I first began writing about technology law because it was just plain interesting. In the early 1980’s both copyright and patent law professionals were having difficulties figuring out what to do with computer programs. Viewed from one perspective, computer programs ought to be protectable by copyright law because in source code form programs seem to qualify as original works of authorship. Yet, once compiled into machine-executable form, they are virtual machines and machine processes, which has long been the province of patent law. Patent law too had difficulties with programs and program-related inventions: with programs because they are texts, which is traditionally copyright, not patent, subject matter, and with program-related inventions such as algorithms because they are mathematical ideas. Although intellectual property debates about patents and copyrights for software date back to the mid-1960’s, it wasn’t until the 1980’s that the computer software industry was at a stage that it made a significant difference which law, if either, applied to programs and what scope of protection these laws might provide to programs.
For the first several years of my work on software intellectual property law, I wrote articles in law reviews and in CACM to analyze ongoing litigation, such as the Apple v. Microsoft and Lotus v. Borland – look and feel – lawsuits. At some point, I realized that writing articles about train wrecks that I thought were about to happen wasn’t enough. So I became an activist. Sometimes it felt like I was throwing myself on the train tracks to try to stop the wreck. I wrote amicus curiae briefs for intellectual property professors in cases that were pending before courts and worked with other professors on their briefs and recruited other professors to join in. It was deeply satisfying to realize that law professors could speak with one voice and help the courts analyze the implications of rules for which understandably self-interested litigants were fighting. The briefs we filed in key software copyright cases were influential in helping judges apply copyright law to software in a way that would protect it against market-destructive appropriations but not so as to stifle competition and innovation.
The most recent friend of the court brief that the high tech clinic at Boalt and I undertook in the last year was one filed with the US Supreme Court in the MGM v. Grokster case. (A very talented young computer science graduate student Marci Meingast was part of this amicus team.) Sixty intellectual property law professors signed onto this brief, as did the USACM Public Policy Committee.
MGM, as you may know, sued Grokster for copyright infringement, claiming that it was liable for the infringing acts of users of its peer to peer file sharing program. MGM argued that Grokster had intentionally designed this technology to enable infringement, that it had supplied this technology to users knowing or having reason to know they would use it to infringe, and that Grokster could have designed the technology to thwart infringement, but chose not to in order to encourage infringement. Grokster defended this lawsuit by claiming that its software had and was capable of substantial non-infringing uses and hence that it qualified for a safe harbor that the Supreme Court had recognized in its 1984 Sony v. Universal decision that allowed Sony to continue to sell Betamaxes because they were widely used for time-shifting purposes. The two lower courts agreed with Grokster, but no one was surprised when the Supreme Court decided to hear MGM’s appeal.
The principal argument in our amicus brief was that by MGM was asking the Supreme Court to make technology policy, not to apply the copyright statute. Each of the alternative standards for technology developer liability for user infringements for which MGM was arguing would have radically shifted the balance of power between the entertainment industry and the technology industry. If the law needed to be changed, we argued that the change should come from Congress because it, not the Court, has the institutional competence to identify the affected stakeholders, gather facts about matters arguably calling for a policy response, assess the costs and benefits of various proposed solutions, and craft rules that balance competing interests.
While the Supreme Court did decide the case in MGM’s favor, it did so on a very narrow ground. It sent the case back to the lower courts to consider whether Grokster had induced its users to engage in copyright infringement, a theory that MGM had not actually argued below. I believe that our brief helped to persuade the Supreme Court to preserve the Sony safe harbor for technologies with substantial non-infringing uses, on which innovative technologists depend every day.
