Mitchell Baker, Jan Cuny and Yuqing Gao Lauded for
Outstanding Innovation, Leadership, and Social Impact
PALO ALTO, Calif. — May 11, 2009 —The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI) hosted its fourth annual Women of Vision Awards banquet on April 30th to honor three leaders in technology: The evening highlighted the winners’ accomplishments and contributions in three areas: Innovation, Leadership and Social Impact.
Attracting 650 attendees, the attendees included industry and academic professionals and college women. More than 136 students attended the event, their attendance sponsored by technology companies and local universities.
Padmasree Warrior, CTO of Cisco, was the keynote speaker at the event. Her speech, entitled “Fear Stays Silent While Passion Speaks”, addressed five themes she has evolved throughout her career:
- Every transition brings a growth opportunity
- You can gain speed at a turn
- Leaders blur boundaries
- The best way to gain recognition is to give it away
- Opportunity is a mold waiting to be reshaped
In her acceptance speech, Yuqing Gao, winner in the Innovation category for her development of a speech to speech translation technology, spoke of her two guiding principles, “focus and risk taking” and that “without the sense of being challenged and the desire of conquering the challenges, there would be no path for progress and innovation”.
Jan Cuny, winner in the Social Impact category, spoke about the need to include underrepresented minorities and women in computing. “We need them because, as a nation, we are really dangerously under-producing the number of undergraduate and graduate degrees that we need to keep a competitive IT workforce. We need them because without their talents and creativity we’ll miss opportunities for innovation.”
Leadership winner, Mitchell Baker, spoke about her hope that “all of us work to empower ordinary people or seemingly ordinary people to enable more of us to do extraordinary things and see what kind of results we can achieve.
The evening concluded with Kathleen Collins, representing Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, who presented the three winners with Special Congressional Recognition Certificates.
The 2009 Women of Awards was supported by a Dinner Host – Lockheed Martin. Silver sponsors were Cisco, NetApp, SAP and Symantec. Bronze Sponsors were Adobe, Career Action Center, Google, Intuit, and Juniper. The growth of this event over last year marks an increase in both financial support and recognition of the importance of the Anita Borg Institute’s mission.
About the Women of Vision Award Winners
Mitchell Baker, Chairperson, Mozilla Corporation
Mitchell Baker is the Women of Vision Award winner in the Leadership category. Mitchell Baker is recognized for her work as the leader of the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to openness and innovation on the Internet. Her work with the Mozilla Foundation and the Firefox Web Browser has evolved the technology around web browsing with more than 200 million users worldwide. Her leadership in the Open Source movement has impacted millions of people, through her way of integrating and unifying the work of company employees and an international community of volunteers.
Yuqing Gao, Senior Manager, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Yuqing Gao is the Women of Vision Award winner in the Innovation category. Yuqing Gao headed the Laboratory for Speech to Speech Translation Systems at IBM. She was also the principal investigator of DARPA CAST and TransTac Programs at IBM and led the research and development of IBM MASTOR (Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator) systems which is leading the industry in automated speech translation. Her work in speech processing has led to the development of an English-Iraqi speech to speech translation system, which is deployed with the US military and enables personnel to interact directly with civilians in Iraq.
Jan Cuny, Program Director, National Science Foundation
Jan Cuny is the Women of Vision Award winner in the Social Impact category. Jan Cuny has been a passionate voice for women and under-represented minorities in her work with the National Science Foundation’s Broadening Participation in Computing Program. She has successfully created broader participation in computing programs. Her work has gone beyond funding programs to building an inclusive community for under-represented groups in technology, allowing them to use and create technology, ensuring they will be qualified for roles in our technology driven world.
About the Women of Vision Awards
The three Women of Vision award winners were selected from a field of more than 65 nominees, all of whom are engaged in technology professions in industry, academia, NGOs or government chosen by a selection committee of industry and academic leaders. Videos about the three winners are posted on the ABIWT channel on YouTube.
About the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI)
The Anita Borg Institute provides resources and programs to help industry, academia, and government recruit, retain, and develop women leaders in high-tech fields, resulting in higher levels of technological innovation. ABI programs serve high-tech women by creating a community and providing tools to help them develop their careers. ABI is a not-for-profit 501(c) 3 charitable organization. ABI Partners include: Google, Microsoft Corporation, HP, Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Intel, SAP, Lockheed Martin, NetApp, NSF, IBM, Symantec, Amazon, CA, Intuit, Genentech and Capgemini. For more information, visit www.anitaborg.org.
Media Contact:
Jerri Barrett
650-857-6095
jerrib@anitaborg.org