Each month, the Anita Borg Institute profiles Senior Technical Women. We have selected 7 questions and asked each of these amazing women to share their answers.
1. How did you decide to pursue a career in technology?
I somehow found myself in a career in technology after completing a masters in literary theory and a joint Ph.D. in psychology and linguistics. First the computer was just a tool for my research. I began using the first digital video editing programs, merely opportunistically, to do research on how people view boundaries between events in stories. And then I progressed to envisaging some kind of autonomous “virtual human” (before the phrase or the concept existed) as a way of evaluating competing theories of the relationship between language and nonverbal behavior in conversation. Then I got caught up in the fun of implementing things that then had an independent existence in the world. So, it feels like I didn’t *decide* to pursue a career in technology . . . I just found myself in that career one day. But, then again, I hear that women are more likely than men to say that their entire career was a series of accidental events, while men are more likely than women to say that they intended to end up somewhere and worked towards that goal. So, maybe this whole life narrative is a smoke screen for a deeply organized and focused path towards a set of career goals!
2. Based on your own experience, what skill(s) or characteristic(s) do you think are most important for technical women to succeed?
Perseverance (also known as stubbornness!), perfectionism, a sense of irony, passion for one’s work. I think women are uniquely positioned to break through barriers and push forward innovation. After all, they have already broken barriers and confounded expectations by becoming women in largely male-dominated fields!
3.What was the greatest challenge that you overcame in your career?
Myself.
4. How do you deal with work/life balance?
Actually, I don’t believe in the concept of a “work/life balance”. This phrasing seems to indicate that work and life are on opposite sides of the scale, competing with one another for my attention and my love. They seem to indicate that time spent on one takes away from time spent on the other. I, on the other hand, (try to) live a synergy model I have spent my whole life trying to *integrate* my work and my life, so that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. I did, after all, choose a career that is a life: academics (in vast majority) don’t go home at 5pm and leave their work at the office. And academics (in vast majority) socialize with their colleagues as well as non-work friends and family. So, in my case, a large part of my work is mentoring the next generation of researchers – junior faculty, post-docs, graduate students and undergraduates. And a large part of my life is cooking and feeding people. Those loves are not separate – just last weekend, for example, I put everything else aside to cook for two straight days (think: 12 lbs of ribs, 8 lbs of chicken, 5 lbs of potatoes, 8 quarts of cherry tomatoes, 9 quarts of strawberries . . .) and then welcomed into my home all of the undergraduate RAs who are working with me this Spring and Summer. What a bonus: the high that comes from feeding hungry and very appreciative 20 year olds . . . and to be able to have an influence on their tastes in the process! My vacations are, in large part, determined on where I am invited to give talks. I love that because it pushes me to explore unexpected places (and since the flight is paid for and the location is determined in advance, I can put my financial and planning energies into off-the-beaten path adventures). Anyway, you get the idea.
5. What advice would you give to women in high tech who want to advance on the individual contributor technical track specifically?
On the general level, I’d say: Follow your passion. If a topic really interests you, pursue it, as it will then surely interest others. Remember that just because nobody has done something in the past doesn’t mean it’s impossible. On the more concrete level, I’d say: make sure you cultivate relationships with mentors and with mentees – both kinds of relationships will help you. Ensure that you talk to others about your ideas – grab your courage in two hands and send out undone work for comments – the result will be better work and a community in which to flourish. Most of all, try hard to keep your passion alive, not let it get overtaken by insecurities and structural impediments to the fullest expression of your real contribution/creativity.
6. How do you stay current in your technical field?
Through interaction with my students, who do a great job telling me about new research and helping me find work that helps me think in new ways about my own research.
7. In your opinion, what (if any) are the remaining barriers faced by women in technology?
I still see a restricted number of roles attributed to women in technology, where by role I mean psychological role or stereotype attribution. That is, I still see strong women called “troublemakers” and gentle women called “weak,” successful women called “careerist” and struggling women called “incompetent”. Until accomplishment in the field is simply seen as accomplishment, and is not accompanied by noxious stereotypical attributions, I think women will not be on a level playing field.
Biography
Justine Cassell is the incoming director of the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Previously, she was the director of the Center for Technology & Social Behavior, and a full professor in the departments of Communication Studies and Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at Northwestern University. She is also the graduate director of the new Technology and Social Behavior joint PhD in Communication and Computer Science. She holds courtesy appointments in Learning Sciences, Linguistics, and Psychology.
Cassell previously held a tenured associate professor appointment at the MIT Media Lab where she directed the Gesture and Narrative Language Research Group.
Cassell won the Edgerton prize at MIT in 2001, was the recipient of the AT&T Research Chair at Northwestern in 2006, and in 2008 was awarded the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision award for Leadership (her acclaimed acceptance speech can be viewed here). In between, her work has been awarded a number of best paper prizes, and has received various other kinds of accolades.
She holds a master’s degree in Literature from the Université de Besançon (France), a master’s degree in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh (Scotland), and a double Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, in Psychology and in Linguistics.
Cassell’s research interests originated in the study of human-human conversation and storytelling. Progressively she became interested in allowing computational systems to participate in these activities. This new technological focus led her to deconstruct the linguistic elements of conversation and storytelling in such a way as to embody machines with conversational, social and narrative intelligence so that they could interact with humans in human-like ways. Increasingly, however, her research has come to address the impact and benefits of technologies such as these on learning and communication.
In particular, Cassell is credited with developing the Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA), a virtual human capable of interacting with humans using both language and nonverbal behavior. More recently Cassell has investigated the role that the ECA can play in children’s lives, as a Story Listening System (SLS): peer support for learning language and literacy skills. And Cassell has also employed linguistic and psychological analyses to look at the effects of online conversation among a particularly diverse group of young people on their self-esteem, self-efficacy, and sense of community.
Once machines have human-like capabilities, can they be used to evoke the best communicative skills that humans are capable of, the richest learning? This is the goal of Cassell’s research: to develop technologies that evoke from humans the most human and humane of our capabilities, and to study their effects on our evolving world.