I am at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2009 at Tuscon, Arizona. This is my fourth time at this conference and I hope to be able to come back to more. There are enthusiastic and energetic crowd of 1,600 technical women in industry, faculty, and students from 22 countries!

Few people, in the recent past, seem to know about Grace Hopper. Admiral Grace Hopper was one of the pioneer Computer programmers in 1940’s.  You can read more about her in the Biography of Naval History.  Grace Hopper popularized the term “bug” as applied to computers and it was the origin of the term “debugged”. Here  is a pic of the original real-life bug stuck to the data sheet that Grace Hopper and her team had displayed in their lab.

The original "bug" that introduced the term into Computer jargon

The original can be seen at the Naval Historical Center site.

Today, there was a workshop today by Jo Miller on “A Person of Influence”. It was followed by a panel discussion on the topic with diverse panelists. It was very thought provoking. More on my take-aways in a subsequent blog.

I am conducting a panel discussion tomorrow. It is titled “Women and the Flat Connected World”. I met a few of my panelists today. We will meet at breakfast tomorrow. I have some preparation to do.