Before the keynote, we got to watch a video “I am a Technical Women”.

It is heartening to see so many technical woman who are proud to be geeks! The hope is that the video will help inspire girls and women everywhere with the wonderful diversity of technical women. This video celebrates everything that is wonderful about women. It changes the image of technology by showing the world that women from all over the world belong in technical fields.

Megan Smith, VP at Google.org started her keynote presentation by telling us about the MIT admission question that she had to answer when she was applying there. “What animal would you be and why?”. The interesting thing is that most boys wrote about an eagles (high vantage point, get to fly & soar) and most girls wrote about dolphins (travel in groups and are interconnected). (Incidentally, Smith wrote about wanting to be an Arctic Tern!)

The first area Smith touched on was “interconnectedness in developing world”. As Smith showed the search statistics (on a very interesting map with light emanating from it) and showed that although Google gets billions of search queries from around the world, there is  close to zero traffic from Africa.  There is a big pool of talented people in Africa but they are not connected to the rest of the world. However, broadband is going to the continent and there were pictures she had from Kenya and other countries showing work in progress.

The second area that Smith focused on was “interconnectedness of data”. She talked about major initiative from Google, which targets Healthcare. The effort is to get the health records accessible and move all the paper based health records online. It is interesting to see how Google set up a real time information website to track the recent flu trends. Days before the CDC knows about official epidemic numbers, Google’s virus trend application queries for data in real time and you can get to see information about diseases.

Smith then went on to talk about “Interconnectedness of Civil Liberty and Personal Empowerment”.  Facebook, Twitter and social networks have had a positive impact in the word.  People feel that they are not alone and they can let each other know what is going on in their lives or in their world. An example she used was about Congo, where women are often victims of rape. There has been an initiative to alert women through SMS about which streets are safe to walk on. Her other illustration included the “Voices against FARC” movement in Columbia where a million demonstrators rallied against FARC. The group was mobilized by the power of SMS and Facebook updates. The outcry after the recent Iranian elections is another example where social networking played an important role in mobilizing the communities against evil. She referred to the Alliance of Youth Movements Summit (held in New York City, March’09 ) and the New York Times special edition (8.23.09) on women fighting against oppression. I have these on my reading list.

Smith’s last topic was about the impact of computer science on environment. We can use technology to solve the renewable energy problem, make it cheaper than conventional energy and be able to compete with it.  We have to invent our way out of the energy crisis. Smith gave other examples similar to Yunus Muhammad’s micro loans idea, the movement for solar installations, and the OVC initiative which are doing well.

The GHC Conference theme is “Creating Technology for Social Good”, and Smith’s talk emphasized the need to step back and take a look at all the technology that has been created and relook at how this can be used for social good. She posed several questions to the audience to ponder over.

I enjoyed her talk.