Recent posts
A brief glimpse into my actual job
24 Jul 2012I can't often talk about the research I do at Lincoln Laboratory, but sometimes the curtain parts for a brief instant and allows a quick peek:
Four innovative technologies garner 2012 R&D 100 Awards for MIT Lincoln Laboratory
And while I'm at it, let me reiterate the fact that we're looking for more great people to come help solve important cryptographic problems:
- Automated Security Analysis Researcher (crypto and formal methods!)
- Applied Cryptographer (help bring homomorphic encryption to actual use)
- Malicious Code Analysis Researcher (what is this malware doing?)
That's just a sample. Many, many more positions here. (Hint: search for jobs associated with Groups 06-61, 06-68 and 06-69.)
On consulting
26 Jul 2011I made a promise, a few posts back, to answer a reader's question about consulting. In particular:
How do you get started in consulting? Do you wait for someone to approach you, or to you actively advertise your interest in taking on consulting work?
Dear reader: a good question, but not the most important one.
Why do I blog about the gender gap in computer science? I am not a research psychologist, and so don't care about the underlying mechanisms for their own sake. Likewise, I do not think of being a computer scientist as a privilege and so do not care about the social justice issues. No, my interest is pragmatic: more computer scientists means more technological progress, which means a better standard of living for me and my children. So to me, everything in this topic boils down to two questions:
- Are we losing potential computer scientists to other fields?
- If so, what can we do about it?
The answer to question (1) seems fairly settled by now: yes. In particular, we're losing women.1 Now, most of my posts on the topic have focused on a question not on the list above: why? This is not because I find the question of 'why' interesting in its own right (I don't) but because it might help me answer question (2). So, I'm very happy to report I've found a glimmer of hope in a paper that verifies the effectiveness of a specific, easily-implemented strategy to keep women in CS.
- 1. We might also be losing other minorities, such as racial minorities. In fact, I'm pretty sure we are, but I haven't found any good papers on the topic yet.
So, how bad is the gender gap in CS?
29 May 2011Via Sociological Images (who in turn got it from Kieran Healy) I stumbled across the eye-opening chart below:
