@T: ALWAYS THE TWAIN

Yesterday’s W-Tech event was designed to encourage women to pursue careers in technology and be successful in the sector. Workshop topics ranged from ‘Project Management’ to ‘Getting Your Research Project Funded’ to ‘How Smart Women Manage their Careers’. Speaking to some of the other attendees throughout the day, quite a few of them chose to attend the workshops on personal branding, political savvy and emotional intelligence. I selected ones where either the technology is at the bleeding edge or the speaker is someone I need to know to help my career — like Gary Bullard who presented the ‘Negotiate Your True Worth’ seminar. Previously he was President, BT Global Services and now he runs a company that supports talented female executives in advancing their careers and getting senior roles in big companies.

Anyway, these were the workshops I chose to sit in on and listen to:

· Funding Your Hi-Tech Start Up

· Cloud Computing and the Law

· Google’s MapReduce

· Interacting with Technology — MS Surface

· Negotiating Your True Worth

· Confidence + Credibility

· Closing session: Achieving in the Technology Profession (panel comprised senior female technology MDs from Goldman Sachs, Accenture, IBM, London 2012, Deloitte and P+G).

It was a really enjoyable and educational day and I managed to swap business cards with people who are incredibly inspirational.

MS Surface + Communicator

Also at yesterday’s event I got up close and personal with the Microsoft Surface product. At the moment, the product is retailing for GBP8000 in the UK for the consumer version and GBP10,000 for the developers’ version. The MS demonstrator showed us several programs that are available on the system:

· Finguistics — a foreign languages learning package

· Vitruview — a medical visualization package which allows doctors to show patients their medical conditions with 3D images which can be rotated, enlarged etc. Vitru is in reference to da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

· Unified Office Communicator — a system that combines a motion-detection sensor with a 360 panoramic view web cam, voice-activated mobile services that allow users to access and update their emails, swap and collaborate on documents, and a P2P IM channel that can record conversations. The entire solution is designed to enable remote working and collaboration across different locations.

MS Communicator was what interested me the most. The demonstrator said the solution has been around for 3-4 years. This isn’t exactly right; it’s been at MS for about 3 years. However, its history stretches back to the late 1990s.

I know this because it was one of the incubations in my investment portfolio at the bank. It was developed in-house, rolled out as our internal communications tools, opened up as a consortia offering to the other Tier 1 banks to facilitate external communications and later successfully spun out. It preceded Skype and is technically more robust and secure because its original audience was the financial services sector where information security requirements are high. This was all before it became a consumer product at MS, via the acquisition of the company a few years ago. One of the original patent owners and I are still in touch.

GoogleMap Reduce

The audience was shown the results from a study by Matthew Gray and Dave Petrou. They’d written a software program that scanned through all of the books deposited in Google Books looking for any mentions of place names. The books included the Gutenberg collection and dated from 1600 to today. Using this data, they’d mapped the longitude and latitude of these places mentioned in books. The map results were displayed for 1600, 1700, 1800, 1900 and 2000. The Google representative observed how it started with a concentration of locations in Europe, which then migrated over to the States and spread gradually to Africa and Australasia. She commented that India didn’t seem to be mentioned much in the literature that had been scanned.

Well, there was a much more obvious missing contribution: China.

So I raised my hand and observed that perhaps the name tags in the search algorithms used show a bias towards Europe and America because they’re in English and use the alphabet. If the name tags picked up Chinese characters instead of English, for example, then the incidence and frequency of Chinese locations on the books map would be higher. I also noted that the search result differences between me searching with Chinese characters in Google.com is different from when I search in Google.cn and different again when I use Google Translation Services.

She said that my point is an extremely good one and would make an interesting project.

Then I said that this type of mapping is also relevant to Semantic Web developments and our increasing attempts to differentiate text-based words. I noted that every time the word “Paris” appears in a book it may not be in reference to the capital city of France but to Homer’s character in the Iliad, for example.

Later, when she referred to how the central character in Frankenstein moved from ingolstadt University to Geneva, I asked whether it may be possible in the future for MapReduce to have some type of time flex so that we can trace not only where locations that appear in books are, but also when the characters or the author(s) arrived there.

Later still, when she discussed loads and cluster processing I asked whether theoretically instead of mapping locations mentioned in books, MapReduce might be applied to mapping and predicting the incidence of economic bubbles and potential bursts. She said that she’d use linear regression to do that. I noted that with linear regression outliers would need to be removed and also there’s no dynamic longitude-latitude pinpointing.

Anyway, the take-away from the seminar she said that the points I raised would make very interesting code projects and I said I’d send her some links and materials to reports on the recent global economic crisis, which have numbers etc. that can be plugged into MapReduce.

Applying technology in a good way to monitor and prevent future global financial crisis and value destruction of US$ trillions that affect millions of households globally is something I believe in. If this tiny suggestion of mine to test MapReduce in this way and see what results it produces works, then that’s another step forward in the right direction.

Oh and here’s some interesting quotes from her presentation:

· If you have one server, it may stay up 3 years (1000 days);

· If you have 10,000 servers expect to lose 10 a day.

· With MapReduce, they lost 1600 of 1800 machines once, but the processing finished fine.

Here’s a Google Roundtable on MapReduce from YouTube:

London 2012

During the event we also got to see the first screening of London 2012’s new promotional video. It shows the integration of sports with local communities and the way Olympic venues are shaping up. The music track on the video is sung by Leona Lewis with Jimmy Page on the guitars, which was first performed at the close of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

How women can succeed in technology

The last seminar of the day focused on experiences and tips from a handful of senior women in technology about career progression and being mentored. Some of them were of the opinion that there is no pay or promotion differential between the sexes whilst others commented on the male culture they’d had to learn to deal with.

All of them paid tribute to their families as role models and highlighted the following as having played a part in their careers (in no particular order):

· authenticity

· knowing their business well

· prioritization

· calculated risks

· training

· growing into the role

· economic independence

· LUCK and serendipity

Later, I caught up with the MD of Goldman Sachs and we swapped notes on our experiences with male bosses and whether some of her fellow panelists’ horror stories about lost opportunities and pay differentials because of men have any validity. We both noted that we’d been extremely lucky and hadn’t experienced the discriminatory issues other women have.

I think she’s spot-on when she says it’s about our own attitudes, approaches and outlooks on our careers and male-female dynamics too.

My male manager at the bank could not do more to support my career or advance it:

· He approved financing for the best training I could possibly get.

· He publicly and privately credited me for the work I produced.

· He went to a Special Committee to present the case for my fast-track promotion.

· He recommended me into CEO-Chairman’s Office to contribute to and support the CEO’s corporate agenda.

· He remains one of my mentors now and acts as a sounding board for my ideas on strategy, banking and business.

There are some PHENOMENAL bosses out there — male and female. We just have to hope that luck and serendipity brings them across our paths and we have the opportunity to be guided by them and to follow their example.

On a final note, the event also enabled me to experience my first-ever coaching session, ‘Confidence and Credibility’. The coach reminded the audience of the importance of posture and that it can send signals to others of whether they can entrust their projects, pets and even children to that person. Then she showed us how we should stand.

All of a sudden she called out, “Up there I see a woman I’d gladly hand over my kids to right this second!”

Over two hundred pairs of eyes turned and looked right at me!

It’s just as well I don’t have too many complexes or I’d have turned bright red. The fact is I’ve always been self-assured, have a certain amount of kudos and am ready to take on responsibilities. Plus I went to dance lessons and played lots of sport as a kid, so standing up properly and being ready to compete and be a team player is something I’m trained in.

If the coach wants to entrust her kids to me, fine. I’d prefer to take care of my own, though — LOL.