Especially at a time when unemployment is high and our economy is weak, we cannot afford to lose anyone with the technical skills to create a sustainable future, improve health, build our cyber and physical infrastructure, and enhance personal and societal security.

A diverse set of minds needs to tackle those problems. But we are largely missing out on women’s intelligence, creativity, and values in solving the problems we all face.

Why is this so? [Read More]

Peter Chapman – Male Runner-Up

Senior at University of Virginia

Peter Chapman is a Senior at the University of Virginia majoring in Computer Science and Cognitive Science.

Computer security and privacy is a critical concern, especially when medical issues are involved. Peter developed a method for automatically searching web applications to find side-channel vulnerabilities in web applications. He applied new statistical tools to better describe these vulnerabilities. In the end, he determined that 88% of queries to Google Health could be recovered by an eavesdropping adversary.

Peter has also worked on secure computation, where parties collaborate on computing a function of two inputs without exposing the inputs to each other. He has proposed novel applications of secure computation in smartphones, and is working on an improved approach to mobile secure computation, relying on the network carrier to provide suitable streams of randomness.

You can read more about the side-channel analysis work at http://www.cs.virginia.edu/sca/ and about the mobile secure computation work at http://www.MightBeEvil.com/mobile.

It’s not a myth. The technology industry is in the midst of a hiring surge stronger than any we’ve seen since the days of the dot-com boom. InfoWorld’s interviews with economists, technology executives, job seekers, and hiring board managers indicate that employment in the tech sector is up a solid 10 percent this year — by some bullish estimates, closer to 20 percent. And despite the tendency of the media to fixate on California’s Silicon Valley, the hottest job markets are in places like New York and Washington, D.C., where firms in financial services and the federal government hire droves of IT hands.

At Harvard, alongside computer science, Zuckerberg also studied psychology. He says Facebook springs from both disciplines: “Those two things together really represent the DNA of Facebook… There are a lot of great technology companies and there are people who think about social issues, but there aren’t a lot people doing both.”

Peter was selected as the Runner-Up, and Jiamin Chen and Virginia Smith were selected as Honorable Mentionees.

Congratulations to Jiamin, Peter, and Virginia!

For a list of previous winners, see the Awards page.

To Innovate, ‘Make Sure the Experts Think You’re Nuts,’ Kamen Tells Engineers, UVa Today, 19 November 2011.

Kamen told his audience of mostly engineering students and professors that one way to make innovation happen is to “make sure the experts in the field think you’re nuts.” He said new ideas should go from “indefensible to indispensible,” and that innovative thinking will lead to many failures but also to new ways to solve society’s most challenging problems, such as clean water and power shortages for two-thirds of the world’s population.

As a boy, he said, he was inspired by the “David and Goliath” story, in which little David defeated the giant Goliath with technology – a slingshot. He encouraged the future engineers to think beyond their own fields. “Become interested in people from different fields, different backgrounds and see what you can do that’s new. You have this little spot of time between eternities to do something amazing – don’t waste it.”

Rice Hall Dedication, NBC 29, 18 November 2011.

Celebrity inventor speaks at dedication of UVa’s new science building, Daily Progress, 19 November 2011.

President Sullivan

Dean Aylor

Paul Rice

Ribbon Cutting

Dean Kamen

Dean Kamen and Coca-Cola: Largest Health Care Company in the World

Do you have any advice for current computer science students?
Find a mentor… Fortunately, there’s an easier way to find a mentor — asking a professor to be one for you. I recommend showing up to office hours of the professors you are fans of and asking them directly. [Read More]