Fran Allen Wins Turing Award

shoemortgage writes "The Association for Computing Machinery has named Frances E. Allen the recipient of the 2006 A.M. Turing Award for contributions that fundamentally improved the performance of computer programs in solving problems, and accelerated the use of high performance computing. Allen,74, is the first woman to receive the Turing Award in the 41 years of its history. She retired from IBM in 2002."

Re:Rare Women

[Xeger]

Hmm. Can you think of anything about engineering that makes it undemocratic?

I follow your premise that childbirth isn't democratic -- it's a biological reality that only women bear children, and all women are affected by the biological and chemical side-effects of their ability to bear children.

However -- try as I might, I can't think of a single sex-specific talent or skill in the field of engineering. Are you claiming that males are biologically better at math, logic, spatial relationships, that sort of thing? I admit it's a tempting explanation for the lack of women in engineering fields. But I humbly invite you to consider that the ratio of of woman/man engineers is 5% greater today than it was 20 years ago; 10% greater than 40 years ago; and 100 years ago, women basically didn't engage in technical pursuits (except for rare, anomalous cases) and most technical schools didn't admit women.
(source [societyofw...ineers.org] for recent data)

So: if "engineering ability" is sex-linked, what is the explanation for the recent, dramatic rise in technical women? Is there some kind of genetic mutation occurring? One possible explanation is that women have some latent "engineering ability," though not enough to compete with men; in this case, we should expect the ratio of women/man engineers to converge on an equilibrium point somewhere below 50%.

Is there such an equilibrium point? Are women really less technically-oriented than men? As a rational person, I must admit it's a possibility. However, given that the proportion of women engineers has been trending steadily upward for the past 100 years, I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it to stabilize anytime soon. Personally, I think that in the 100-year timeframe, as old cultures and mores adapt to changing circumstances, we will see it approach 50%.

Re:

[db32]

Just to play devils advocate here a little. I have had some outstanding women supervisors and coworkers in the IT field, however, I have simply never had the same ammount of 'issues' with male supervisors and coworkers. The number of women I have worked with that are supremely offended by any suggestion that they may not be absolutely correct in all things IT blows my mind. I have never seen (not that it doesn't happen) a male coworker turn red screaming when it was insinuated that they were not correct.

Re:

[Xeger]

Based on my interactions with women engineers, I think "bitchiness" of women in technical fields is largely a social phenomenon. I've known three engineer-girls who seemed unnecessarily defensive of their ideas; ultimately, two of those three became less defensive over time as I worked closely with them and proved that I was capable of treating them with respect. After all, these are women whose opinions have been dismissed or overlooked throughout their careers simply because they're not "one of the guys."

Re:

[db32]

The problems I have run into were with totally unqualified women in IT who believed they were the best of the best and could not be questions. Some of these interactions I managed to mitigate by avoiding ever working on the same job with them, and they became pleasant in the office so long as there was no kind of technical work between us. Others just insisted they were correct in all things IT. One went so far to chastise me how dumb I was for not understanding that I had to turn on the FTP service on a

Re:

[NittanyTuring]

But I humbly invite you to consider that the ratio of of woman/man engineers is 5% greater today than it was 20 years ago; 10% greater than 40 years ago; and 100 years ago, women basically didn't engage in technical pursuits (except for rare, anomalous cases) and most technical schools didn't admit women.

The term "computer" was first used as job title for people who would do manual calculations; this position was usually held by women. 60 years ago, when electronic computers were invented, programming was a 100% female-dominated field. All the programmers of the ENIAC were women. It was, in fact, seen as unmanly. As soon as programming began to be perceived as challenging and worthwhile, the whole thing turned inside out.

Re:

[Xeger]

Alas, we cannot hold up those female "computing pioneers" as examples of women engineers because number crunching is only a small part of the discipline of engineering. It is a tool used by engineers, but it is not "engineering."

If 19th-century computers had been doing their own problem-solving, applying critical thinking, or designing systems of some sort (buildings, bridges, machinery), then I could agree that they were engineers. Unfortunately they were doing none of those things; they were simply proces

Re:

[Westacular]

There are obviously a wide variety of both cultural and biological factors that influence the likelihood of anyone going into engineering, and the distribution of these differs between men and women. The dramatic rise of technical women in the last century reflects the dramatic changes in cultural views on the role of women. It's impossible to define a specific equilibrium point for the male:female employment ratio because of the constant changes in both cultural views and in the structure of the workplace.

Re:

[Xeger]

That's quite a well-reasoned argument in favor of a potential gender disparity in the field of engineering. Indeed, I wouldn't expect the "natural" female/male ratio of engineers to be 50% -- but I suspect it is somewhat higher than 10%.

Thank you for taking the time to write such a thoughtful post.

Re:

[skinfaxi]

There are many recent cognitive and neurological studies that show statistically significant, complex patterns of sex differences in these skills.

Cite, please.

Re:

[Westacular]

Google scholar gives some good starting points [google.com]. A couple quick results:

DC Geary, SJ Saults, F Liu, MK Hoard, Sex differences in spatial cognition, computational fluency, and arithmetical reasoning [missouri.edu]. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2000.

This paper:

ES Spelke, Sex differences in intrinsic aptitude for mathematics and science: A critical review [harvard.edu]. American Psychologist, 2005.

criticizes studies that conclude any general disparity in skills, and argues that gender disparity seen in such fields does not hav

Re:

[PastaLover]

Now as a thought experiment take this post and replace all instances of "women" by "negros".

Re:

[bitt3n]

Do your figures take into account the increased number of women in the workforce? If the proportion of women in other fields has increased as much or more, simply on the basis of the fact that more women work than did 40 years ago, those numbers are not particularly useful.

Re:

[Xeger]

Good point. I lack the time to track down the numbers on women in the workforce, but the "woman engineer" numbers should be controlled for variances in "women worker."

Re:

[Have Brain Will Rent]

There are at least a couple of things going on that would support the "undemocratic" idea, and before anyone asks, no I don't have cites handy so proceed to ignore this if it makes you uncomfortable.

Many years ago (25?) there were studies that showed men were better able than women to visually (mentally) rotate objects or, equivalently, recognize the equivalence between two objects seen at different rotations. The application to engineering, maths, chemistry and physics are obvious.

Second, and afaik,

Re:

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

But I humbly invite you to consider that the ratio of of woman/man engineers is 5% greater today than it was 20 years ago; 10% greater than 40 years ago; and 100 years ago, women basically didn't engage in technical pursuits (except for rare, anomalous cases) and most technical schools didn't admit women.

Here is an invalid form of argument: We have a sequence of statements, A, B, C, ... ,Y, Z. We also have B=>A, C=>B, D=>C, ..., Z=>Y. We know A, B, C, ..., Y are true. Therefore Z is true.

In

Re:

[Xeger]

I didn't claim to offer any sort of proof that there is no gender disparity in engineering talent. Nor did I offer proof of the counter, for that matter. I simply made the (true) observation that the number of female engineers has been increasing linearly since women have entered the workforce, which suggests perhaps that it's too early to conclude that women are unsuitable for the engineering trade based solely on empirical evidence. We need to wait until the effects of centuries-long cultural bias against

Re: Resistence to Female Engineers

[Phrogman]

Well, I am not an engineer. I have known a few who were majoring in Engineering and employed as various types of Engineers thereafter. Pretty much all of them noted a low female Engineering population in University. For the most part this was seen by them as being due to the fact that Male Engineers resented the presence of women in their faculty, and tended to actively (and often boorishly) discourage them by making sure they knew they were not wanted. It wouldn't suprise me to see this attitude in those p

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow...flamebait indeed...how disgusting that the first handful of comments are immediately debasing the award winner as a token.

Why do you feel Allen's selection is so obviously inappropriate/undeserved on the merits that prima facie she's a 'token'?

I work in academia - computer science - and I'm not oblivious to the fact that there's a fair bit of 'affirmative action' for women and non-asian minorities to try to 'correct' the 'problem' of under-representation. Without diverting the conversation onto that

Re:

[P(0)(!P(k)+P(k+1))]

Without diverting the conversation onto that issue, please share why you feel Allen is egregiously undeserving?

Why not “deviate” thither? Like I said above, she may be the next Countess of Lovelace [wikipedia.org]; but to foist a false sense of democracy upon us in the name of her achievement is disingenuous.

Long live meritocracy!

Never heard of her before

[Per Abrahamsen]

And I'm not alone on that, her Wikipedia entry is only two weeks old.

She narrowly beat out a nun with the same name who lived 200 years ago, for first place in a Google search (they get an unimpressive 30k hits combined).

It is quite possible that she is a unacknowledged genius, but it is no surprise that the first reaction isn't "finally!" from most people.

Presumably, we will learn a lot more about her now. Maybe some FORTRAN parallelization experts will outline her contributions for us.

Re:Never heard of her before

[DevStar]

Actually my first response was "Finally!". I think the surprise exhibited by most people on Slashdot has more to do with the level of actual CS sophistication on Slashdot than it does anything else (which is consistently displayed on almost anything related to CS). Her work on program analysis and program transformation has completely changed the field in the same way that Codd changed databases or Thompson changed systems.
Also, RIP Ken Kennedy. Another true star in the field.

Re:Never heard of her before

[Helios1182]

There are very few famous computer scientists, and unless you are an academic or researcher in a given area of CS you don't necessarily know who the important people are. There are people like Dijkstra, Knuth, Rivest, Turing, etc. that almost everyone in CS has heard of, but it is a very limited number. The following is a list of all previous winners, all of whom have done a lot for the field, but I bet even on Slashdot the majority only know of the contributions of a few on the list. 2006 Allen, Frances E 2005 Naur, Peter 2004 Cerf, Vinton G. 2004 Kahn, Robert E. 2003 Kay, Alan 2002 Adleman, Leonard M. 2002 Rivest, Ronald L. 2002 Shamir, Adi 2001 Dahl, Ole-Johan 2001 Nygaard, Kristen 2000 Yao, Andrew Chi-Chih 1999 Brooks, Frederick P. 1998 Gray, James 1997 Engelbart, Douglas 1996 Pnueli, Amir 1995 Blum, Manuel 1994 Feigenbaum, Edward 1994 Reddy, Raj 1993 Hartmanis, Juris 1993 Stearns, Richard E. 1992 Lampson, Butler W. 1991 Milner, Robin 1990 Corbato, Fernando J. 1989 Kahan, William (Velvel) 1988 Sutherland, Ivan 1987 Cocke, John 1986 Hopcroft, John 1986 Tarjan, Robert 1985 Karp, Richard M. 1984 Wirth, Niklaus 1983 Ritchie, Dennis M. 1983 Thompson, Ken 1982 Cook, Stephen A. 1981 Codd, Edgar F. 1980 Hoare, C. Antony R. 1979 Iverson, Kenneth E. 1978 Floyd, Robert W 1977 Backus, John 1976 Rabin, Michael O. 1976 Scott, Dana S. 1975 Newell, Allen 1975 Simon, Herbert A. 1974 Knuth, Donald E. 1973 Bachman, Charles W. 1972 Dijkstra, E. W. 1971 McCarthy, John 1970 Wilkinson, J. H. 1969 Minsky, Marvin 1968 Hamming, Richard 1967 Wilkes, Maurice V 1966 Perlis, A. J.

Taking the test

[Per Abrahamsen]

I'll take it as a challenge, and see how many names I recognize without looking them up.
2005 Naur, Peter: The N of BNF, even if he prefer the N to stand for "Normal". He is most known here for mandating the use of Danish translations of computer terms when he worked at DIKU.

2004 Cerf, Vinton G. 2004 Kahn, Robert E: Someone in Al Gore's staff.

2003 Kay, Alan: Always talking about nothing at all,

2002 Adleman, Leonard M. 2002 Rivest, Ronald L. 2002 Shamir, Adi: Adleman should be last, I would not recognize the

Re:

[lakeland]

You did roughly as well as me. Here were a few I happened to recognise you missed:

1999, brooks is the mythical man
1996, something in compiler (langauge) theory from memory. Program proofs?
1981, You'll curse yourself for forgetting if I tell you - easy one.
1980, was Tony Hoare's Turing award for formalisms? I thought it was more prgamatic. Though of course he does do a lot of formalism stuff too)
1975, didn't he found expert systems in AI?
1974, beautiful description! Though I've almsot stopped using TeX m

Re:

[Per Abrahamsen]

1999: That was embarassing

1981: I have somehow managed to totally ignore DB stuff, so I don't recognize the name even knowing what he did. But I do know that rel. db are important enough for the award.

1980: Never bothered with why the awards were given, just whether I know the name.

1968: Yes, his invention being named after him and all.

Some were added specifically as award-winners

[Goonie]

A few years ago, I created something at least to stub level for all the Turing award winners who didn't already have articles. So, yes, at the time some of them got articles because they'd gotten the award. But I expect they've been improved considerably since then.

Re:

[Osvaldo Doederlein]

Complementing your list (also without google's help...)

Brooks, Frederick P.: The Mythical man Month, No Silver Bullet paper. Processualist.

Milner, Robin: From the Hindler-Millner typesystem used in ML and Haskell, and perhaps other functional languages too. Type inference stuff that gives you all the advantages of static typing without most of the type declaration work.

"1984 Wirth, Niklaus: You can call him by value; or you can call him by name." LOL!!

Codd, Edgar F.: Database pioneer, recently RIP.

Hoare, C.

Does she deserve the award?

[jacobw]

I'm not a computer scientist, so I don't know offhand if she deserves the award. However, I know a foolproof way to figure out if she does

Just put either her, or a previous winner of the award, in a sealed room and let me ask converse with them via slips of paper passed back and forth. If I can't tell the difference, then she must deserve the award.

Now, if only I can come up with a clever name for this test...

Re:

[seandiggity]

hahaha...I'm not a big fan of John Searle, but that was funny as hell.

Re:

[bitt3n]

I work in academia - computer science - and I'm not oblivious to the fact that there's a fair bit of 'affirmative action' for women and non-asian minorities to try to 'correct' the 'problem' of under-representation.

As may be the case here, affirmative action can worsen the problem it is trying to solve by inclining people to suspect that any accolade awarded to a member of a relevant group is unjustly bestowed, even when this is not true. Thus the blame cannot fall squarely on the shoulders of the person w

Re:So, has the black guy won yet?

[glwtta]

And, if we're lucky, maybe at some point they can dedge up a Native American with some mediocre qualifications too.

Yeah, next thing you know they'll be giving it to some gay guy.

Re:

[elrous0]

Will not...will not make Steve Jobs joke...will not make Steve Jobs joke....will not make...

-Eric

Re:

[RegularFry]

Oh, for mod points - +5, funny :-)

Re:

[bluewhale]

Yeah, but then it won't be so unexpected since Turing himself is gay.

Re:

[glwtta]

Yeah, but then it won't be so unexpected since Turing himself is gay.

He is? What a coincidence that I made that joke entirely by accident!

(btw, I'm pretty sure he's dead)

So wait...

[RyanFenton]

...Does this mean she's a cylon?

Ryan Fenton

Re:

[cp.tar]

If she is, I propose a toast for our new toaster overlords.

Re:

[hanzoach]

Hmm.. 74.. is she in Korea ?

Ironic

[wombatmobile]

I was glad to hear Fran Allen had won the Turing prize and went searching for an inspirational quote that would help me to appreciate the genius that sets her apart from other humans.

But alas... I only found these [thinkexist.com].

So I'm left wondering... maybe Fran Allen IS a computer...(?)

In which case... I'm excited! Fran Allen deserves the Turing prize!

Re:

[skoaldipper]

She [ibm.com] is the real deal alright.

Re:

[elrous0]

So, what exactly ARE these "algorithms and technologies that are the basis for the theory of program optimization today and are widely used throughout the industry"?

This is /., there must be hundreds of programmers here from every industry imaginable. Has anyone here ever even heard this woman's name before today?

-Eric

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFPR

"Allen's 1966 paper, Program Optimization, laid the conceptual basis for systematic analysis and transformation of computer programs. Her 1970 papers, Control Flow Analysis and A Basis for Program Optimization established "intervals" as the context for efficient and effective data flow analysis and optimization. Much of her early work was done in collaboration with John Cocke, an IBM computer scientist who died in 2002. Her 1971 paper with John Cocke, A Catalog of Optimizing Transformations, provid

Re:

[Otter]

There is something peculiar about how far you have to dig to even find what she worked on (optimizing compilers, apparently) and no one here seems to have heard of her. If you look at the history of the Lovelace Awards [awc-hq.org], she's only noted as "First woman to be named IBM Fellow", in contrast to "Adele Mildred Koss: Developed the first compilers" or "Betty Holberton: One of the six original programmers of ENIAC".

Yeah...

[tcdk]

So, what kind of test did she have to complete to qualify?

Re:

[TheRaven64]

The Loebner Test, obviously...

Fran on Wikipedia

[shudde]

Without getting too far into discussing whether she merited the award or not, since I'm not really qualified to judge. I find it interesting that her Wikipedia entry was only created on 6 February 2007 by a username that has made no other edits. I've always found the Wikipedia coverage of computer science fairly comprehensive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran_Allen [wikipedia.org]
Edit history of Jtaylord [wikipedia.org]

Re:

[elrous0]

Not to mention the fact that it just repeats, verbatim, her bio [witi.com] from a 1997 award she won.

-Eric

Re:Fran on Wikipedia

[TheRaven64]

I've always found the Wikipedia coverage of computer science fairly comprehensive

Coverage of computer science is good. Coverage of computer scientists is not. I was sent a link to a computer scientist on Wikipedia a few weeks ago, and it had the 'this is a stub' header across it. I tried searching for a few people I knew to be leaders in fields I've interacted with, and found that some were stubs and most didn't exist. Few people since Church and Turing have full articles, including most of the recent winners of the Grace Murray Hopper Award [wikipedia.org].

Re:

[zen-theorist]

Computer scientists in universities are well-represented in Wikipedia, because they are known by their students who have all the time in the world. Computer scientists at IBM/Microsoft Research are not all that well-represented, because they are known only by their boss and subordinates, both of who never heard of Wikipedia.

Not only have I not heard of Fran Allen but...

[cmacb]

I'm surprised Grace Hopper never received the award. When I was coming up in the industry she was always cited as one of the great pioneers of computing.

Re:

[Billosaur]

It would seem to be a slight of epic proportions... I wonder if they would deign to give her one now? But let's face it, the computing field has been male-dominated since its inception -- there's no reason to wonder it took so long for a woman of Fran Allen's stature to win the award. Perhaps this will bring to light the contributions of other women in the field.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

the computing field has been male-dominated since its inception

Ada Lovelace [wikipedia.org]

Re:

[lord_mike]

No slight...

She invented COBOL.

That fact alone should prevent her from receiving any major computer science award for at least the next 1000 years.

Thanks,

Mike

Alan Turing vs. Grace Hopper

[Per Abrahamsen]

Alan Turing never won the Grace Murray Hopper Award [wikipedia.org] either, so that seems fair.

Well, him being dead well before the GH award was invented could explain it, but none the less. Having an award named after you kind of make up for not winning an award.

Re:

[OldAndInTheWay]

I am lucky (and old) enough to have attended a lecture by Grace Hopper. She had an uncommon skill at presenting computing technology that was accessible to both technical and nontechnical folks. Fascinating, dynamic, a chain smoker, and perhaps all of 5 feet tall. I still have one of her nanoseconds - a wire cut to the length that an electrical signal can travel in a nanosecond.

Re:

[lakeland]

She'd have been TOO early. The Turing awards didn't start until about 1970, by which time she had kinda finished 'Pioneering'.
Not that the Turing awards avoid giving retrospective awards (Naur for instance) but it seems more common to give it to semi recent research.

I agree

[MarkoNo5]

She was the first person to realise you could use computers for other things than computing mathematical formulas, and that it should be programmable in a language resembling english. To realize that in that time must have taken an insane amount of insight. Many advances come from seeing a problem, and solving it. But she didn't really have problem to see! Everybody else thought she was crazy, that it could never be done. Computers performed mathematical calculations and were programmed using assembly or ma

Re:

[CelticLo]

You'll be digging up Ada next.

I, for one

[ACE209]

I, for one, shall greet our new 'female geek' overlords.

(sorry for that - but the overlord-semi-joke was posted only once here - until now.)

Too much Aqua Teen...

[nospmiS remoH]

Man, this is sad. I was scanning the RSS and I read "Frat Aliens Win ..." and of course I clicked the link immediately based on that :).

Re:

[nb caffeine]

My dad totally owns this dealership

Re:

[elrous0]

"Frat Aliens Win ..."

You know, the great thing is, no matter how you finish that title it would make a GREAT movie.

-Eric

Astronomy

[Bastard of Subhumani]

I thought she discovered the Fran Allen belts.

Typical. No mention of why.

[zuiraM]

I'm going to RTFA for this, but why is the article just saying "whoa, a turing award recipient didn't have the Y-chromosome", and not saying *what* she got it for? If her work is so noteworthy as to be deserving of the Turing award, isn't it worth a mention on Slashdot? The real story isn't just that a woman got it, for once, but also what she got it for.

Most, if not all, articles where men get some award, the focus tends to be the work they did, not the fact that they have an extra appendage dangling betwe

Only woman?

[bronsinbound]

Didn't Grace Hopper win the Turing Award years ago?