Why are There so Few Female Computer Scientists?

This report examines why women pursue careers in computer science and related fields far less frequently than men do. In 1990, only 13% of PhDs in computer science went to women, and only 7.8% of computer science professors were female. Causes include the different ways in which boys and girls are raised, the stereotypes of female engineers, subtle biases that females face, problems resulting from working in predominantly male environments, and sexual biases in language. A theme of the report is that women's underrepresentation is not primarily due to direct discrimination but to subconscious behavior that perpetuates the status quo

Dataflow Computation for the J-Machine

The dataflow model of computation exposes and exploits parallelism in programs without requiring programmer annotation; however, instruction- level dataflow is too fine-grained to be efficient on general-purpose processors. A popular solution is to develop a "hybrid'' model of computation where regions of dataflow graphs are combined into sequential blocks of code. I have implemented such a system to allow the J-Machine to run Id programs, leaving exposed a high amount of parallelism --- such as among loop iterations. I describe this system and provide an analysis of its strengths and weaknesses and those of the J-Machine, along with ideas for improvement

ParaSite : mining the structural information on the World-Wide Web

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1998.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 126-128).by Ellen Spertus.Ph.D

Parasite: Mining structural information on the web

Web information retrieval tools typically make use of only the text on pages, ignoring valuable information implicitly contained in links. At the other extreme, viewing the Web as a traditional hypertext system would also be mistake, because heterogeneity, cross-domain links, and the dynamic nature of the Web mean that many assumptions of typical hypertext systems do not apply. The novelty of the Web leads to new problems in information access, and it is necessary to make use of the new kinds of information available, such as multiple independent categorization, naming, and indexing of pages. This paper discusses the varieties of link information (not just hyperlinks) on the Web, how the Web differs from conventional hypertext, and how the links can be exploited to build useful applications. Specific applications presented as part of the ParaSite system find individuals ' homepages, new locations of moved pages, and unindexed information