| Associate
Professor of Computer Science (on leave 2007-2009) Mills College 5000 MacArthur Blvd. Oakland, CA 94613 spertus@mills.edu Voice: 510-430-2011 Fax: 510-430-3314 |
Research Scientist 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043 Voice: 650-253-0000 Fax: 650-253-0001 |
Internet information retrieval and collaboration: (1) Data
mining within social networks; (2)
Software for managing email and online communities; (3) Making use of
structural information on the Web.
Computers and society: (1) Reasons for the underrepresentation
of women in science and engineering, particularly computer science;
(2) Computer science education.
Teaching:
Software agents: Designed and developed software to automatically recognize insulting or abusive email, applying natural-language processing and machine-learning techniques, Microsoft Research (May 1995-September 1995). Visiting scholar, Internet Softbot Group, University of Washington (September 1995-November 1997).
Compilers: Combined novel instruction scheduling and register allocation for a highly-optimizing compiler, Microsoft Research (Summer 1993, February 1994-May 1995). Designed and added optimizations to production compiler for switch statement code generation, Microsoft (Summer 1988).
Architectural evaluation: Constructed a system to analyze instruction traces for instruction-level parallelism (Summer 1990) and built a microprocessor simulator (Summer 1989), Microsoft.
Principal Investigator (PI), A Relational Database Interface to the World-Wide Web, National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development grant ($200,000), April 1999 - December 2004.
Co-PI, Techbridge, National Science
Foundation PGE/LCP grant ($900,000),
September 2000 - August 2004.
Winner, Women Who Dare Award, Girls Inc. of the Island City, 2007.
One of the ABCNews.com Top Ten Wired Women of 2002.
Sexiest Geek Alive, 2001.
Fellow, Intel Foundation Graduate Fellowship, 1995-1996.
Winner, Department Meritorious Service Award, MIT EECS, 1992, for compiler seminar.
Winner, Morris Joseph Levin Memorial Award for independent work by an undergraduate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT, 1991, for "Why Are There So Few Female Computer Scientists?"
Graduate fellow, National Science Foundation.
Winner, Undergraduate Computer Systems Prize, MIT, 1990, for bachelor's thesis.
Co-winner, best paper, 1990 MIT-ACM Undergraduate Computer Conference, for a paper on compiler optimizations developed while at Microsoft.
Member, Eta Kappa Nu.
"Dynamic Sublists: Scaling Unmoderated Mailing Lists", with Robin Jeffries and Kiem Sie, Fifteenth System Administration Conference (LISA), December 2001.
"Scalable Online Communities with Javamlm" (short paper), with Robin Jeffries and Kiem Sie, World Conference on the WWW and Internet (WebNet), October 2001.
"Squeal: Structured Queries on the Web", Ninth International World-Wide Web Conference", May 2000, with Lynn Andrea Stein. Also appearing in Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking, Volume 33, Issues 1-6, June 2000.
"A Hyperlink-Based Recommender System Written in Squeal", CIKM '98 Workshop on Web Information and Data Management (WIDM'98), November 6, 1998 with Lynn Andrea Stein.
"Just-In-Time Databases and the World-Wide Web", Seventh International ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, November 1998, with Lynn Andrea Stein.
"The J-Machine: A Retrospective", 25 Years of Selected Papers from the International Symposium on Computer Architecture, 1998, by William J. Dally et al.
"Smokey:
Automatic Recognition of Hostile Messages," Innovative
Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI) '97. (
Postscript version also available.) Also presented at the Eighth
Annual Meeting of the Society for Text and
Discourse, July 31, 1998.
"Squeal: SQL Access to Information on the Web", AAAI-98 Workshop on AI and Information Integration.
"Mining the Web's Hyperlinks for Recommendations", AAAI-98 Workshop on Recommender Systems, with Lynn Andrea Stein.
"ParaSite:
Mining Structural Information on the Web," The Sixth International
World Wide Web Conference, April 1997. Also appearing in Computer
Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications
Networking 29 (1997) 1205-1215. A German translation
"Informationssuche
im Internet" appeared in Computerworld
[Switzerland], August 3, 1998.
"Link
Geometry and Crawling on Demand," Distributed
Indexing/Searching Workshop, World
Wide Web Consortium, May 1996, with Gregory Lauckhart.
"Evaluating
the Locality Benefits of Active Messages," Proceedings of
the
Fifth ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel
Programming, with William
J. Dally, 1995.
"Proving Machine-Language Programs Correct, or `Turtles All the Way Down'," MIT Area Exam, January 1994.
"Evaluation of Mechanisms for Fine-Grained Parallel Programs in the J-Machine and the CM-5," International Symposium in Computer Architecture, 1993, with Seth Goldstein, Klaus Schauser, Thorsten von Eicken, David Culler, and Bill Dally. Also appearing in Laxmi Bhuyan and Xiaodong Zhang, eds., Multiprocessor Performance Measurement and Evaluation, IEEE Computer Society, 1994.
"The J-Machine: A Fine-Grain Parallel Computer," Computing Systems in Engineering, 1992, by William J. Dally et al.
"Experiences Implementing Dataflow on a General-Purpose Parallel Computer," 1991 International Conference on Parallel Processing, with William J. Dally.
"Dataflow
Computation for the J-Machine," MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab
Technical Report 1233, June 1990. (Bachelor's thesis, Department of
EECS, MIT.)
"Developing a
Hardware and Programming Curriculum for Middle School
Girls" by Jeri Countryman, Alegra Feldman, Linda Kekelis, and Ellen
Spertus. Inroads -- SIGCSE Bulletin (Special Issue on
Women and Computing), Vol. 4, No. 2 (June 2002).
"Leveraging
an Alternative Source of Computer Scientists: Reentry
Programs" by Sheila
Humphreys and Ellen Spertus. Inroads --
SIGCSE Bulletin (Special Issue on Women and Computing), Vol. 4,
No. 2 (June 2002).
"Women and Computing" by Ellen Spertus and Denise Gurer. Encyclopedia of Computer Science. Ralston, Anthony; Reilly, Edwin D.; and Hemminger David, eds. Fourth edition. Nature Publishing Group (U.K) and Grove Dictionaries (U.S.), 2000.
"Wit Helps Women in Computer Science Combat Ignorance", Women in Higher Education, May 1997. Reprinted in Shatter the Glass Ceiling, December 1997; reprinted in The CPSR Newsletter, Winter 2000; and reprinted as "Gender Benders" in Inroads -- SIGCSE Bulletin (Special Issue on Women and Computing), Vol. 4, No. 2 (June 2002).
"Social and Technical Means for Fighting On-Line Harassment," Virtue and Virtuality: Gender, Law, and Cyberspace, April 1996.
"Declaration of Stephen Donaldson" (unnamed co-author), Affidavit in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, ACLU et al. v. Reno (No. 96-963) & American Library Association et al v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 96-1458). March 17, 1996.
"Women and Computing." Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Engineering. Ralston, Anthony and Edwin D. Reilly, eds. Third edition. Van Nostrand Reinhold: New York, 1993.
"Why Are There So Few Female Computer Scientists?" MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Technical Report 1315, August 1991. This report has been widely distributed in the computer science community, including to all of the faculty, staff, and graduate students in computer science at the University of California at Berkeley by department head Prof. David Patterson. A summary appeared in the Association for Women in Mathematics Newsletter (March-April 1992), and a chapter was reprinted in the Australian Computer Society Victorian Bulletin (July, August 1992). The report (or other of my writings on the subject) is recommended or required reading in courses at MIT, Smith College, and The University of Texas.
Moderator, "Women in Science and Technology: Challenges and Changes Through the Generations" (panel), sponsored by the Association of MIT Alumnae of Northern California and Google, Mountain View, September 20, 2007.
Invited participant, Integrative Computing Education & Research: Preparing IT Graduates for 2010 and Beyond (ICER - West), Stanford, California, January 27-28, 2006.
Panelist, "Flame,
Blame and Shame", BlogHer
Conference, Santa Clara, July 30, 2005.
Panelist, "Women
and Girls in Math, Science, and Technology", Girls Incorporated of the
Island City Women
of the 21st Century Club Speaker Event, Alameda, CA, July 19, 2005.
Panelist, "Managing
the Academic Career for Faculty Women at Undergraduate Computer Science
and Engineering Institutions", CRA-W, St.
Louis, February 23, 2005.
Panelist, "What We
Can Learn from Computer Science's Differences from other Sciences",
Women,
Work and the Academy: Strategies for Responding to 'Post-Civil Rights
Era' Discrimination, Barnard College, New York, December 9-10, 2005.
Organizer and panelist, "It's Never Too Late: Careers in Computer Science", Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and Google, Mountain View, CA, June 2, 2004.
Panelist, "The Job Search Process and Later Job-related
Decision Making", CRA-W Career
Mentoring Workshop, San Diego, June 6-8, 2003.
Panel chair, Surging into the Pipeline: Re-entry Programs for Women in Computing, Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, Vancouver, British Columbia, 2002.
Panelist, UNESCO Chair Conference on Women's Cyber Rights, Research Institute of Asian Women, Seoul, Korea, May 31, 2002.
Invited participant, IDM 2002 Workshop, NSF, May 5-7, 2002.
Panelist, "Women AND Technology: Changing the future for both", Xerox PARC Forum, December 13, 2001.
Panelist, "Issues in Higher Education", Women Leading the Way in Science, Engineering, Technology, Arts and Creativity, Women's Leadership Institute, Mills College, October 19, 2001.
Panelist, "Techbridge: A Technology Program of Their Own", with
Linda Kekelis, Jeri Countryman, and Alegra Feldman; The Eighth Annual
National Diversity Conference: Race, Gender and Information
Technology: Closing the Digital Divide, San Diego, May 2-5, 2001.
"A
relational database interface to the World-Wide Web" (poster), with
Lynn Andrea Stein, Proceedings of the
Fourth ACM Conference on Digital Libraries, 1999.
Panelist, "Mentoring and Graduate School", Beyond the Classroom: A Workshop for Undergraduates in EE & CS, University of California, Berkeley, September 26, 1998.
"Information Hierarchies," 1995 MIT Student Workshop on Scalable Computing.Debate, "Resolved: That to exploit advances in parallel processing technology, Fortune 500 companies should invest in networks of distributed workstations instead of parallel computers", 1994 MIT Student Workshop on Scalable Computing.
"Trading Off Control and Data Locality in Fine-Grained Computing", 1994 MIT Student Workshop on Scalable Computing
Panel, "A Look at Climate Issues and Gender Fair Education", Massachusetts Winter Conference, American Association of University Women, Concord, MA, January 29, 1994.
Panel, "Creating an Empowering Environment for Women Students in Undergraduate, Co-Ed Computer Science Programs," Twenty-Fourth SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, February 1993.
Invited participant, Workshop on Expanding Opportunities for Women in CISE, National Science Foundation, October 1992.
Invited witness, President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, June 24, 1992.
"Dataflow Computation on the J-Machine," 1991 MIT Student Workshop
on VLSI and Parallel Systems, July 1991.
"Of Flames, Fan Mail, and Software That Can Tell the Difference", Chronicle of Higher Education, August 18, 2000, p. B6.
"Lost in Cyberspace" (Review of Mark Dery's Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century), Technology Review, April 1997.Advisory board member, HarambeeNet: The SocialNets in Education Project (NSF award CNS-0722288), 2007-present.
Member, City College of San Francisco
Computer
Science Department Industry Advisory Council, 2004-2007.
Program committee member, WebKDD 2006, 2008; AAAI 2008.
NSF Program Review Panels (CCLI, ADVANCE, HCI): 1998, 1999, 2001,
2002, 2003.
Program committee member and scholarship committee member, Grace Hopper Celebration of Women
in Computing, 2000, 2004. Scholarship committee member 2006, 2007, 2008.
Committee member, AAAI-1999 Workshop on Intelligent Information Systems, July 1999.
Committee member, Expanding Your Horizons in Science and Mathematics
Workshop, Mills College, 1998-1999, 2003-2004. Led workshop "Digital
Electronics",
March 20, 1999; March 18, 2000 (San Jose State University); March 25,
2000; March 8, 2003; March 13, 2004; March 19, 2005; March 25, 2006; March 17, 2007.
College representative, MentorNet, 1998-2000.
Director-at-large, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, July 1997-June 1999.
Advisory board member, Geodesic Systems, 1996-1998.
Selection Committee, CRA Distributed Mentor Program, 1997.
Chair, Workshop on the Computer Gender Gap, Center for Advanced Studies Conference (CASCON), Toronto, Ontario, 1996. Highest rated workshop at conference.
Member, EECS Committee on Women's Enrollment, MIT, Fall 1993.
Graduate Student Representative, Association for MIT Alumnae, Fall 1991 - January 1994.
Co-founder and co-president, Tech Square Big Sisters, Fall 1991 - Spring 1993.
Co-editor, Underground Guide to Course Six, Fall 1989 and Spring 1990.
"What We Know and Don't Know About Gender and Computers" (keynote
presentation), Issues of Gender in Mathematics and Science, Bay
Area Science Project and Bay Area Mathematics Project, March 22, 2003.
"Rigorous vs. Nurturing: The False Dichotomy", CS301 (Teaching Techniques) lunch series (host: Prof. Brian Barsky), UC Berkeley, March 12, 2003.
"Gender and Computer Science: Myths, Facts, and Successes" (dinner speech), Wilkes University, January 10, 2002.
"ParaSite: Mining the structural information on the World-Wide Web"
"Mining Links, or How to be a Para-Site", Knowledge Media Design Institute,
University of Toronto (host: Prof.
Alberto Mendelzon), November 15, 1996.
"Too Many Flames and Too Much Email", Google (host: Dr. Sharon Perl), Nov. 20, 2003.
"Smokey: Automatic Flame Recognition"
"Why Are There So Few Female Computer Scientists?"
"Evaluating the Locality Benefits of Active Messages," Center for Research on Parallel Computation, Rice University (host: Prof. Ken Kennedy), Oct. 20, 1994.
"An Evaluation of the MIT J-Machine's Mechanisms for Fine-Grained Parallelism," University of Washington (host: Prof. Susan Eggers), September 2, 1993.
Last modified: June 7, 2008