We celebrate Ada Lovelace Day today by honoring Janie Irwin, recent recipient of the ACM-W Athena Lecturer Award. I have known Janie for a while now, and she is inspirational both in her research and in her commitment to women in computer science. The photo shows Janie (right) along with Laura Haas and me at the 2008 CRA-W CAPP Workshop - an effort to bring more women into senior positions in academia and industry. Janie was one of the founders of this program.To quote from the ACM Press Release, " Irwin’s landmark contribution is the design of the first architecture for Discrete Wavelet Transform, a process that decomposes a signal into a set of basic functions. This advance provides optimal performance for signal processing and image compression used in computer-aided design. To address bottlenecks in hardware design progress resulting from poor design tools, Irwin developed a new addition algorithm, known as ELM, which offers superior energy and performance characteristics that are now found in many computers. ... The Evan Pugh Professor of Computer Science at Penn State, Irwin holds the A. Robert Noll Chair in Engineering in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. She serves on the Computer Research Association’s Committee on Women (CRA-W) Steering Committee and the Board on Army Science and Technology as well as the External Research Advisory board of Microsoft Research.
Irwin was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2003, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009, and was named a Fellow of ACM in 1996. In 2007, she received the Anita Borg Technical Leadership Award. She has also served as a founding Co-Editor-in-Chief of ACM’s Journal on Emerging Technologies (JETC) from 2004 to 2006, and Editor-in-Chief of ACM’s Transactions on the Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES) from 1998-2004. She was vice president of ACM from 1997 to 1998."
Congratulations on your award, Janie, and thanks for your inspiration and all your efforts on behalf of women in computing!
