Mills College
In January 1998, I joined the faculty of Mills, a minority-serving women's college in Oakland, California, where I have been able to combine my love of computer science, passion for teaching, and my commitment to social justice.
In January 1998, I joined the faculty of Mills, a minority-serving women's college in Oakland, California, where I have been able to combine my love of computer science, passion for teaching, and my commitment to social justice.
I co-created and continue to co-organize a large conference for women from ethnicities underrepresented in computing and their allies, with hundreds of attendeees each year.
I was part of the small team that developed the interactive tutorials behind the first Hour of Code, I contributed lessons to Code.org's first twenty-hour curriculum, and I improved and evaluated tools for generating feedback on incorrect student solutions.
I was part of the small team that created App Inventor, a drag-and-drop programming environment for creating mobile apps, and the corresponding free curriculum. App Inventor is used by hundreds of thousands of students worldwide, and I continue to contribute to the codebase.
I have led or contributed to open source projects for AnitaB.org, Google, Mozilla, the Internet Archive, and the MIT Center for Mobile Learning and spoken on introducing students to open source at All Things Open 2020.
I served on the ACM Council on Women in Computing and the advisory board of the Ada Initiative and presented 7 times at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.
Back when most researchers were treating the Web the same as previous text collections, I was part of the first generation to realize it needed to be treated differently. This work was part of my MIT dissertation and led to presentations at two early International World Wide Web conferences.
Was named Sexiest Geek Alive in a 2001 geekiness pageant and contributed a chapter about the experience to She's' Such a Geek!, edited by Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders. In 1993, I appeared in a New York Times profile of 3 MIT women under the headline 'Women, Computer Nerds -- and Proud of It'.
I created the first software to automatically recognize insulting messages. The work was written up in Wired and Maledicta: The International Journal of Verbal Aggression and has been cited more than 350 times.
I have volunteered with and been on the board of directors of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, Just Detention International, and the Human Rights Defense Center. I was webmaster of JDI (then Stop Prisoner Rape) when it was a co-plaintiff in Reno v. ACLU, overturniing the Communications Decency Act.