Who Wants To Be An Innovator?

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Technology is everywhere. It’s our backbone. And increasingly, technology is about INFORMATION: how computers are being used to transfer, store, create, or manipulate information. Technology is why you’re here. But technology isn’t just things. It’s people. People use their ideas and their experience to create things. Things to solve problems, make the world better, faster, safer, connected.

This is analysis of information from an online dating website. It collected over 500,0000 messages from its users to find out what words or phrases, used in that first message exchanged before two people even meet, would be most likely to result in a response. These words are plotted against the “average” response rate of 32%. As you can see, commenting on someone’s physical appearance in that first message is actually a bad move, if what you want is a date. These words might work better over at bootycall.com. It is someone’s JOB – an IT PROFESSIONAL – to manipulate data like this, to make this information interesting and relevant to other people who need it to do their jobs. That is what an INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY PROFESSIONAL does.

This is an x-ray, obviously. Of a cat. This is its tail. What’s that little thing on top of its tail? It’s an RFID chip. So if the cat gets lost, then found, it can literally be “scanned” and more easily returned to its owner. Technology like this saves lots of animals from being euthanized in shelters every year. It is someone’s job to create the RFID tag that goes in a cat’s tail – to figure out what kind of hardware you can stick in an animal’s body to generate radio frequency information, to determine what kind of information (owner’s name, address, cat’s name, etc.) gets transmitted, and to market this “product” to pet owners who are less savvy about technology.

This is a architectural design drafted on a Google program called Sketchup. It’s for a prefabricated house – a house that comes in pieces, manufactured for low cost using sustainable resources, shipped to your piece of land ready to assemble. It is someone’s job to use a program like Sketchup or autocad, a design program, to create architectural drawings that have meaning to potential homeowners, to builders, and to city planners. This requires knowledge of architecture and geometry, but also urban planning and design principles.

This guy?

What do these two dudes have in common? Besides obscene wealth, and successful software companies? Yes, they are both college drop-outs. These guys dropped out of college because traditional college was not their thing. Innovation was their thing. They took an idea, built a product and a company around it, and took that product to market. Quoth Steve Jobs: “Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.”

This is Anat. She’s from Israel. She’s at the forefront of computational photography. She develops ways to manipulate digital images, both inside the camera and on computers. This blurry image of a moving toy car was taken with a traditional camera. The clear image was taken with Anat’s modified camera. The camera's sensor moves from side to side during exposure, blurring all moving and stationary objects equally, no matter how fast each object is moving. Levin developed an algorithm that can remove this uniform blur to yield a clear image.

Why yes. He’s a 23-year-old electronic artist named Je Deviens DJ en 3 Jours ("I Become a DJ in Three Days"). He made an album of music called Da Chip , a collection of Daft Punk covers made entirely with the sound processors found in classic videogame systems. It became an instant underground hit, charting up to 25,000 downloads a day and elevating the chiptune—a Game Boy-inspired genre that's been kicking around for two decades—from fanboy in-joke to serious headphone fare. Check out 8Bitone, a chiptune synthesizer app for iPhone.

This is Mary Spio. She has been a server at McDonald’s and an aerospace engineer at Boeing. She holds a patent that makes it possible to send movies to theaters digitally. Now she produces video content for Xbox Live. How’s that for a cool job?

Emily is 25. She founded a company called Foodzie, which is like Etsy for food. It brings together food crafters from across the country and lets you buy their delicious products in a single shopping cart. Emily worked as a brand manager for a small market in North Carolina, then she went to Virginia Tech, where she met her future business partners. Then she got selected for TechStars, a “boot camp” for tech entrepreneurs here in Boulder. Then she landed $1 million in funding. Not too shabby!

This is David Kelley, founder of a design firm called IDEO. His firm has radically changed the way we think about design, from architecture to toothpaste tubes to defibrillators. IDEO hires people called “human factors specialists”, whose job it is to analyze how people interact with their physical environments in order to create better objects, better spaces, better interactions, better results. Now David is running the d school at Stanford, where you can get a graduate degree in “design thinking”. How cool is that?

You may be thinking, technology’s doing pretty well by me – got no complaints.

Computing-related professions are projected to grow 30 percent faster than the overall job market in the next six years. By 2016 there will be more than a million new computing jobs in the workforce, and given current enrollment in computing fields of study, our universities will graduate only about half of the needed candidates to fill those jobs.

Are you left-handed? Do you know someone who’s died of cancer? Have you been to Mount Kilimanjaro? Do you love Woody Allen movies? It’s the very quirks and smarts and ways of looking at things through your own unique lens that makes your contributions in IT valuable to other people. (photo via Flickr)

The early speech-recognition systems, genesis of our modern voicemail, were developed and tested in the 1960s ONLY by male engineers. Women probably weren’t even allowed in the room back then. Well, this early speech-recognition software, created and tested only by men, failed to recognize women’s voice octaves. And it hung up on them.

Stereotype threat is a research-proven phenomenon wherein our belief in our own or others’ negative conceptions of us tangibly affects our performance.

People who choose “language & literature,” “biology” and “undecided” all have higher math SAT scores than those who choose computer science. You don’t have to be a math genius to be good at computing – computing is all about problem-solving!

Would it surprise you if I suggested that this Birkenstocks-with-socks image is the stereotypical image of a computing professional for a lot of people? CNET recently named Paris Hilton among its “Top Ten Girl Geeks,” presumably because she licensed her own video game and is often photographed carrying her Sidekick (which, famously, was HACKED). If Paris Hilton is the media’s idea of a girl geek, we clearly have work to do.

Challenge your stereotypes about who “does” technology, who’s good at it, and what technology jobs really entail. Most IT doesn’t happen in a vacuum, or even a cubicle.

Tech jobs are not just software development of hooking up networks. Are you a graphic designer? Consider user interface design: same principles, more technical, you’ll love it. Don’t let that psychology degree go to waste; industrial design needs people skilled in human factors to help create new technology products. Like fashion? I happen to know that Liz Claiborne is looking for IT professionals to help it write proprietary software. About CLOTHES.

Anyone here familiar with the concept of pair programming? A study from UC Santa Cruz shows that pair programming has benefits for both men and women students -- Increases the percentage of first-year students (especially women) who declare a computer science major; Increases the number of students who remain in the computer science major one year later; and Reduces the so-called “confidence gap” between female and male students, while increasing the programming confidence of all students.

CNN Money recently ranked the best jobs in America on things like pay, job growth, and quality of life, and technology jobs mobbed the lists. This is a look at the top 10 jobs based on projected growth, but the salary and quality of life charts look pretty good, too.

Do you know how computers work? Have you ever taken one apart? Do you know any programming languages? Can you explain how the Internet works at a cocktail party? Be the change. Think of yourself as a creator, not just a consumer. Yeah, someone else made your car and someone else fixes it. But changing your oil is not creative. Technology is creative, and the people who use it should be represented in how it is created. Technology is revolutionizing our world in such a profound way that you really should have a hand in it. Find a way to interact with technology that gets your hands dirty.

Technology is not just for geeks anymore. Geeks are not just geeks anymore. Be a role model, spread the word.

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Who Wants To Be An Innovator? - Presentation Transcript

Who Wants to Be an IT Innovator? Jenny Slade Communications Director NCWIT
What is information technology?
Is this IT?
How about this?
Does this look like IT to you?
Who creates IT?
Is this the face of an IT “innovator”?
Is this the face of an IT innovator?
Is this guy an IT innovator?
How about Mary? She has a patent, people.
This is Emily. She likes food, and the Internet. She’s also an IT innovator.
This guy is a total geek, right?
So, why does it matter who creates IT?
Because IT needs us.
Because if IT is designed to serve all of us, it makes no sense that it be created only by some of us.
Because we are each the sum of our parts. We each bring a different perspective.
Because when users ≠ creators, bad things can happen.
Why don’t more of us do IT?
- STEREOTYPE THREAT. White male engineering students get lower-than-usual test grades when told in advance that Asians typically score higher than any other group on math tests.
- UNCONSCIOUS BIAS. Parents of boys are more likely to say that IT is a good career for their child than parents of girls.
- UNFRIENDLY CULTURE. Unwritten rules that reward quantity of hours on the job vs. quality of job performance penalize everyone, not just those with families.
Is computer science “too hard”?
Is this your image of an IT professional?
Take a closer look at IT jobs.
This is what IT jobs look like. Psychology + IT = UI designer Veterinarian + IT = RFID chip designer Architecture + IT = home designer
This is what “programming” looks like.
IT opens doors.
Look under the hood.
Tell your friends.
National Center for Women & Information Technology