Facebook"s "emotional experiment" is most shared academic research

Facebook’s notorious emotional manipulation study received more online attention than any other scientific research in 2014, according to an analytics company.

The paper, “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks”, was published in the respected US journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July.

It sparked outrage by revealing that Facebook had been experimenting on hundreds of thousands of unwitting users, attempting to induce an “emotional state” by selectively showing positive or negative stories in their news feeds.

Academic analysts Altmetric suggests that the research will have done wonders for the scientists’ public engagement metrics after it ranked number one for attention out of every scientific article published in 2014.

Perhaps surprisingly, the majority of the recorded attention was on Twitter, where the article was shared 4,000 times to almost 10 million people. On Facebook itself there was little reaction to the research, which was shared publicly just 344 times. However, there were likely to have been more private wall posts on Facebook, so the total cannot be determined.

The article was also mentioned in 300 news sites, 130 blogposts, 13 subreddits and even 113 Google+ profiles.

But while Facebook may be a natural topic for online attention, the rest of the top five articles are more varied – and so are their reasons for getting so much attention. Second place went to a seemingly unassuming paper in the Journal of Ethology titled “Variation in Melanism and Female Preference in Proximate but Ecologically Distinct Environments”. But a quick scan of the articles citing the paper reveals the reason for its notability: the article was published with an author’s comment left in, asking “should we cite the crappy Gabor paper here?”.

The rest of the top five at least made the list for their contents. Third place went to a study from Nature suggesting that artificial sweeteners could induce glucose intolerance, while fourth place was a breakthrough in stem-cell research also published in Nature.

And the fifth place? Research published in Frontiers in Zoology in which animal behaviourists watched dogs defecating and discovered that they were sensitive to small variations in the Earth’s magnetic field.

Euan Adie, founder of Altmetric, said: “It’s no surprise to see that the most shared articles of the year heavily mirror the media agenda, but interesting to note that on occasion online communities are drawing attention to studies that have not received a significant amount of mainstream coverage.

“For example, we had more than 2,000 tweets for a study on how gaining basic certification affected nursing confidence levels. This reached a combined following of more than 2.2 million followers, demonstrating how social media can really boost the profile of some online published studies.”

via Facebook’s ‘emotional experiment’ is most shared academic research | Technology | The Guardian.

Facebook"s "emotional experiment" is most shared academic research

Restless At Work? LinkedIn Can Guess What You"ll Do Next

A generation ago, if you felt restless in your job and weren’t sure what to do next, you could ask your boss or friends for advice — or you could visit the local fortune-teller. Now however, an intriguing new LinkedIn tool provides some pretty good guesses about what you’ll do next.

LinkedIn’s data-visualization team has created a giant sphere that’s speckled with nearly 300 types of jobs, ranging from actors to firefighters, insurance agents and Oracle database administrators. Click on any one of those categories — and an animated version of connect-the-dots will spring forth, showing you the most common career moves of people in those fields. This link will let you test the system yourself.

To create these forecasts, LinkedIn research consultant Sohan Murthy explained in a blog post, the company’s data scientists culled through the career histories of more than 300 million people with LinkedIn profiles. Researchers focused on cases where people switched to at least a slightly different category, instead of simply moving up the ladder in their chosen specialty. LinkedIn’s analysts also discarded cases involving people who had switched careers multiple times, or whose current careers straddle multiple categories.

Many of the career paths are exactly what you’d expect. Financial consultants tend to become accountants and data analysts. Psychologists end up as social workers or university professors. And when today’s job becomes unbearable,  just about everybody is willing to give sales a try.

But in an intriguing number of cases, LinkedIn’s mapping system unearthed job hops that are far from obvious. Among them:

• Soldiers and military officers, when they transition to civilian life, may pick new jobs as diverse as corporate strategists, business owners or police officers.


• Geologists sometimes end up as information-technology support specialists or environmental specialists.


• Pharmacists cross over to the other side of the counter and become medical representatives.


• People who start out as political staffers can end up as everything from lawyers and judges to public-relations offices.

Another oddity: fields that offer very little mobility. As LinkedIn’s Murthy points out, people who become web developers, paralegals or physicians have hardly any common career options beyond staying in their current field. Bad news? Not necessarily.

In Murthy’s words, “this is a classic sign of specialization,” and that’s nothing to weep about. If demand for these skills stays strong, and the work is enjoyable, people in such aspects of law, tech and health care may never feel the urge to switch.

via Restless At Work? LinkedIn Can Guess What You’ll Do Next.

Restless At Work? LinkedIn Can Guess What You"ll Do Next

Why So Many New Tech Companies Are Getting into Health Care

A flood of new health care IT companies has been pouring into the U.S. health care market. The cause of this torrent: the recognition that as market and regulatory forces alter incentives in health care, IT companies will play a powerful role in combating the overemployment and declining productivity that has plagued this industry and in helping providers improve the quality of care.

The dam broke in September 2007, when Athenahealth went public, the price of its shares jumping by 97% on the first day. Since then, the company’s value has risen to $5 billion. Athenahealth proved to entrepreneurs, software engineers, and investors that the health care sector is fertile ground for creating large technology-services companies that use a subscription-based business model to offer software as a service (SaaS).

Despite its size and growth rate, the health care sector was long considered an impenetrable, or at least an unattractive, target for IT innovation — the entrepreneurial equivalent of Siberia. Athenahealth broke the ice by proving that it could sell SaaS efficiently to small physician businesses, get doctors to accept off-premises software, and achieve the ratios of customer-acquisition costs to long-term value that other sectors already enjoy.

As Athenahealth accomplished its goals, several larger forces have dramatically widened the scope of opportunity in the sector:

• The Great Recession led to a loss of 8.8 million U.S. jobs and big declines in demand throughout the economy (including health care services) — yet health care employment grew by 7.2%. That reality increased awareness that a decline in labor productivity was driving much of the excessive spending in health care.


• The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 included the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, a $25.9 billion program to give doctors and hospitals incentives to adopt electronic health records. EHR adoption has now grown to nearly 80% of office-based physicians and 60% of hospitals, fueling many successful software start-ups, such as ZocDoc, Health Catalyst, and Practice Fusion.


• The Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires that an enormous amount of data on cost and quality be made freely available. In addition, digital health applications, mobile phones, and wearable sensors, as well as breakthroughs in genomics, are creating truly big data sets in health care. These data contribute to greater market efficiency, more consumer-oriented products and services, and clinical care that is evidence-based and personalized.


• The ACA has led to a proliferation of risk-based (rather than fee-for-service) payment models. For example, providers in accountable care organizations are rewarded for generating annual savings, and providers who use bundled payments get a fixed budget for an end-to-end course of treatment. Effectively responding to these changing economic incentives will increase reliance on software that helps providers manage population risk, understand costs and trends, and engage patients.

These macro-level developments set the stage for other SaaS companies to follow Athenahealth’s lead in enormously improving labor productivity and quality of care.

Within the next decade, software tools will eliminate thousands, perhaps millions, of jobs in hospitals, insurance companies, insurance brokerages, and human resources departments. Not the jobs of people who actually provide care — but those of administrative middlemen, whose dead weight contributes to economic loss. Here are five examples:

1. Digital insurance markets, combined with ACA-enacted regulatory changes such as guaranteed issue and community rating, make it possible to price and sell health plans to anyone immediately. These developments will decimate the armies of brokers who act as intermediaries between customers and insurance services.

2. Price transparency, digital insurance products, and tools such as reference pricing make it possible to generate an exact price and instantly collect payment for a health care service. As a result, revenue cycle managers in hospitals and claims adjudicators in insurance companies will be displaced.

3. The inevitable shift to the cloud will render obsolete the costly, insecure data centers that most doctors and hospitals are now building, staffing, and running.

4. Adopting self-serve mobile applications will eliminate the forms, faxes, and excess staffing at many call centers, thereby improving satisfaction for everyone in the process.

5. Centralized clearinghouses that share information across organizations and state lines will eventually replace the byzantine, paper-based process of credentialing doctors, tracking continuing medical education, and keeping licenses up-to-date. That means smaller staffs in hospitals’ medical affairs divisions, health plans, medical boards, and state and local health departments.

Given that wages account for 56% of all health care spending, improvements in labor productivity could generate enormous value. Simply reducing administrative costs could yield an estimated $250 billion in savings per year.

As compelling as the prospective labor efficiencies are, the benefits of SaaS extend beyond direct labor costs. Easier access to data on physician quality, specialization, and adherence to evidence-based care will better match patients with doctors who provide high-quality, efficient services, thereby averting health complications for their patients. Moreover, software can help bring relevant clinical guidelines and personalized risk scores to patients and clinicians as they improve care plans, engage in shared decision making, and avoid duplicative services. Such efficiencies will, in turn, enhance how patients perceive and experience the care they receive. SaaS companies can trumpet all of these advantages, not just the employment savings they yield.

To seize on the new opportunities in the health care sector, SaaS companies can take these steps:

• Attack economic inefficiencies in order to generate immediate, tangible customer return on investment. Witness how Castlight Health’s transparency tools are generating annual savings for employers and employees. And be clear about the source of the ROI, given that in most cases the revenue comes from another health care stakeholder who may be able to undermine the business.


• Focus on building in network effects so that improvements made by one user enhance the product’s value for current and future users, just as Athenahealth does when it rapidly disseminates changes in payment rules at one provider to all other providers. Most SaaS businesses in health care IT cannot protect their intellectual property; so it is important to continually augment the value of the product to achieve scale.


• Use software-enabled service models, rather than pure SaaS. For example, Grand Rounds’ software not only recommends an expert doctor for a patient but also collects, organizes, digitizes, and summarizes the patient’s records — and then books the appointment for the patient. In effect, the software makes it easier for patients to adhere to high-quality, cost-effective care, thereby enhancing the overall ROI for the product.

It took Athenahealth a decade, from 1997 to 2007, to go public on the strength of its SaaS model. It took Castlight Health only six years, from 2008 to 2014, to do the same. Now an array of highly valued healthcare SaaS companies, each worth more than $100 million, is emerging. They include Zenefits, Grand Rounds, Doctor on Demand, Omada Health, Health Catalyst, Doximity, and Evolent Health. Indeed, Zenefits is one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies ever, regardless of industry, surpassing $500 million in enterprise value in its first year.

The success of SaaS companies in health care is thanks, in part, to an influx of leaders from other sectors. They bring with them teams of technical talent that deliver consumer and enterprise software faster, better, and more cheaply than many legacy health care IT companies can do. Witness ZocDoc, founded by first-time entrepreneurs from McKinsey; Grand Rounds, founded by Owen Tripp, who cofounded Reputation.com; Zenefits, founded by Parker Conrad, who cofounded SigFig; and Doctor on Demand, founded by Adam Jackson, who cofounded Driverside (just to name a few). This type of cross-pollination is an essential ingredient of innovative change.

The barriers between health care IT companies and IT in other industries are clearly coming down, and we expect the number of sector disruptions and billion-dollar companies to swell. As each innovation wave generates more data, disruption-cycle times will shorten, thereby forcing all players in the health care ecosystem to address inefficiency as they compete on quality and value creation. Those who fail to act will be washed away by the tide that lifts all other boats to greater productivity.

via Why So Many New Tech Companies Are Getting into Health Care.

Why So Many New Tech Companies Are Getting into Health Care

Retailers" Secret Weapon Lies In Their IT Department

In today’s world, customers are looking for an experience that streamlines the shopping process and caters to their needs. In fact, the quality of their shopping experience is playing a larger role than ever when it comes to making purchasing decisions.

A 2014 study by TimeTrade, for instance, indicated that 90 percent of shoppers leave a store empty-handed if they don’t get the help they need – while 86 percent of those very same shoppers would buy more than planned if they got that help, and 90 percent would be more likely to return to the same store again. In other words, retailers who effectively and efficiently guide customers through the buying process will win sales and customer loyalty.

Today’s technology increasingly plays a role in customer satisfaction. It streamlines the process and makes new forms of customer interaction possible. In fact, as technology begins dominating the landscape, retailers who fail to embrace it will find it hard to compete. And it has positioned IT managers and specialists as vital players in retail strategies.

IT managers must find and coordinate teams of people with different specialties to ensure tech operations run smoothly in the store. Tech systems are growing increasingly complex, often requiring people with different skills and backgrounds, changing the hiring needs of most retailers.

“[IT specialists] have always been important, but with the evolution of technology, just from a home use to a people perspective, companies are looking more and more toward IT to gain a competitive edge,” says Ed Smith, an IT specialist and VP and CEO of Abt Electronics, a Chicago-area electronics superstore which is known for its cutting edge use of IT in a retail environment.

“[Retail IT] is our DNA” he says.

The IT factor

A single store might need someone who specializes in mobile development, another who specializes in supply chain implementation, and another who focuses on analytics or on a real-time data and memory platform. A manager coordinates these efforts so they can actually produce useful results and coordinate actual programs and strategies with a high ROI.

Selling products online and making them available in-store for pickup has made the buying process easier for customers – and it also can save valuable space and resources for the retailer. And the use of beacon technology, such as Samsung’s newly introduced Proximity, enables retailers to reach customers like never before. Beacon technology is a location-based service that allows retailers to provide in-store offers to consumers and can even provide customers with floor plans of a mall. For customers, it’s convenient and appealing, and for retailers it provides a streamlined way to create and manage marketing campaigns.

Another key use of technology that every retailer should consider is making product information and branding available in-store. This may mean using video screens to display product detail, but there are other options. Providing free Wi-Fi is a simple, affordable and extremely powerful one. Shoppers with smart phones and tablets can simply connect to Wi-Fi and research products, or even find sales tailored to their personal interests and purchase history.

Some stores – like Smith’s Abt – equip their staff with tablets or smartphones so that they’re ready to answer any customer question with the click of a button.

Ben Davis is an IT consultant with the British firm Econsultancy, which specializes in using technology to bring together online and offline retail strategies. He notes that while many retailers overemphasize integrating social media into the store environment, mobile technology can be extremely powerful. Giving price comparisons, sales alerts and product information can guide customers through the purchase process. It can also help develop strong customer-retailer relationships while providing retailers with valuable data and analytics.

All of these projects require teams of people with different specialties – mobile technology, programming, analytics – to succeed. Retail managers’ coordination efforts make this possible. These can facilitate every step of the selling process – from stocking stores to attracting customers and driving sales.

“Multichannel customers are worth more than offline- or online-only ones,” says Davis. “It pays to implement tech that allows operational improvement – not just a flashy experience for the customer.”

 

via Retailers’ Secret Weapon Lies In Their IT Department.

Retailers" Secret Weapon Lies In Their IT Department

Tech jobs: Minorities have degrees, but don"t get hired

Top universities turn out black and Hispanic computer science and computer engineering graduates at twice the rate that leading technology companies hire them, a USA TODAY analysis shows.

Technology companies blame the pool of job applicants for the severe shortage of blacks and Hispanics in Silicon Valley.

But these findings show that claim “does not hold water,” said Darrick Hamilton, professor of economics and urban policy at The New School in New York.

“What do dominant groups say? ‘We tried, we searched but there was nobody qualified.’ If you look at the empirical evidence, that is just not the case,” he said.

As technology becomes a major engine of economic growth in the U.S. economy, tech companies are under growing pressure to diversify their workforces, which are predominantly white, Asian and male. Leaving African Americans and Hispanics out of that growth increases the divide between haves and have-nots. And the technology industry risks losing touch with the diverse nation — and world — that forms its customer base.

On average, just 2% of technology workers at seven Silicon Valley companies that have released staffing numbers are black; 3% are Hispanic.

But last year, 4.5% of all new recipients of bachelor’s degrees in computer science or computer engineering from prestigious research universities were African American, and 6.5% were Hispanic, according to data from the Computing Research Association.

The USA TODAY analysis was based on the association’s annual Taulbee Survey, which includes 179 U.S. and Canadian universities that offer doctorates in computer science and computer engineering.

“They’re reporting 2% and 3%, and we’re looking at graduation numbers (for African Americans and Hispanics) that are maybe twice that,” said Stuart Zweben, professor of computer science and engineering at The Ohio State University in Columbus.

“Why are they not getting more of a share of at least the doctoral-granting institutions?” said Zweben, who co-authored the 2013 Taulbee Survey report.

USA TODAY

An even larger gulf emerges between Silicon Valley and graduates of all U.S. colleges and universities. A survey by the National Center for Education Statistics showed that blacks and Hispanics each made up about 9% of all 2012 computer science graduates.

Nationally, blacks make up 12% of the U.S. workforce and Hispanics 16%.

Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple and Yahoo declined to comment on the disparity between graduation rates and their hiring rates.

LinkedIn issued a statement that it was working with organizations to “address the need for greater diversity to help LinkedIn and the tech industry as a whole.”

Google said on its diversity blog in May that it has “been working with historically black colleges and universities to elevate coursework and attendance in computer science.”

USA TODAY

In his blog post on diversity, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook cited improving education as “one of the best ways in which Apple can have a meaningful impact on society. We recently pledged $100 million to President Obama’s ConnectED initiative to bring cutting-edge technologies to economically disadvantaged schools.”

All of the companies have insisted they are hiring all of the qualified black and Hispanic tech workers they can find.

In an interview earlier this year, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said the key to getting more women and minorities into the technology field had to start with improvements to education.

Tech companies lag in hiring minorities

Only half of black and Hispanic graduates with computer science degrees from leading universities are being hired by major technology companies. Percentages of minority staff at seven major companies and minorities graduating with CS degrees from major universities*:

Wage disparity among high-tech workers

Minority tech workers are paid less than their white coworkers, with Hispanic women at the bottom of the pay scale, according to a new study.

“We are not going to fix the numbers for under-representation in technology or any industry until we fix our education system,” she said.

Others say tech giants simply don’t see the programmers right in front of them.

Janice Cuny directs the Computer Education program at the National Science Foundation. She says black and Hispanic computer science graduates are invisible to these companies.

“People used to say that there were no women in major orchestras because women didn’t like classical music. Then in the 1970s they changed the way people auditioned so it was blind, the listeners couldn’t see the players auditioning. Now the numbers are much more representative,” she said.

The same thing happens in the tech world, said Cuny. “There are these subtle biases that make you think that some person is not what you’re looking for, even when they are.”

USA TODAY

One of the key problems: There are elite computer science departments that graduate larger numbers of African-American and Hispanic students, but they are not the ones where leading companies recruit employees. Stanford, UC-Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, UCLA and MIT are among the most popular for recruiting by tech companies, according to research by Wired magazine.

“That is the major disconnect,” said Juan Gilbert, a professor of computer and information science at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

“The premise that if you want diversity, you have to sacrifice quality, is false,” he said. His department currently has 25 African-American Ph.D. candidates. Rice University in Houston has a large number of Hispanic students.

“These are very strong programs, top-ranked places that have excellent reputations,” he said. “Intel has been hiring from my lab, and they say our students hit it out of the ballpark.”

Justin Edmund says he was fortunate to attend Carnegie Mellon. Today he’s the seventh employee at Pinterest and one of the top designers at the San Francisco start-up valued at $5 billion.

He’s also one of the few African Americans in his company.

“There’s a lot of things that can be done to fix the problem, but a lot of them are things that Silicon Valley and technology companies don’t do,” Edmund said. “If you go to the same prestigious universities every single time and every single year to recruit people … then you are going to get the same people over and over again.”

Contributing: Paul Overberg

via Tech jobs: Minorities have degrees, but don’t get hired.

Tech jobs: Minorities have degrees, but don"t get hired

What"s Driving Greater Adoption of IT Operations Analytics?

With modern business becoming more complex and facing constant changes, unpredictable events, and dynamic demand by the end users – all happening at unprecedented speed – IT Operations & Management is looking to adopt the right tools to optimize operations to handle the complexity and pace of change.

Need to Do More With Less

In 2009, IT budgets fell sharply. According to Gartner, they shrank 8.1 percent in 2009, and another 1.1 percent the year after. Though IT budgets started growing again in 2011, they are only at the level they were in 2005.

At the same time, IT operations teams are running with fewer people and resources, while not only managing an increasing number of systems, but also dealing with the new complexity that comes with hybrid environments and the rapid pace of changes nurtured by agile processes. Increasing productivity while lowering costs seems like a difficult proposition, especially since increased demands are placed on operations staff to manage a variety of rapidly evolving applications across the environment.

Managing Enormous Amounts of Data

Everything from system successes to system failures, and all points in between, are logged and saved as IT operations data. IT services, applications, and technology infrastructure generate data every second of every day. All of that raw, unstructured or polystructured data is needed to manage operations successfully. The problem is that doing more with less requires a level of efficiency that can only come from complete visibility and intelligent control based on the detailed information coming out of IT systems.

Frequent Changes Occur in IT Operations

With the operations staff responsible for the health of the entire business it is in their DNA to resist anything that might introduce unpredictable changes within the IT infrastructure or applications, so much so that IT Ops are rewarded for consistency and for preventing the unexpected or unauthorized from happening.

However, solving business problems requires creativity and flexibility to meet the frequent changes dictated by business requirements. New agile approaches eschew the standard method of releasing software in infrequent, highly tested, comprehensive increments in favor of a near-constant development cycle that produces frequent, relatively minor changes to applications in production. With hundreds or thousands of dependencies, even if the agile iterations are properly tested throughout development, unforeseen problems can arise in production that can seriously affect the stability.

Since every IT service is based on many parameters from different layers, platforms, and infrastructure, a small change in one of the parameters amongst millions of others can create significant impact. When this happens, finding the root cause can take hours and days particularly given the pace and diversity of changes. In many cases unplanned changes lie at the root of many failures. This can create business and IT crises that should be resolved quickly to avoid productivity and business losses.

Traditional Approaches Failed

Problems can be difficult to manage or even identify because so many businesses rely only on monitoring software, which is not sufficient alone to address challenges described above. In fact, problems are often not detected until they have grown out of control. If these issues are not resolved quickly, the result is downtime.

All of the technology infrastructure running an enterprise or organization generates massive streams of data in such an array of unpredictable formats that it can be difficult to leverage using traditional methods or handle in a timely manner. IT operations management based on a collection of limited function and non-integrated tools lacks the agility, automation, and intelligence required to maintain stability in today’s dynamic data centers. Collecting data, filtering it to make it more manageable, and presenting it in a dashboard is nice, but not prescriptive.

One of the holy grails still unresolved in IT management is intelligent IT automation. There are pieces of activities that are automated, targeted at the repetitive, well-known, mundane activities. This can free up people and resources to perform more innovative activities, and offer a more agile, speedy response from IT.

However, while automation is an important tool in the kit, it’s just one of the tools. The effort to automate complex environments is proportional to the complexity. Essentially, automation is just another generation of scripting of those activities that are running as part of operations designed to spawn and manage slave automation gofers.

The Rise of IT Operations Analytics

Given that changes to the operational model are almost guaranteed, a change in perspective is needed where IT operations takes a proactive approach to service management. Applying big data concepts to the reams of data collected by IT operations tools allows IT management software vendors to efficiently address a wide range of operational decisions. Because of the complexity of environments and processes and the dynamics of the environment, organizations need to have automation that is analytics driven.

With all of this data, IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) tools stand as powerful solutions for IT, helping to sift through all of the big data to generate valuable insights and business solutions. IT Operations Analytics can provide the necessary insight buried in piles of complex data, and can help IT operations teams to proactively determine risks, impacts, or the potential for outages that may come out of various events that take place in the environment.

Allowing a new way for operations to proactively manage IT system performance, availability, and security in complex and dynamic environments with less resources and greater speed, ITOA contributes both to the top and bottom line of any organization, cutting operations costs and increasing business value through both greater user experience and reliability of business transactions.

via What’s Driving Greater Adoption of IT Operations Analytics? | Data Center Knowledge.

What"s Driving Greater Adoption of IT Operations Analytics?

Women in Tech You Need to Know

Good news, according to a report released by the Center for American Progress:

The number of women-owned firms in the US grew by 59 percent from 1997 to 2013 — 1.5 times the national average.

Women of color are the majority owners at close to one-third of all women-owned firms in the nation.

African American women are both the fastest-growing segment of the women-owned-business population and the largest share of female business owners among women of color, at 13 percent.

Recently, I asked my folks to contribute names of impressive women in the STEM field who really have their boots on the ground. We got some really good responses, and have compiled an abbreviated list in no particular order. (You can read the full list here.)

1. Bindu Reddy, CEO and Co-Founder of MyLikes

Before starting MyLikes, Bindu was at Google and oversaw product management for several products including Google Docs, Google Sites, Google Video and Blogger. When she first started at Google, Bindu was a Product Manager for AdWords, where she improved the AdWords bidding model by introducing Quality Based Bidding and Quality Score for keywords. She was also in charge of Google’s shopping engine — Google Product Search and designed and launched Google Base.

Before Google, Bindu founded AiYo — a shopping recommendations service. Earlier in her career, Bindu was the Director of Product Management at eLance and a Computational Biologist at Exelixis.

2. Edie Stern, a distinguished Engineer and Inventor at IBM Edie has more than 100 patents to her name, and has been awarded the Kate Gleason Award for lifetime achievement. She received the award for the development of novel applications of new technologies. The 100 patents to her name represent her work in the worlds of telephony and the Internet, remote health monitoring, and digital media.

3. Ellen Spertus, Research Scientist at Google & Computer Science Professor at Mills University

Ellen’s areas of focus are in structured information retrieval, online communities, gender in computer science, and social effects of computing. She was a core engineer of App Inventor for Android, which enables computing novices to create mobile apps. and she co-authored a book on App Inventor.

Ellen has been working to bring more women into computing for decades now. In 1991, while studying computer science at MIT, she published a paper titled, “Why are there so few Female Computer Scientists.” And Ellen tells girls: “I’m sorry to tell you that Hogwarts isn’t real — but MIT is.”

via Women in Tech You Need to Know | Craig Newmark.

Women in Tech You Need to Know