Mission
Members
Profiles
Resources
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The Women@SOCS Committee
The Women@SOCS Committee consists of women faculty within the School of Computer Science.
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Laurie Hendren
joined McGill in 1990 after completing her B.Sc.(Honours)
and M.Sc. degreee at Queen's University and her Ph.D. degree at
Cornell University. Her first large research project at McGill was
the McCAT optimizing/parallelizing C compiler which had a particular
focus on structured intermediate representations and pointer analysis.
Her current research groups concentrate on compilers and tools for
Java (http://www.sable.mcgill.ca) and most recently she has starting
working on compilers and language extensions for an aspect-oriented
language, AspectJ, which is joint work with Oxford (http://aspectbench.org).
She is currently the chair of the Chair of the Work Group on
Women Professors' Academic Careers and Associate Dean
(Academic) in the Faculty of Science.
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Bettina Kemme
joined McGill in 2000 after completing her Bachelor/M.Sc. at the
Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen, Germany, and her Ph.D. at
the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland.
During her studies, she spent a year at the University of Seville,
Spain, and at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her general
research interests lie in the design and development of distributed
information systems with a special emphasis on data consistency. Some
of her recent research projects look at adaptability issues in
multi-tier architectures. The idea is to replicate the various
components in such an architecture to achieve fault-tolerance and
scalability. If one replica fails, others can take over the load, load
is distributed among the replicas and by adding new replicas the system
can handle more load. However, coordinating the replicas of one tier,
and coordinating the different tiers in such an environment requires
sophisticated replica control mechanisms. Bettina Kemme is also
interested in XML data management, in particular, concurrency control
issues, and in data management support for massively multiplayer games.
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Brigitte Pientka joined the School of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor in 2003 after completing her PhD in Computer Science at
Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to her studies at Carnegie Mellon,
she has studied and worked at the Technical University of Darmstadt
(Germany), University of Edinburgh (Scotland), and Cornell University
(USA).
Her research area is verification and foundations of
programming languages. Her principal research interest lies in
developing a theoretical and practical foundation for building and
reasoning about reliable software. To achieve this goal, she combines
theoretical research in programming languages and verification with
system building and real-world experiments. In particular, she applies
techniques from logic, type theory, and automated deduction to find
rigorous solutions to problems exposed in practice.
Brigitte Pientka has been one of the founding members of Women@SCS at Carnegie Mellon University, and is now the chair of Women@SOCS at McGill University.
In her free time, she enjoys swimming, hiking and reading mysteries.
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Joelle Pineau has been an Assistant Professor at the School of Computer
Science since 2004. She has a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon
University, and a B.Sc. in Systems Design Engineering from the University
of Waterloo. Her research is motivated by the desire to build robust
intelligent autonomous systems. She is actively involved in finding new
algorithmic solutions for problems of decision-making under uncertainty,
and is interested in implementing these algorithms in the context of
real-world robotic and medical systems.
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Doina Precup
joined the School of Computer Science in 2000, after completing
her undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Engineering at the
Technical University Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and her MS and PhD degrees
at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Her main research interests
are in the area of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Doina
is especially interested in finding computational methods by which an
agent can learn from interaction with an environment, rather than by
being told what it should do. Hence, most of her research is in the
field of reinforcement learning. At the moment, she is the
Undergraduate program director.
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Sue Whitesides joined the School of Computer Science in 1983, and she now
serves as its
Director. After completing an M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at
Stanford in 1969, where
she was secretary of the IEEE, she worked as an engineer in the
machine tool industry, then continued graduate studies in
Mathematics. She received her Ph.D. from the University
of Wisconsin Madison in 1975, completing a thesis on finite
projective planes. She then joined the Department of Mathematics at
Tufts University,
where she inaugurated the local chapter of the Society for Women in
Engineering and served as its first faculty sponsor. Later she joined
the Mathematics
Department at Dartmouth College, where she was a professor for a number
of years before
arriving at McGill in 1983. Her research interests lie in computational
and discrete
geometry,the design of algorithms, and theoretical computer science.
She is particularly interested in graph drawing and layout problems,
algorithmic motion planning, and
applications of geometry to computer graphics and animation. She enjoys
interacting with researchers in other fields, including brain imaging,
mechanical engineering, chemistry, biology, sociology, and archeology.
In the old days, before becoming Director in 2005, she enjoyed playing
violin, and she looks forward to more of that soon.
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