It's Ada Lovelace Day!

I can hear from a far a load of people going.. Ada who?

Well, that asks for a little history lesson, I am not going to type it all out when you have the wonderful wikipedia that can tell more about this fascinating lady. Ada Lovelace in short was the first female programmer, this in the 19th century when she created a theoretical program that would give you the a sequence of Bernoulli numbers.

So today we remember her and want to shine an extra spotlight on women in technology. Being a programmer myself I had a hard time choosing one of the many fantastic examples out there. But a few weeks ago a colleague posted a link on our company Yammer and it caused that feeling that you get as a little girl when you know when you know what you wanna be when you grow up. Well when I grow up I want to be like Pattie Maes!

For the people not knowing Pattie Maes, she is a belgian lady who is currently an associate professor at MIT's program in Media Arts and Sciences.

Apart from that awesome job title Pattie Maes was the key architect behind what was once called "collaborative filtering" and has become a key to Web 2.0: the immense engine of recommendations fueled by other users. In the 1990s, Maes' Software Agents program at MIT created Firefly, a technology (and then a startup) that let users choose songs they liked, and find similar songs they’d never heard of, by taking cues from others with similar taste. This brought a sea change in the way we interact with software, with culture and with one another.

The movie clip that introduced this remarkable lady to me, you can find here.

It shows Patty demoing a new way in which humans and computers interact, partially by redefining both human and computer. In Maes' world (and really, in all of ours), the computer is no longer a distinct object, but a source of intelligence that’s embedded in our environment. By outfitting ourselves with digital accessories, we can continually learn from (and teach) our surroundings. This can vary from product information while shopping, to taking pictures and all this information visualised on any surface!

I was gobsmacked by the advanced state of the technology demoed and can see the world changing with the actual introduction of it. The possibilities are too many to think up in a few days.

So on this Ada Lovelace Day I would like to share with the world my own personal Ada being Pattie Maes. Keep up the good work and thanks for reminding me that with hard work even a woman from a country as little as Belgium can make that big an impact on the world!