Happy Ada Lovelace Day Isabelle Guyon

Happy Ada Lovelace Day everyone :)

For the second year, I have taken the Ada Lovelace Day pledge to blog about women in technology. Last year, I didn't really have a woman role model - or a particular Ada in mind - so I mostly blabbed in my post.

After that, I got to learn, in the Advanced Machine Learning course (a.k.a. the horror :P) we took last year, about a smart woman called Isabelle Guyon. Now, I don't know Isabelle personally, but I have discovered that she is a very smart woman-in-technology. She was one of the organizers of a past Feature Extraction challenge that we were assigned to (try to) implement feature extraction methods for. That was the toughest coursework we had to do and her being the organizer of such an event is just remarkable :) She even made it to role model status before I learned anything else about her ;)

So, she specializes in statistical data analysis, pattern recognition and machine learning techniques with experience in biometrics, bioinformatics, and handwriting recognition. Also, she is vice-president of the Unipen foundation, action editor of the Journal of Machine Learning Research, area chair at the NIPS conference and competition chair of the IJCNN conference.

To be honest, ever since I learned about her, I thought she was my Ada and I wanted to blog about her on Ada Lovelace Day 2010 :) .

Although this is a very short post, I just wanted to spread the word about a very remarkable woman.

I hope there are many more women like Isabelle out there :)