Dr. Katie Bouman
Katie Bouman is most known for developing the first ever picture of a black hole. She, along with a team of scientists, used 8 global radio observatories to analyze the galaxy on and off for 10 days in April 2017 to make this breakthrough in computer science. Katie Bouman also developed the Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors (CHIRP) algorithm that could be used in imaging black holes, though it wasn’t used in the first ever photo which she made possible.
Joy Buolamwini conducted a study that pointed out how AI and facial recognition had racial and gender-based biases. This has even been apparent in major companies such as Microsoft and Amazon. This acknowledgement has made these companies aware of the issue and some effort has been put into it by them to make a change, showing how their involvement has already made notable changes. Overall, she really helped to bring some more much-needed ethics to technology.
Elizabeth Feinler was a monumental figure in representing women that worked in the computer science field. Her group developed the first Internet yellow and white-page servers. In essence, these servers contained the names, telephone numbers, and addresses of people. White page servers get this information based on landlines while yellow pages gather this information based on business establishments and service providers. Her group also helped to develop the first WHOIS server which is a public database that collects information when someone registers or updates a domain. They also managed the Host Naming Registry for the Internet from 1972 to 1989. She developed the domain naming system seen commonly today consisting of top-level domains such as .com, .edu, .gov, .mil, .org, and .net. Because of her impact, she was appointed Delegate at Large at the White House. She is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Society for Industrial Security, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and was a founding member of the Internet Engineering Task Force. She led the ARPANET, which was the first public packet-switched computer network, and then the Defense Data Network, network information centers under contract to the Department of Defense. In reality, her work is what laid the foundation for the introduction of the internet.