Science Friday - ‘Broad Band’ Computing History, Science Talent Search. March 9, 2018, Part 2

Episode Date: March 9, 2018

In the history of male-dominated computer science, there are a few women who have gotten attention and credit for their contributions. Famously, Ada Lovelace wrote the first algorithm designed for a computer, and foresaw that such machines could do much more than math alone. Grace Hopper, after programming Harvard’s Mark 1 computer during World War II, went on to develop the first program compiler and helped make software programming accessible to more people. But as Claire Evans writes in her new book, Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, even more women were part of the internet’s rise at every step along the way. She joins Ira to tell their story. Plus: What were you doing when you were in high school? Were you investigating how supernovae explode? Designing 3D-printed nano-devices that can absorb bacterial toxins? Writing algorithms to detect gender bias in the news? Those are just a few of the ambitious projects more than 1,800 high school science whizzes submitted to the Regeneron Science Talent Search, a competition founded by the Society for Science and the Public. One thing is for sure: If these students are the future, the future is looking bright. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flito. Here's a number for you. Familiar number? 1984. No, I'm not talking about the George Orwell novel. I'm talking about the year that women's numbers started to decline in computer science. Until 1984, the number of women with computer science degrees had been rising steadily. Those studying computer science went from 15% women in 1970 to 35% in 1984, and then it all started to go down. Today, women only hold about a quarter of computing jobs.

This problem is well documented and much bemoaned, but it might surprise you to hear that before this decline, women had their hands all over tech. Remember the hidden figures of NASA's human computers? That's not the only story of women's early participation in tech. Women were programmers and engineers. They helped build some of the structure of our modern internet. Univac to Arpenet to Hypertext.

They built social networks. They helped the Internet become a place where information had meaning and interconnection. And don't forget Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first algorithm for a computer. Here to tell some of these stories is Claire Evans. She's author of a new book, Broadband, the untold story of the women who made the Internet. And we want to know if you're a woman who was online or just intercomputing in its early days, give us a call. Our number 844-724-8255-8-4-Sight-4-Sight-Talk, or you can tweet us at SciFry.

I'm welcome you to Science Friday, Claire. Hi, I'm delighted to be here. It's nice, nice to have you. You tell my producer, this book came from a crisis of faith you had about your place as a woman on the Internet. Yeah. Well, I grew up online, essentially. I'm of the generation where, although I can remember a time before the web, it's not very clear for me. I grew up learning how to write on the internet.

I saw text on the screen and it empowered me as a young writer. My father worked for Intel. I had computers in the home growing up. I had always felt that the internet was my country in some way. But in the last few years, I started to feel a little bit disconnected from it. Unsure if as a woman I had a place on the internet anymore, I felt more vulnerable. I felt like it was harder to express myself as freely as I had in my early days online. And so, yeah, the book comes from that.

Did it solve? Did it resolve your issues there? I don't know about the future, but I'm certainly much more confident about the past. When we were first broadcast our show on the Internet in 1993, we did a show called What's This Thing Called the Internet? I would love to hear that. It's great. We play it a lot.

It's true that our guests were mostly men. We had Brewster Carl and Carl Malamund. We also spoke with Gene Polly of Nisernet. Do you remember that one at all? And we heard from several women, including a university research librarian, who raved about how the Internet had changed her work. So where exactly do you think women's stories? And why have they been left out of the history of the Internet?

Well, the Internet is an interesting case because it was developed by the Department of Defense and to serve the needs of computer scientists and engineers at the highest levels of academic computer science. So by definition, it was a very male-dominated environment in terms of the infrastructure. But women have always found ways to position themselves even within those kinds of spaces. I mean, one of the most fascinating characters I think in my book is a woman who ran what was called the network information center of the early ARPANET, the first version of the internet. She was the secretary, the air traffic control, the librarian, the sort of head information resource of the network. She wasn't a computer scientist, but she brought a lot of value to organizing the information on that network and connecting people on it, which tends to be a theme if you look at the network. the history of women in computing and also in my book.

That was Jake Finler? That's Jake Finler, yeah. Yeah. And you're reading your book, I learned a lot of new stories. I've been reading, living the Internet from my old career. But two of the names you write about are absolutely familiar, Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper. Yes. Now, I have a particular soft spot for Grace Hopper because she, I remember she did an interview

with David Letterman in 1986. And it's one of my favorite clips I play it as much as I can. And you worked on the original computer in this country? I was very fortunate. The Navy owed me into the first big computer in the United States, Mark I at Harvard. It was called Mark I at Harvard. Now in those days the thing was 51 feet long, eight feet high, and eight feet deep. And that was the pocket model. That's right. You could put it on a little tiny corner of a chip now.

Yeah. Now how did you know so much about computers then? I didn't. How did you? The first one. Yeah. In fact I had to learn a lot of things. One day Commander Aiken came around to my desk and

and says, you're going to write a book. I said, I can't write a book. He said, you're in the Navy now. So I wrote a book. You had to write a book, and that was outlining the entire manual of the computer. Wow. And that really set the stage for other people who follow, right? She was the best.

Her name is not credited on that manual, by the way. Is that right? Yep, yep. So she didn't just program the Mark I, and she also helped make programming accessible to the rest of us and for people who came later. Yes, exactly. I mean, when she came into her,

job as a programmer, there was no precedent. There was no established system. She had to learn how the machine worked from wiring diagrams and from taking it apart. She bootlegged her own engineering education. And then she not only sort of refined the methods by which we operate programs on those old school computers, but after the war, she dedicated a great deal of her career to establishing systems by which programmers could make, their jobs could be made easier, essentially. She invented the first compiler. She pushed for what was then called automatic. programming, which was a way for programmers to step to a level above the machine level and sort of begin to think more symbolically about their work, which is, I would argue, what

sort of catalyze a development of programming as a discipline, as an art form and as a language. I remember from the back in the day, Cobol. She invented Cobol, which was used by everybody. The grandmother of Cobal, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah.

At the same time that Grace was changing the field of programming, a group of women were programming the ENIAC, the first successful ballistic demonstrations, right? Yes, exactly. And they didn't get credit until many years later. They did not get credit for 50 years until they finally got sick and tired of it all and started to tell their own stories, which is very important for women to remember to do sometimes. And why were they not remember? Well, back in those days, there wasn't much of a distinction made between hardware and software.

Software was, you know, considered to be the menial manipulation of the hardware. It was kind of subservient to the hardware. It took many years for programming to be seen as a kind of art form or something with the real power to change the world. The people who operated the ENIAC were, you know, they came from applied mathematics. They were doing sort of the grunt work of the scientific age. They were mathematicians, but really they were seen as on the level with, you know, telephone operators or secretaries. It was seen as clerical work, not as significant. So it wasn't until the significance of that work became clear that, well, if the people wanted to take the credit for it,

as they always do. If you didn't have an advanced degree or a degree in computer science or some sort of thing that the men had, you weren't looked at as legitimate. Yeah, exactly. I mean, part of the decline of women in computing coincides with the development of the sort of professionalization of the field. When its importance became recognized, programming was sort of implicitly, there was a semantic shift.

They stopped calling it programming, they started calling it software engineering. And software engineering has its own established sort of. of professional canon. It's got a clear chain of, you know, a linear chain of educational prerequisarments that you have to have in order to become an engineer. So that kind of edged women out of the field just as they were most needed. And we can thank Elizabeth Jane Finler for our handy dandy domain sorting system. Dot edu.com.

Yeah. She was sort of a one woman Google of her time. Yeah, she was the one person. I mean, back in the early days of the ARP and at the internet, there was no interface for navigating those resources. If you wanted to use a computer at a distance, you had to know what was on that computer. And so what Jake did was she created the sort of white pages, the yellow pages of the internet. She was the one person who knew where everything was.

If you had a question about the internet for 20 years, you called a phone number in her office, and she answered or one of her employees answered and told you how to have access to the thing you needed. It's pretty mind-blowing to think about. Are these stories about women or internet pioneers who happen to be women? I think it's a story about underdogs, frankly. Oh. Who happened to be women, yes.

For me, listen, I think it's not so much that I want to counter great man history with great woman history. I think people often do that with people like Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper. They're easy to point to and say, here's this amazing woman. For me, what's more interesting is simply providing more complexity and more nuance to the stories of the technologies that have changed our world. And one way to do that is to tap into the amazing resource of all these extra people that were also in the room, the time and hear what they had to say about what it was like. Is there a benefit to a gender difference between the women who were designing computers and the men?

Did the women bring a certain feeling to it that the men didn't have? I always want to stay away from this idea that there's something essentially, you know, feminine about a certain approach to computing. That being said, if you look at the history of computing and you're looking for women, you tend to find them in these spaces that are more user-oriented. Now, that might just be a consequence of where it was easier to, you know, get purchased as an academic or a computer scientist as a woman. But I think that there may be something there. You know, I think that a concern for and a care for users and how people actually employ technology is really, really important.

And it has been somewhat ignored, I think, in other histories. Because you're reading your book, you see, the women are the ones who are the communicators in this. Yeah, for sure, for sure. They realize the power of communication and the way to open up computers to everybody is to, my own. Like, you know, Grace Hopper did find a way to communicate with them. Exactly. I mean, Grace Hopper was, I think, her biggest legacy is that she fought really hard to make computers accessible to non-programmers, which at the time was not an easy feat. But we talk a lot about machines, and when we think about the history of computers, we think of a sequence of machines.

But really, it's not the machines that changed the world. It's the users. And I think emphasizing the importance of use is something that we need to really be doing, especially more and more now, as technologies really have an outsized effect on, you know, the disruption of communities and cities and entire workplaces and environments. Yeah, it's all about the user. Our number 844-8255. We're talking about, what we're talking with Claire Evans, who's author of Broadband, the untold story of the women who made the intranet,

and we're trying to tell a little bit of their stories. There's so many stories. Did you have to limit how many women you could talk about? Yes, I did. When I first started working on this book, I felt the real burden of responsibility of wanting to include every single excluded name. And I could have written an encyclopedia. There are so many stories beyond the ones that I included in the book.

Volume 2? Broader band. This time it's personal. Oh, that's good. You already have the title. I don't think my publishing would go for it. All right, we're going to take a break and come back and talk more with Claire Evans, author of Broadband, The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet.

Also, we're going to talk about some of the early Internet. Stacey Horn is going to join us. She's going to be talking about the early days of what was the Internet. Like, maybe you can go back and remember what it was like in those days in the early 80s. Maybe you were part of it. Give us a call, 844-724-8255. And also, if you're a woman who was involved in computing in those days, you can also reach us at 844-724-8-255 or tweet us at SciFri.

We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. We're talking about the beginning, the untold story of the women who made the Internet Broadband book by Claire Evans about her new book. A lot to talk about. And one of those women is with us right now. Before there was a Facebook or even a Friendster,

if you wanted to go online to make friends in, let's say, 1990, you might join a BBS. Do you remember those? Bulletin board system. There was no graphic interface for the net. You typed everything on that little green screen, remember, and you could join any number of conversations about arts, culture, politics, or just the weather.

The whale in San Francisco was one of those places. But here in New York, Stacey Horn from her apartment in Manhattan built one such network just for people in New York City. It was called Echo, the East Coast Hangout, and its thousands of members made in person. They formed friendships, talk politics. Even live-tweeted, so to speak, news events, what they could do in those days. And more remarkably, Echo was the rare space on the Internet that was full of. women. They had their own private channels on Echo to talk with each other, and they were put in charge of moderating conversations on an equal basis with men. Stacey Horne joins us here

in our studios. Welcome, Stacy. Great to be here. Thank you. Remember those start at the beginning of those days? I do remember. I do remember. Well, I was a student at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, and we had an assignment to call the Well, which I instantly became addicted to, called every day through the out graduate school. And when I was in my last semester, I was logging into the well,

and someone said, oh, I heard you're going to start the East Coast version of the well, which actually had never occurred to me, but the second I heard it, I thought, oh, yeah. And I type back, yeah, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to start the East Coast version. And I quit, dropped a course I was taking, picked up another course called writing a business plan and put it together. And your catchphrase for Echo was, Echo has the highest percentage of women in cyberspace, and none of them will give you the time of day. Yeah, yeah. What did you mean by that?

Well, because I wanted women viewed as how they really are, and they're not there for your entertainment and amusement. They're there for their own reason. So I wanted to have that attitude right from the start. You made sure you had a voice in how Echo was run. Every separate chat room or conference had to be a female. host, a male host? Yeah, I wanted women when they logged in to not feel that this place was run by men. There was just as many women in charge as men, so that they, again, weren't there at the behest of

men and weren't being controlled by men and told how to speak by men. There were women in charge. But, of course, like anything else, had also had its share of ills, right? What was it like to be the first person to deal with the trolls? The Internet trolls. Horrible. Like whenever anyone tells me to look back, probably the first thing I'll remember is panic.

Like I started echo with all these wonderful dreams of community and conversation. And the minute people got together, conflict arose, which, of course, when you think about it is like, duh. But at the time, I didn't know what I was doing. There was no troll manual. But you must still have realized that despite the trolls, there's great value in creating this community. It overshadowed the trolls. And in a way, there's great value for trolls.

If you can somehow manage to at least mitigate their conversational skills, their communication skills a little bit, You can safely online get into the heads of someone that you disagree with, someone you find abhorrent. Echo's still working? Yes. It's a lot smaller and quieter than those days, but we're still around. Does it have a GUI interface now? No, it's still text-based. How do you do that?

You go to a website now, or how do you get on? I have to mail you in the mail. Do you have to have a modem to get into it? No, no, no, no. We're on the Internet, but you have to learn commands. Is that right? Yeah. So, yeah, you will mail somebody how to get into it.

Yeah, yeah. And I send this letter where I call us retro trying to make it sound appealing. Also with me is Claire Evans in case you're joining us now. Author of Broadband, The Untell Story of Women Who Made the Internet. Claire, you joined Echo, in the process of writing the book, right? I did. I did. I lurked around on Echo for some time.

It's a pretty fascinating thing for someone who grew up on the web to experience. You know, you don't realize how much your understanding. understanding of how the world's information is navigated, is predicated on sort of hyperlinks and conventions that are more graphic. But Echo is something that you have to sort of dive into this textual universe. It's very fascinating. And the fact that it's been around for so long, it's like this amazing time capsule. It contains thoughts and feelings and reactions to all these important historical moments and all

these mundane things as well. And they all exist in the same sphere. and you can navigate it, and you can sort of be a ghost flying through the entire history of New York City, it feels like. Yeah, because we saved everything. All the conversations that take place are still there. Wow. As someone who was so involved in the early online communities, how do you feel about social media and the new internet now? Is that, or are you on Facebook?

I love the new internet. You like it better. I love it. I wouldn't say better. It's just, it's like saying, what do you like better, a book or a movie or a phone call or email? Now, everything has its place. I love it all. What do you think the women in your book would have thought of they at all?

I asked that question of pretty much everyone that I talk to that's still alive, what they think of the Internet today. There's a varying degree of responses. Some of the people that were involved in the really early days don't even really see it as the same thing. You know, they see the thing that they were involved with, and they see this thing now. And they're like, it's a totally different beast, as same as Stacy just said. A lot of people are annoyed with spam. and advertising and, you know, data tracking and all the things that we find to be upsetting today. But, you know, that's the great thing about the Internet is there's space for all different kinds of use.

And one of the things I love about Stacey's Facebook presence is that I feel like echoids use Facebook like Echo, kind of. Like, you're talking a lot in the comments in a way that I don't. I find that really fascinating. Interesting. 844724-8255 is our number. Let's go to Cincinnati. And Sunita, welcome to Science Friday. Hello, thank you. Thank you for taking my call.

Go ahead. So I was a woman in computer science in the early 90s. I finished my degree in the early 90s. And, you know, when I started my degree, I actually did not have any background in computing. I never touched a computer. And, you know, my dad thought, well, I think you might like this because, you know, my favorite subject in high school was math. So, but I just didn't have the confidence.

And at that time, you know, you didn't have the mentorship. I didn't even know that I needed. a mentor at that point, but not having a mentor and not having that confidence. And then, you know, in most of my classes, they were mostly guys. So I was actually enrolled in the Honest Program and I dropped out of it because I just, you know, you felt out of place a lot of times. So, but I did go on and, you know, for my master's, I did a degree in geography, which was mostly, you know, applying computing like computer cartography and GIS.

And after that, I worked for a few years in IT. And then, you know, following that, I did leave because of family reasons. So that was one of the reasons I called, that, you know, when you think about a lot of the women who were in computers, even at that time, many of them are not in computer science careers anymore. And some of those reasons, you know, our family reason, because, you know, when I try to negotiate flex time or part-time work, I wasn't successful in doing that. So you're saying that women today are a little, have it a little better because there's more sympathy for women's issues? I think there is more of an awareness for women's issues. You know, there is, I think people at least talk about, you know, the balance between balancing work and family life. There is at least a conversation.

I think at the time when I was dealing with some of these issues, if you brought it up and, you know, your boss or the people, that you worked with might see you as somebody who is not committed to their job or their career. And some of us also didn't think of it. You know, we were, I guess when I looked back, I think, you know, I thought of my job as a job, not necessarily as a career. And there is a big distinction between the two sometimes. All right. Let me get a reaction. Thanks for calling.

Any reaction? Yeah, I mean, she touched on some issues that come up again and again in this history, which is that mentorship is really important, community and sort of, representation, seeing yourself surrounded with other people in the workplace or online really matters. That's why I think the fact that Stacey made female moderation a big part of Echo is a really powerful thing, a very simple thing to do. And, of course, companies making space for child care obligations because those are not

just women's issues, those are everyone's issues. And you recognized early on in Echo that by separating, creating groups just for women's issues or women to talk to each other, that was important. Absolutely. But actually, while she was talking, I just flashed on when I was initially trying to get financing for Echo and going from bank to bank and investor and investor. They not only said no, they just looked at me with disdain and pity that I thought that communicating with other people over your computer was ever going to be a thing. Wow, that's really interesting. Let me go to the phones to Menlo Park, California.

Beverly, hi, welcome to Science Friday. Beverly, are you there? I'm here. Hi, go ahead. So one story that I wanted to highlight that I think is left out is the story of Lynn Conway. So I would put her in a similar league to maybe Grace Hopper, maybe like, you know, B-League compared to Grace Hopper, but she solved a key problem in computing called very large-scale integration, which is modern computers have many, many processors instead of just one processor.

And the problem is that a program, a computer program is a linear set of instructions that you just take, start at the top and go to the bottom. So how do you run those on two computing quarters at the same time? So at IBM, she was one of the key team members who helped solve that problem. The catch is Lynn Conway

is transgender and did that work as a man. So she did that work as a man, and then she changed to a woman, and to protect herself, she hid her past, including that key part of computing history, and then rose again,

from the bottom, just a mere programmer, to the top again, and she's now a tenure professor at University of Michigan. She literally wrote the book on a very large-scale integration while she had Xerox, and I was completely flabbergasted when I read about her because I personally studied the stuff she invented in school, my senior year in an electrical engineering and computer engineering degree. See the Wheels and Claire's kind of going around for her next book.

No, there's so many. Great story. Thank you for calling in up with that story. That's remarkable. I've heard of Lynn Conway. The thing about this book I really hope I can get across is that I really don't want people to look at this book and say, well, okay, the stories have been written. We're done now. There's so many more, so many more that even I don't know, and I've spent years of thinking about this stuff. It's remarkable how many incredible women have been involved in the development of computing.

So if you had to pick out one story out of the, you know, it's like asking you know your kids. which kid they love the most. The most untold story, or the most... The most untold. The most most story. You know, one thing that really knocked me out reading about this stuff is the history of hypertext. You know, we think about the web as being a hypertext thing. Like, that's how we, that's our main association.

But hypertext conventions and the sort of advanced thinking about hypertext was developed for a decade before the development of the World Wide Web by a group of predominantly female computer scientists and researchers. and they thought about things like how can we create systems where we connect information to one another through links and we never lose that information. So they designed systems where links could go two ways,

they could go in several directions at once, where they weren't embedded in the documents themselves would in fact live in this layer above the documents so that we would never have what we experience today on the web with a 404 error where if you lose a page, then you lose that piece of information that's connected to it. There could have been a million different ways that the web could have gone,

and I think often about, you know, what if some of these systems had taken the place of the web, what kind of world will be living in today? This is Science Friday from PRI Public Radio International. Talking with Claire Everton's author of Broadband, The Undold Star of Women Who Made the Internet, Stacey Horn, founder of Echo here in New York. So I can't let you end with that thought. How would, you know, how could the web be better if it had gone in another direction? Listen, I mean, right now we take for granted that when we create a link, it might not last forever.

I think the rate of link rod is, you know, every nine years, you know, that's about the, that's like the length of a link's life. But the information that's contained in the connection between two ideas is just as important as those individual ideas themselves. And the way that we can navigate the world of information with the constructive, creative attitude, you know, those were the sort of core conventions of early hyper. So I don't know how we can fix the web we have. Stacey, did you see the web going in this direction? I mean, when you were starting out, where did you, you know, did you see the commercialization? That's the thing that surprised me the most is how quickly. No, absolutely.

In fact, I was always trying to get companies to get online and to use the internet. I didn't see that as a bad thing. I think I always say that I saw a lot of it coming because a lot of it happened on Echo and the well and other places that I was visiting. You could see what was taking off and what wasn't. So the only thing that was a real surprise to me was how we would all be transferred to telephones. You mean over the phone? To phones.

Oh, you mean to cell phones we have instead of the computer and the modem. Yeah, I still think telephone. So would that, do you still find that shocking, surprising? I saw phones becoming popular. That wasn't the surprise. The surprise was that they would replace computers for people. Oh, personal. The old Newton, remember the original Apple Newton?

Yes. The first little carry-all device went nowhere. Yeah. It was something before its time. Yeah. So where do you think you should go today? Are you starting over at Echo again or starting, what would you do? Do differently.

Honestly, the only thing I can think I would do differently is I never built a graphic interface for Echo. But as Claire was talking, I was thinking, what really would I do differently? And the only thing I can think of, and I'm not sure how I would implement it, is the ability to look into people's eyes. You know, one of the interesting things you talk about and the difference between social media is that the first designers, and I only have a minute to make this point, you weren't allowed to give out your real name, right? Your ID back in the day had to be some phony name so that you couldn't bring politics into the discussion of the military, into the discussion. And now it's just the opposite, social media, isn't it? Yeah, well, the nature of anonymity has changed a great deal, and it's changed the way that we relate to one another. It used to be we would use avatars to protect ourselves, and now we use avatars to troll and harass people.

On Echo, you're not allowed to be anonymous. Yeah. And that was always the case. Yeah, because? Well, because I felt people would be more careful. and responsible about what they said if they knew that everyone was going to know who was saying it. And were you right? Yes.

She was right about everything. But that doesn't seem to work on Facebook and where people, you know, they have their names? Well, people are more civilized among each other, but not now between people that they see as part of another group. All right. We'll have to bring this up again next time because we've run out of time. Stacey Horn, founder of the New York Social Network Echo back in 1990. Claire Evans, author of Broadband, The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet.

It's out now a great read. Congratulations. Thank you so much. On that book. We have a little bit of it on our website, ScienceFriety.com slash a broadband. And you just heard the story of the women on the Internet. And next week we're going to tackle a question of the Internet's present,

why women are being left behind in the cryptocurrency craze. Subly. That's what we do here. We'll be back after this break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Back in high school, did you build a project for the science fair? Mine was a punch card reader. If you're of a certain age, you'll know what I'm talking about. If not, there are there a lot of other ideas that might impress science fair? Judges, let me give you a few. How about analyzing the chemical makeup of stars to discover just how exactly supernovas explode? Or, why not 3D print a nanoscale device to suck up toxins from antigenes? antibiotic resistant bacteria. Those are two real examples of projects.

And this year's Regenerin science talent search, a science competition founded and produced by society for science and the public. There are more than 1,800 students from high schools around the country that entered. And now just 40 brainy finalists remain. They're in Washington, D.C. for the final judging now. And we've got a couple of them on the line today. Let me share them with you. My next guest is a one.

One of the finalists, her project, an algorithm that can sniff out gender bias in movie reviews and news articles. Nietzsche Partisardi is a senior at Northwood High School in Irvine, California. She joins us by Skype. Welcome to Science Friday, Nietzsche. Hi, happy to be here. Thank you. Now, you designed an algorithm to detect gender bias in text to look at the relationships of certain words like strong or smart with either men or women. tell us about that.

Oftentimes, in societies will see males refer to as strong as smart and females refer to as kind or caring, and I wanted to examine this. And the first way I did that is through statistical analysis. And I found that we often do associate males and females with those stereotypical adjectives. But I also noticed that was really interesting is that we associate males with some female stereotypical adjectives. So not only will we call them strong or smart, but we'll also call them kind of. or caring. And from here, I moved on to algorithmic analysis to see if I could create an algorithm to detect these biases. So there's a sentence, he is strong, and I took out the

word he. Could the computer guess whether he or she should go in there? And so now I have a program that allows anyone to put any document they have into my program, and it will give you a biased score, basically telling you how biased your document is. Well, can you expand this thing into other kinds of biases like racial bias, political bias? Yes, that's one of the great things about my project, is that it so easily extends to different types of biases. Like I mentioned in the sentence, he is strong. If I replace the word that I was looking for,

which is he or she, with some sort of racial pronoun, like African-American or any term like that, I could easily detect the biases that we use to describe different races. I can do the same thing with age, even political biases that we have. Now, I know you use neural networks and things like that for this project. How did you learn to use all of these computer programming tools? So for me, I think this is all inspired by my project.

I started off realizing that there's a problem with gender bias, and I wanted to do something about it. So it came up with this project, and I wanted to objectively measure bias in society, and I knew to do that. I needed to use algorithms. And so really the way that I learned it was looking online to research and read papers. And my passion for analyzing bias really carried me

through all that literature and being able to understand what was happening. And I kept reading online about the best algorithms to use. I read up on courseware from Stanford and MIT, where they described how neural networks work and learned through that. And right now, I'm taking APE computer science to develop a more.

more fundamental knowledge of computer science as a whole. But really my project and my understanding neural networks just stem from an interest to analyze my project. And from there, I really learned neural networks. So you're being modest. What you basically did was teach yourself everything. Yeah. I mean, I think that for anyone, if they're really interested in something, if you find a topic and explore through basically working backwards, you have a topic and you want to figure out how something works and you work backwards, I think that's the best way to learn. You say you were inspired to pursue this as a project. Was there an event in your life that was key and in your inspiration?

Yeah, I think there are two events specifically that really started off my project. I've experienced bias throughout my life. One of the key experiences I had was in eighth grade. I decided I wanted to be a doctor because I just really wanted to help people. And immediately, people started telling me, like, oh, you're, You want to go to medical school? Don't you want to have children? Don't you want to have a family?

The two were exclusive. And I immediately stopped wanting to be a doctor because people expected me to have my whole future life planned out when I was in eighth grade. And so that bias totally carried through my life. And there was a special aha moment when I really began my project. My brother, my dad and I were driving to get food one day. And my brother started to cry. asking for boba or bubble tea on the East Coast.

It's a type of drink. And my brother's obsessed with this drink, and he started to cry, and my dad said, stop crying like a girl. And for some reason that day, I just took severe offense to the statement. It's something that you hear all the time. You run like a girl. Stop crying like a girl.

But I was so sick of women always being associated with these weaker turns, and I really want to examine to see if this was something that was just in my community. It's just a societal problem, and what can I do to change that? and that's really what started my project. Wow, that's really interesting.

So you really have a passion for studying and doing something? Yeah, I think, I mean, especially today, we've seen so many women speak out. I think whenever you see a problem in society, or at least for me, there's always an inclination to somehow fix that. And I'm really glad that through my project, I've been able to take a step towards fixing gender bias. And so I think, yeah, I've always had a passion for helping other people.

And through this project, I really realized that computer science is the way that you can truly help people. So do you think that teenagers should become very involved in speaking out when they see something they don't agree with? I do think so. I think a lot of people think that teenagers don't really know what they're talking about. But we have a totally different perspective. We have a fresh set of eyes. And sure, sometimes we can be naive and idealistic about the world, but I also think that's great, that fact that we can hope for something

that might not be practical, but the longer and the more we strive to achieve that type of idealism, I think we're going to reach as close as we can to, maybe not perfection, because perfection is boring, but some sort of equality in the world or just, I mean, a general sense of just improvement. I think that teenagers really are inspired to change the world, and every issue that they think the world needs to solve, especially now they're taking it to their own hands. I think that's something that's really admirable and should be encouraged.

And you see computers as a way of taking that power? Yes, I think that technology is complicated, but it's so interesting, and it's really the future of the world. And computer science, especially, and computers in general, are really the new ways in being able to, I mean, there's so much you can do with it, you can relate to biology, to fashion if you wanted. So there's so much to discover, and I think computers and computer science is the perfect way to do so. I know that some technologists like Elon Musk, whom I understand you admire,

are worried about the implications of artificial intelligence. What's your take on the future of AI? Should we be worried about it? It's not developing, my view, and that's why I respect Elon Musk. so much because there are definitely negative to AI. And I think a lot of people think that AI should be a robot and should be a tool that we use rather than something that's starting to take over.

And I totally understand the aspect. But I think there's so much merit to looking at AI as modeling the human brain and trying to see what we can achieve. Can we achieve a neural network or any form of artificial intelligence intelligence that can process things or information like the human brain. And I think there's so much that we can discover through that. And I agree that there are some really dangerous possibilities. And we've already kind of seen that peek through and AI can definitely lead to some dangerous

possibilities. But I think that we'd be doing a disservice by not examining and trying to push forward science. So I think when we look back at just science in general, when people were really worried that science would change their perspective of the way they thought the world would, the way they thought the world acted. And then we see now how science has led to so many new discoveries. And I think that if we try to, like, inhibit what we can do with AI just because we're afraid of the possibilities, which I know that they're dangerous, I know there should be limits, but if we try to inhibit that too much, I think we're doing ourselves a disservice.

I want to bring on another finalist. investigated invasive species and how to get rid of them using biological controls. I'm going to let her explain it. Hannah Sharif is a high school senior at Lincoln Park Academy in Port St. Lucy, Florida. She joins us

from NPR. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. We're very happy to have you. You've come up with a new... Tell us about this new type of weed killer. First you had to go out into the natural world and hunt for the weeds natural enemies. Tell us about this.

Yeah, so there's a weed particularly called Purple Nutsedge, and it's become a huge problem, not only in Florida, but around the world. And basically, my discovery was by chance. I went into a farm with, well, my mentor went onto a farm, and she saw that this particular Nutsedge was being attacked by a rust fungi. However, this fungi had, I mean, this, this Nutsedge had never been seen being attacked by this fungi before. So we brought the fungi into the lab and we identified it and we found a completely new association, as in this fungi, just never attacked this plant before. And I also, what I did is I took the fungi and I increased its efficacy. So basically what I did is I added different solutions to the fungi that basically make it produce more disease on the plant, therefore killing the plant and therefore being really influential in the agricultural industry. and deterring this weed not only in our gardens, but also just in corporate scale productions.

You know, the history is filled with unintended consequences. Yeah, for sure. You know where I'm going with this, right? Yes. Could there be unintended consequences to spraying this fungus around? Yeah, so the biggest thing that separates my project from a typical biological control or a typical experiment where you release an organism into a new environment is that this fungus has already been discovered in natural environment. So it already naturally attacks this plant.

So all I'm really doing is I found this fungus, which hasn't been found before attacking this plant, but it naturally attacks it. And I brought it in, and I only increased its efficacy. So it's already present in the environment. And it's already doing substantial harm to the not touch population. And I only basically increased the amount of harm that it does through using plant-based volatile. So the volatiles are also not, they're not chemically based. so they're not bad for the environment in those kind of aspects.

This is Science Friday from PRI, Public Radio International, talking with some of the finalists and the regenerant science talent search with me, as Hanya Sharif talking about her new fungus, she's hoping to keep invasive species from taking over. For other young people listening today who are interested in science, but maybe you need a little advice on how to get where you are today. Give us an idea of what your pathway, your trajectory, the thing that got you into science. Yeah, so for me, I live in a very small town.

I might go to a very small public school that doesn't have as many opportunities as a typical public school does or a typical private school does. So for me, I think the biggest thing, the biggest advice that I would give to different scientists is to take every opportunity you can possibly have. If there's something as small as working in a lab and washing dishes, you never know how far that you can take. how far that can take you. For me in particular, that's how I started. I started working in a local lab, a very small lab, and I washed dishes, and I watered plants. And over time, I just saw the implications of what these scientists were doing,

and I became more interested in science in general. So just take every opportunity you possibly can, even if it's the smallest thing, because you never know where it can potentially take you in the future. What was the most surprising thing that you learned during your travels in this experiment? So I think the most surprising thing I've learned is patients. Typically, when we see or hear about a scientific development on the radio or on like a television, we don't realize how much time it takes for scientists to really come out with something effective. Something as simple as DNA extraction or something as simple as DNA identification takes weeks, if not hours and hours.

And that's such a small segment of the whole project. And I think for me as a scientist, it was really surprising to understand the implication that time, how. has on science in general. Anita Partisari, what is your advice to people? Other people who might take your path? I think that just find something that you're really passionate about and explore it and don't let anyone else tell you otherwise. That's something that I myself have been culprit to.

When someone discourages you or discourage me, I'd easily swayed and move on to something else. But if you're really passionate about something, I think you should go for it, especially if that something has, like, real merit and could change society, really push forward no matter what anyone else says, because true change happens despite the resistance that you might have. Do both of you find comfort in meeting others, scientists, your age, and with your passions? Yeah, so for me, I think that, oh.

No, go ahead. Okay, so for me, I think that the most amazing thing coming to Regeneron is that you see, see students from all around the nation that are just as passionate about something as you are. And they're just, sometimes they're just, sometimes they're more knowledgeable than you in certain aspects and you just learn so much from them. And I think that's the biggest thing that I've learned from, you know, Virginia on and SCS in general. Nietzsche, you too?

I agree. I think that science, especially today, is so interdisciplinary. And right now we all are very specialized into our own fields and being able to talk to people from different areas and see where our research kind of converges, where they're different. It's really interesting and being able to talk to these people. And also the response, when you talk about your project for so long, so many people get bored. But when you're talking to these top 40 finalists, they're so enthralled in what you did, no matter what type of project, whether that be math or computer science or biology,

and that's really been wonderful. Well, I want to wish both of you good luck among the 40 finalists. Nietzsche Partisartisardi, senior in Northwood High School and Irvine. and Hanya Sharif, a high school senior at Lincoln Park Academy in Port St. Lucie, Florida. Good luck to all the finalists in the Regenerant Science Talent Search. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you so much. Thank you.

You're welcome. Congratulations for getting this far. Our digital producer Lauren Young has put together beautiful Q&As with both Hanya and Nietzsche. It's up on our website where you can read more about their projects, and you can find out more about how they got into science. They're all up on Science Friday.com slash high school. science. Science Friday.com

slash high school science. BJ Leatherman composed our theme music, and of course, every day is Science Friday. You can listen to our website, all kinds of videos and wonderful stuff up there, social communities. You can ask, you know, your new devices to play

Science Friday whenever you want. Just smart speakers will spit it right out there for you. Every day now is Science Friday. Have a great weekend. Thank you all for your birthday wishes this week on social media. Myra Plato in New York.