The first year of the Athena Lectureship was 2006-2007, and the inaugural Athena Lecturer was Professor Deborah Estrin of UCLA, who spoke at MobiCom 2006 in Los Angeles.)
The 2007-2008 Athena Lecturer was Professor Karen Spärck Jones of Cambridge University, who passed away on April 4, 2007. She taped her lecture, which was given at the 30th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval in Amsterdam.
The 2008-2009 Athena Lecturer is Professor Shafi Goldwasser of MIT and the Weitzmann Institute of Science. Professor Goldwasser will present her lecture at the 2009 ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computation.
Shafi Goldwasser accepted the ACM-W Athena Lecturer Award at the ACM Awards Banquet at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco on June 21, 2008.
Pictured (L-R): Stu Feldman, ACM President; Elaine Weyuker, ACM-W co-Chair; Alan Eustace, Google Vice President; Shafi Goldwasser; John White, ACM CEO.
Athena Lectures celebrate outstanding women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. Each year ACM will honor a preeminent woman computer scientist as the Athena Lecturer. Speakers are nominated by SIG officers. The Athena Lecturer will give a one-hour invited talk at an ACM conference determined by the speaker and the SIG which nominated her. A video of the talk will appear on the ACM website. The award includes travel expenses to the meeting and a $10000 honorarium. Financial support for the 2008-2009, 2009-2010, and 2010-2011 Athena Lecturers is being provided by Google. Nominations for the 2009-2010 Athena Lectureship are due February 1, 2009.
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