The University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory has been home to brilliant female researchers since its earliest days. This International Women’s Day we celebrate some of the outstanding women in computer science, pioneering researchers who have made a significant impact on the field both today and in the past.
Professor Amanda Prorok
Robots
Amanda Prorok is Professor of Collective Intelligence and Robotics in the Department. Professor Prorok’s research focuses on robots and finds ways to optimise their collective intelligence. She designs algorithms that allow multiple autonomous robots to coordinate and cooperate. Her work has a direct real-world application in improving traffic and transport, where using robots could produce smoother, more efficient and safer manoeuvring. Other applications include logistics, surveillance and environmental monitoring.
Professor Cecilia Mascolo
Smartphones + digital healthcare
Cecilia Mascolo is Professor of Mobile Systems and Co-Director of the Centre for Mobile, Wearable Systems and Augmented Intelligence. The Centre aims to advance state-of-the-art mobile systems, security and artificial intelligence (AI). Long term, their research will pave the way towards making wearable, mobile and augmented intelligence systems a reality.
Professor Mascolo’s research focuses on how the devices we carry around daily gather data about behaviour. She looks at how to do this efficiently and accurately, and gives increasing attention to maintaining the privacy of our data.
Professor Mascolo’s group uses machine learning to interpret mobile and sensor-generated data, such as the data from sensors in a smartphone. Her work has been applied in zoology, by monitoring animal behaviour with sensors, and in urban computing by looking at data collected by geo social networks, allowing analysis of how cities function.
Mascolo’s current research focuses almost exclusively on mobile health, where the application of wearable tech can help people to lead longer and healthier lives. Her work can help with the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s and Type 2 Diabetes, as well as supporting mental health and cardio-respiratory illnesses. Wearable intelligent devices can collect and interpret data on symptoms and behaviour, leading to better, more tailored healthcare treatments.
Professor Ann Copestake
Computational linguistics + digital democracy
Professor Ann Copestake was the Head of the Department of Computer Science and Technology (2018-2023), and is Co-Director of the Cambridge Language Sciences interdisciplinary research centre, which brings together researchers from across the humanities, social sciences, biology, medicine, computer science and engineering, as well as other bodies like the University Library and Cambridge Assessment.
Professor Copestake works at the intersection of computer science and linguistics, developing computer models of many different human languages. She was the original developer of the Linguistic Knowledge Builder (LKB), free open source software for generating grammars and lexicons of natural languages.
As the field of computational linguistics advances exponentially, Professor Copestake’s work considers what it means to communicate with non-human, semi-intelligent, artificial agents. As Co-Investigator on the research project Giving Voice to Digital Democracies: The Social Impact of Artificially Intelligent Communications Technology, she is focusing on the ethical and social ramifications of AI. She says “We are already at a point where systems have some intelligent and adaptive behaviour, but we are nowhere near artificial general intelligence.” Her research aims to inform and positively influence the development of Artificially Intelligent Communications Technology (AICT) by recognising its huge potential impact on human society, including at the macro level such as in politics and ethics.
Professor Alice Hutchings
Cybercrime
Alice Hutchings is Professor of Emergent Harms in the Department. She is also part of the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre, and takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining computer science, criminology, and law. Professor Hutchings uses data to improve our ability to identify and understand criminal activity and to gather evidence of criminal behaviour. Her research provides important data on cybercrime and computer security to other academics.
Before becoming an academic, Professor Hutchings had a varied career in parliament, law, and private investigation. She began researching cybercrime in the late 1990s. Her research interests include stolen data, airline ticketing fraud, and offender pathways into and out of cybercrime.
Professor Paula Buttery
Digital languages + cybersecurity
Paula Buttery is Professor of Language and Machine Learning in the Department. Professor Buttery is a computational linguist who works across multiple disciplines, and teaches at both the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics and the Department of Computer Science and Technology. Her research deals with Natural Language Processing and language cognition, and she has also worked on cybercrime and cybersecurity. She is interested in building Natural Language Processing tools that work with non-canonical forms of natural language and also with low resource languages such as endangered languages and dialects.
Professor Buttery is Director of the Cambridge Institute for Automated Language Teaching and Assessment (ALTA). She also works on under-resourced endangered languages as part of the Cambridge Africa programme, which partners Cambridge researchers with colleagues in Uganda and Ghana. Other research interests include the computational modelling of first and second language acquisition and language evolution.
Karen Spärck Jones
Established the basis of search engines
Professor Karen Spärck Jones was a pioneering computer scientist, who worked at the Computer Laboratory from the late 1950s until her death in 2007. Her work formed the basis of all modern search engines, as she taught computers to understand data through words instead of statistics.
Spärck Jones was a self-taught programmer and a computational linguist who was strongly supportive of more women in the field. She was also said to be ahead of her time, foreseeing conflicts between technology and morality that were not perceived in Silicon Valley until recently.
