Irene Grief was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT, she won the 2012 Women of Vision Abie Award for Technical Leadership ! Via Anitaborg.org

Irene Greif is an IBM Fellow and Chief Scientist for Social Business at IBM, where she is responsible for designing IBM’s long-term strategy for social business. She is also the director of the IBM Center for Social Business, a global effort to focus CSCW (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work) and Computer-Human Interaction research on the growing opportunities to transform business practices through social technologies such as crowdsourcing, social analytics, and interactive visualization. The Center has emphasized research based on large scale deployments of new technologies, providing test beds for studies of adoption rates and impact of social media on organizations. The Center is currently developing “social solutions” that put horizontal social software to use in vertical settings to tackle specific business problems.

Irene is a former faculty member of Computer Science at University of Washington and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. She headed a research group in the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science that developed shared calendar, co-authoring, and real-time collaboration systems. She is a fellow of both the Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). Irene was inducted into the Women In Technology International (WITI) Hall of Fame in 2000 and awarded the Women Entrepreneurs in Science and Technology Leadership award in 2008. In 2010, she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and in 2012 she was elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Irene joined Lotus Development Corporation in 1987, formed Lotus Research in 1992, and merged that group into the IBM Research Division in 2000. Recent product innovations from her group include the core features now shipping in IBM Connections: social bookmarking, file sharing, profiles, and business activities, as well as a number of experiments in visualization, with Many Eyes and Many Bills as examples available on the web.

Irene received her S.B. in Mathematics, her S.M. and her PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, all from MIT.

Check out her acceptance speech below!

October 10th is Ada Lovelace Day! Today the world celebrates all of the accomplishments of women in science, art, design, technology, engineering, and math. Each year, Adafruit highlights a number of women who are pioneering their fields and inspiring women of all ages to make their voices heard. Today we will be sharing the stories of women that we think are modern day “Adas” alongside historical women that have made impacts in science and math.

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