Today is International Women in Engineering Day, where people across the globe celebrate the outstanding work achieved by women engineers, and encouraging more women to consider STEM professions. Over the years, we have seen a number of inspirational women present their work, in Arm Research, at conferences we have attended, and at the Arm Research Summit. Their research has enabled us to spark discussions with academics and researchers from around the world. We are taking a look back at some of our favorite talks from women engineers.
We heard from Dr Catherine Ramsdale in 2018, when she spoke about PragmatIC’s work in the IoT field, and their development of flexible electronics. Catherine leads the device engineering activity at PragmatIC, and her talk highlighted how we could incorporate electronics into everyday objects, such as ICs into packaging. Catherine highlights that price point, rather than performance, is the primary driver, as the cost per IC needs to be $0.01 or less. Implementing flexible electronics in packaging could allow brand owners to become more aware of their consumer engagement and give the consumer the confidence in the authenticity of the product they are purchasing. Catherine’s talk detailed PragmatIC’s approach to implementing this, taking the same approach as silicon used in NFC functionality.
Catherine and her team’s work into flexible electronics is eye-opening, and her talk introduced researchers across the world to the benefits of implementing electronics into everyday products. This opens opportunities to organizations looking to understand their customers on a deeper level, and enhance their consumer experience.
Arm Research’s very own Renee St. Amant delivered a thought-provoking talk at the first Arm Research Summit held in Austin. She discussed the use of AI in healthcare and its potential to revolutionize the doctor-patient relationship through earlier diagnosis and prevention of disease. AI has the potential to fuel a rate of scientific progress faster than anything seen before. However, most existing AI technologies have been developed with a focus on accuracy within a different risk landscape than we encounter in biotech. Renee explored the motivation for increased explainability in AI models, as well as policy and ethical considerations that arise from using machine learning and AI on biotech data.
AI in healthcare is becoming central to technological development in the field, and recently policy and ethical challenges have been widely reported on. Renee’s interest and insight in these areas can be applied to many other areas of research and future work in this field. Find out more about her work in the presentation she delivered in 2019.
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At the time working as a Research Associate at Imperial College London, Dr. Marin Sawa delivered a presentation at the Arm Research Summit 2018 introducing a printed solar biobattery for bioelectronics. She noted the urgent need to develop a sustainable battery technology. Ensuring it is cheap, environmentally friendly, easy to fabricate and to dispose of is imperative, especially to tackle the world-wide increase in illegally-dumped electronic waste. Innovative approaches are needed to solve scale-up issues, and Marin presented a method using a simple commercial thermal-inkjet printer to fabricate a thin-film paper-based BPV cell. This consists of a layer of cyanobacterial cells on top of a carbon nanotube conducting surface on plain copy paper. It is able to produce electricity in the light and dark with an electrical power output of up to 0.38mW/m2 in one system, with another fully-printed system sustaining electrical current production for over 100 hours.
Sustainability is becoming an ever more prominent consideration in our society, and Marin’s work highlights the importance of technology in addressing these challenges, also opening the discussion around scalability issues. We look forward to seeing how the research progresses.
At the 2019 Summit, Caroline Trippel presented her research on CheckMate, which addresses the broad class of security vulnerabilities where confidential data is leaked through programmer-observable microarchitectural states. CheckMate is an automated tool able to determine if a microarchitecture is susceptible to the specified classes of security exploits. The approach adopts 'microarchitecturally happens-before' graphs, where prior work designed to capture the subtle orderings and interleavings of hardware execution events when programs run on a microarchitecture. Caroline also shared a case study which demonstrated where CheckMate can be used to evaluate the susceptibility of a speculative out-of-order processor to FLUSH+RELOAD cache side-channel attacks.
Caroline’s cutting-edge research offers an innovative solution to security risks. Throughout her research she leverages formal techniques to design and verify hardware systems, ensuring they can guarantee security for the application they need to support. With the number of connected devices increasing exponentially, Caroline’s work has the potential to make an incredible difference. To learn more, take a look at the slides Caroline presented at the Arm Research Summit 2019.
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Dr Catherine Ramsdale, Renee St. Amant, Dr. Marin Sawa, Caroline Trippel and many more women in engineering have undertaken incredibly thought-provoking research over the years, but what could a career journey look like in the industry? Wendy Elsasser, a Distinguished Engineer at Arm Research, looks back at the milestones in her career journey.
‘My initial job as a full-time engineer was at Motorola, in their engineering rotation program where I applied and worked with four different groups over my first year, selecting one for my final place position at the end. This provided a base knowledge and vast appreciation for a variety of roles in engineering. Moving forward, I transitioned through a few startups. Not all made it to IPO or a buy-out, but the experience was worth it due to the expansion of my skill set. Up to then I worked in an implementation role as a designer and architect. Moving to Arm, I changed roles to work in Arm Research, another shift in my career that has provided new opportunities. I’ve learned that trying new roles and taking risks can be scary, but it can open up doors and create unforeseen rewards that are priceless. The Arm Research Summit is a unique forum to hear from researchers from all backgrounds. It has been great to hear from so many inspiring women engineers over the years, gaining insight into innovative research projects while connecting with the wider community can open further opportunities for everyone in our industry.’ Wendy Elsasser - Distinguished Engineer, Arm Research
‘My initial job as a full-time engineer was at Motorola, in their engineering rotation program where I applied and worked with four different groups over my first year, selecting one for my final place position at the end. This provided a base knowledge and vast appreciation for a variety of roles in engineering. Moving forward, I transitioned through a few startups. Not all made it to IPO or a buy-out, but the experience was worth it due to the expansion of my skill set. Up to then I worked in an implementation role as a designer and architect. Moving to Arm, I changed roles to work in Arm Research, another shift in my career that has provided new opportunities. I’ve learned that trying new roles and taking risks can be scary, but it can open up doors and create unforeseen rewards that are priceless.
The Arm Research Summit is a unique forum to hear from researchers from all backgrounds. It has been great to hear from so many inspiring women engineers over the years, gaining insight into innovative research projects while connecting with the wider community can open further opportunities for everyone in our industry.’
Wendy Elsasser - Distinguished Engineer, Arm Research
Join us at this year’s virtual Arm Research Summit to continue to celebrate the inspirational work taking place across the research community. With a varied program including talks, lightning presentations, and plenty of networking opportunities, the Summit will explore the global technology challenges faced by our society, now and in the future, highlighting how technology is influencing the sustainability of our planet and security of devices.
Registration is now open, and free of charge. Limited tickets are available, so secure your place now.
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