Anita Borg Institute Announces 2012 Change Agent Award Winners

PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwire - Aug 7, 2012) - The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI) today announced the three winners of the Anita Borg Change Agent Awards for 2012. These awards celebrate the accomplishments of technical women outside of the United States who are working in their community to attract and support women in technology. This year's winners are Ramalatha Marimuthu from India, Maria Dubovitskaya from Russia and Evelyn Namara from Uganda. The Anita Borg Change Agent Award winners are being recognized for their technical leadership and advocacy work. The Change Agent Awards are underwritten by Google.

The winners will be honored and will speak at the 2012 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Baltimore Maryland, October 3-6, 2012.

Ramalatha Marimuthu is a Professor and Head of Department at Kumaraguru College of Technology. She has encouraged her students to embark on projects targeting individuals with special needs. Among her significant achievements are her innovative education modules using Vedic Mathematics for these special children, a writing monitor for dyslexic children and an early detection screener system for autism in children, for which she was awarded the Mentor award by the Secretariat for the Disabled, Government of Tamilnadu. In addition she introduced the first Women in Engineering Congress for the Asia Pacific Region in 2008, which is now held annually. She was appointed in 2010 to lead the IEEE Women in Engineering committee which directs the organization's 350 chapters all around the world.

Maria Dubovitskaya is a pre-doctoral researcher at IBM Research - Zurich and Ph.D. candidate at ETH Zurich. Her work on Cryptographic Control Code in Cash Registers and on new Electronic Identity Documents for the Russian Federation provides basis for strong technical know-how in Smarter City solutions. At IBM she continues to develop smarter and more secure systems and technologies that support economic development and bring long-term, societal value, to Russia and the world at large. Based on her achievements, in 2011 Maria received an ex-officio membership in IBM Academy of Technology, and created a Women in Technology chapter under TEC R/CIS. Throughout all these work-intensive life events she continues to find opportunities to support, coach and inspire the next generation of Russian and International female students.

Evelyn Namara is the Program Coordinator at Solar Sister in Uganda. Her focus is on the dissemination and adaptation of life changing technologies, picking up where technology designers and manufacturers often drop off. With the use of simple ICTs she has empowered the rural woman in Uganda. From inventory management systems, googledocs implementations, mobile phones communications, frontlineSMS - Solar Sister demonstrates how simple tools can be used to achieve great impact in society. She is solving the problem of women's access to technology by including women as active participants in a market-based distribution program and by reaching out to teach, encourage and support women in ICT workshops.

"The Anita Borg Change Agent Award Winners have a profound impact on everyone in their countries," said Telle Whitney, CEO of the Anita Borg Institute. "Change Agents are role models for technical women at all levels and show how much impact an individual can have on changing the culture of technology."

The world's largest gathering of women in computing in industry, academia, and government, GHC is a four-day technical conference designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront. Conference registration is now open. For more information, go to www.gracehopper.org.

About the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI)
The Anita Borg Institute provides resources and programs to help industry, academia, and government recruit, retain, and develop women leaders in high-tech fields, resulting in higher levels of technological innovation. Our programs serve high-tech women by creating a community and providing tools to help them develop their careers. The Anita Borg Institute is a not-for-profit 501(c) 3 charitable organization. Partners include: Google, HP, Microsoft, Amazon, CA Technologies, Cisco, Dell, Facebook, First Republic Bank, IBM, Intel, Intuit, Juniper Networks, Lockheed Martin, Marvell, National Science Foundation, National Security Agency, NetApp, SAP, Salesforce.com, Symantec, Thomson Reuters, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Broadcom, Neustar, Raytheon, and Yahoo! For more information, visit www.anitaborg.org