Anita Borg, an internationally recognized computer scientist and activist on behalf of women, founded IWT in 1998 to bring more women and their ideas into all aspects of technology and to increase the positive effects of technology on the lives of women throughout the world. IWT helps communities, industry, educational institutions and government agencies to benefit from these ideas. It carries out this mission through a variety of programs including workshops, Internet technology communities, publications, conferences, and VDC activities. The equipment will include desktop computers, laptops, printers, scanners and other computer hardware and is scheduled to be delivered to the VDC in October. The UA VDC program will begin with a workshop to bring together women with both technical and non-technical backgrounds to explore the use of communications and medical informatics technology in delivering health care to rural communities in Arizona.
Medical informatics involves using software to deal with large volumes of medical data.
Other technical themes will also be developed. One of the UA VDC s first projects will use software developed by Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Ralph Martinez to link rural hospitals to urban hospitals that have sophisticated radiology capabilities. The UA VDC will branch out from this initial effort to include a wide variety of research projects, Umashankar says. By becoming involved in a Virtual Development Center project, women engineering and science students will gain valuable experience and be part of a support group that will help them stay focused and involved in earning their degrees. The UA center also is an academic program and participants will be required to select some specific courses to fill their technical elective requirements that relate to the UA VDC project they are working on.