Students and faculty then work during the school year on projects to create products from the ideas generated at workshops. 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 UA DC 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.
Linking to rural hospitals Also key to the first workshop and this initial program will be Olivia Sheng, department head in Management and Information Systems and an expert in the area of medical informatics, and Alison Hughes, director of the Arizona Telemedicine Program. The UA DC will branch out from this initial effort to include a wide variety of research projects, Umashankar says.