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Computer Science evades gender equality

Unitec Computing Lecturer Mahsa Mohaghegh recently won the prestigious 2012 Google Anita Borg Scholarship, set up to promote women in the male-dominated field of computer science.

Despite massive changes in the working life of women around the world, there are still some industries where they are scarce. One of these is computer science; and for American computing researcher Dr Anita Borg, this became the focus of the last years of her life. Her mix of technical expertise and a relentless vision for dismantling the barriers to women entering the computer science field has helped women around the world embrace technology.

Male domination

When Mahsa was selected as one of the finalists for the Scholarship, knowledge of Anita Borg’s life added to her desire to encourage other women into computing.

“In New Zealand we do not have many women in this field. At Massey University, I was the only female computer engineer at PhD level. I know most of the women who are studying in this field in New Zealand, because there are not many,” she said.

Her aim has always been to learn as much about computing as possible.

“My Bachelor degree was in computer engineering, software and hardware. For my postgraduate (Masters), I changed to sensor networks, and my study involved designing a cross-layer architecture to enhance the quality of service for sensor networks,” Mahsa said.

Artificial intelligence

She was then awarded two scholarships, one each from Massey University and New Zealand Educated, to complete her PhD.

After four years of hard work, she’s just finished her thesis, which was in yet another area, namely artificial intelligence or machine translation.

Her goal is to build a speech-to-speech translation machine, a handheld device for visitors to New Zealand to use in everyday conversation to translate from English to Persian. She said that as interaction increases between people of different nationalities, speech-to-speech translator is becoming a practical proposition.

Three phases

“There are three phases involved in this process. The first is speech to text − words spoken by a user must be converted to text. The next stage is to translate text from one language to text in the other, and then finally text to speech. My contribution to the knowledge has been with the middle section, the machine translation of text to text,” Mahsa said.

Her programme is competing with some heavy hitters in the field.

“It is like Google Translate. You copy text into Google Translate, and press the button to get the translation, but depending what language you are working with, the translation is generally good. You will get the general idea, but mixed up with lots of incorrect words.”

She said her programme takes that idea a step further.

“When you translate just one word, there are more potential meanings, but when it is part of a phrase, it is likely to have a proper translation. Therefore, statistical machine translation based on a phrase is a better approach. On top of developing algorithms for the main program, I also developed a new hybrid three-layer approach for fine-tuning the translation output, which ended up giving translations with a quality that have never been seen before in this language pair,” Mahsa said.

Truthful translation

Following the completion of her PhD thesis, she commenced the next stage of research, which included languages such as Maori that need more translation work.

She received a Unitec Research Committee grant to implement production of a real-time translation programme that will translate Māori to English.

Having been selected as a finalist in the Google scholarship programme for the last two years, Mahsa has taken part twice in the three-day retreat at Google Headquarters in Sydney with other finalists, making vital connections in the industry.

“Google was just named Number One on the Fortune 100 ‘Best Places to Work’ 2013. It is dream job for anyone in computing, and I was able to spend time in their offices, and talk to their people,” she said.

The above is an extract of an article that appeared in Advance (Autumn 2013), a Unitec publication. Unitec is the Sponsor of the ‘Business Excellence in Innovation’ Category of the Indian Newslink Indian Business Awards 2013.

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