To recognize International Women’s Day, SRI shares the stories of four women whose work delivered fundamental advances in computer science.
Women have been central to computer science since its earliest days. Ada Lovelace wrote the first algorithm designed for a computer. Grace Murray Hopper developed some of the first compiler tools and championed the development of COBOL, which still underpins a significant amount of government and finance infrastructure to this day. In the 1940s, Frances Spence, Jean Bartik, Kathleen Antonelli, Marlyn Meltzer, Ruth Teitelbaum, and Betty Holberton programmed ENIAC, one of the first general-purpose electronic computers, doing complex calculations by hand before ever touching the machine.
Radia Perlman’s spanning-tree protocol became foundational to how modern networks function. Fei-Fei Li co-created ImageNet, the large-scale dataset that catalyzed the deep learning revolution and much of modern AI.
In SRI’s 80-year history, some of our most revered computer science innovators are also women.
To celebrate International Women’s Day, we’re sharing the stories of four women whose work at SRI delivered fundamental advances in modern computing.
Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler
Initially trained as a biochemist, Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler pivoted to the emerging field of information science when she joined SRI in 1960. As SRI’s work on computing and networking accelerated, Feinler assumed a critical leadership role in Douglas Englebart’s Augmentation Research Lab: managing the nascent Network Information Center (NIC). The NIC served as the central information hub for the ARPANET, its successors the Defense Data Network (DDN), and (eventually) the modern internet. In addition to publishing and disseminating network documentation to support users, the NIC developed an online query system that later led Feinler to refer to the NIC as “kind of the prehistoric Google.”
One of the more significant moments for Feinler came in the mid-1980s, when the NIC developed the top-level domains — .com, .org, .net, etc. — that we continue to use today. The NIC was also charged with assigning the initial domain names to early adopters. Feinler’s group registered the first commercial domain name — symbolics.com – The First Domain Name Ever Registered on the Internet — to a computer manufacturing company on March 15, 1985.
For her pioneering work, Feinler was elected to the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012.
Helen Chan Wolf
SRI played a central role in launching the AI revolution. One of the forces behind that early work was Helen Chan Wolf, an AI pioneer who fundamentally advanced autonomous robotics.
Even before joining SRI, Wolf had established a reputation as a bold and forward-thinking scientist. In its feature on “The Secret History of Facial Recognition,” Wired chronicles some of Wolf’s important pre-SRI work on facial recognition.
Wolf joined SRI at a critical juncture. In 1966, the year she moved to SRI from Panoramic, SRI launched its Artificial Intelligence Center. The AI Center was one of the world’s first labs dedicated to AI technology and celebrates its 60th anniversary this year. Wolf played key roles in developing Shakey (the first robot to navigate and reason with artificial intelligence) and establishing the field of automated facial recognition.
“Helen Wolf was one of our key developers,” comments Tom Garvey, a former principal scientist at SRI who worked closely with Wolf on the Shakey project and is pictured with Wolf in one of the iconic images of Shakey from 1973. “She was responsible for developing many of the subsystems involved in the Shakey project. A significant part of her work focused on the computer vision systems: both code for the sensors for acquiring images and algorithms for interpreting those images in order to identify objects in Shakey’s scene.”
Later in her career at SRI, Wolf continued to pursue research on vision and AI, contributing new approaches to emerging problems such as linear delineation and algorithmic curve partitioning.
Barbara Grosz
Barbara Grosz is recognized as a major figure in maturing not one but two vastly influential computing disciplines: natural language processing and multi-agent systems.
Before moving onto a distinguished career at Harvard, Grosz spent more than a decade at SRI in the 1970s and 1980s. As she explained in a 2015 interview, one of the most important outcomes of her work at SRI was the first computational model of dialogue. She also helped develop Dialogic, a core natural language processing system that played an important role in multiple SRI research programs in the early 1980s. Working with collaborators from Stanford University and Xerox PARC, meanwhile, Grosz led SRI to co-found the Center for the Study of Language and Information, which went on to support decades of groundbreaking collaborative research in the cognitive sciences.
Later, at Harvard, Grosz served as the dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, chaired the 2005 Harvard Task Force on Women in Science, and more recently co-founded a new effort to infuse ethical reasoning into computer science curriculum. She was the first woman president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and received both the 2015 IJCAI Award for Research Excellence and the 2017 Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award. Grosz is currently the Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences, Emerita at Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Martha E. Pollack
Long before Martha E. Pollack served as the president of Cornell University or sat on the board of IBM, she built a career as a forward-thinking researcher at SRI.
Pollack joined SRI’s AI Center in 1985, after working closely with Grosz (see above) as she earned her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania.
Once at SRI, Pollack published widely, burnishing SRI’s reputation for inventive thinking as the AI Center became a deeply influential hotbed for research in areas like natural language processing and planning in agentic systems. Pollack investigated emerging issues like resource-bounded agents, resource-bounded practical reasoning, semantic and pragmatic interpretation, theories of intention, and agent architectures, asking vital questions about how we could better understand and model machine intelligence. In 1991, Pollack’s work at SRI earned her the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, one of the premier awards for early-career researchers working in the field of artificial intelligence.
In addition to her own research contributions, Pollack has played a critical leadership role in cultivating the broader AI research community. She served as the president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, spent time as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, and is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. As artificial intelligence matured from a promising academic research topic into a century-defining commercial technology, Pollack has been one of the guiding hands shaping the world we live in today.
Celebrating the past, looking to the future
The contributions of Feinler, Wolf, Grosz, and Pollack are load-bearing pillars in computing science history. The internet’s architecture, the first AI-reasoning robot, the foundations of natural language processing, the theory behind modern AI agents: these are their legacies. As SRI marks its 80th anniversary, we carry that legacy forward with intention, striving to maintain a culture where women lead research programs that define the future of technology.
Learn more about how SRI changed the face of computing and communications and continues to chart the future of AI.
