GHC11 Day 3 Recap

I mentioned that days at GHC are long - mine went from 8am yesterday til well after midnight!  Here's a summary of the events of the day:

Ming Hua giving her talk.

• Keynote by the Honourable Shirley Ann Jackson, PhD: read my summary here.
• Facebook technical talk (Large Scale Computing track), "Understanding Relationships through Data": This talk was presented by my grad school labmate, Ming Hua.  Read my summary here.
• Kinect Lounge: This was a really cool initiative by Microsoft.  They set up a 'Kinect Lounge' in the exhibition hall, where anyone could drop by and play Dance Central.  It was great to see so many people come out and try Kinect, many for the first time!  It was also nice to hear the 'oohs' and 'ahs' when they used the voice control feature.  I also met another Kate who works at Microsoft and is Canadian there, which was an unusual coincidence.  We had a great conversation! :-)
• Systers Luncheon: If you are a technical women and not on the Systers mail list, you should be!  I get so much value almost every day from the questions and insights posted here, and it was so nice to meet some fellow Systers in person!
• Plenary Session: In the afternoon there was a great panel discussion with sponsors and their sponsored colleagues.  Sponsorship is a new concept for me so it was helpful to hear about the difference between sponsorship and mentorship and how to negotiate the nuances of the sponsor relationship.
• Industry track talk on "Understanding your Customer": read my summary here.
• Sponsor Night: Sponsor Night is a GHC tradition where the conference's platinum sponsors (this year Google and Microsoft) host an evening of food, t-shirt giveaways, music and dancing!  It's a great way to unwind after the packed conference schedule.  Anita Borg loved dancing, so this is a nice way to honour her.  I think the food at the dinner was the best food I had at the conference all week!  So delicious!

A bit dark, but here's what ~3000 technical women dancing looks like!