CRA-W Activities for Women in Research Labs

CRA-W sponsors a number of activities for women researchers working in industrial and government research labs. While some of these activities are specifically focused on women in industrial and government labs, others have a broader focus but are nonetheless relevant to these researchers. Both types of activities are included here.

Travel Support

For women in industry/government labs

ResearcHers is a discussion mailing list whose purpose is to provide a space for communication and networking of women in computer science research, breaking the isolation of women computer scientists in industry, government labs, and academia.

Grace Hopper Conference

The Grace Hopper Conference, which is an annual gathering of women in computer science, features various activities of interest to researchers. There is usually an informal gathering to meet and share experiences: in 2006 AT&T sponsored a breakfast, while in 2004 Google sponsored a lunch. In addition, there are various panels aimed at women in industry and government labs. From Grace Hopper 2006:

  • Managing Career Change for Researchers
  • Challenges Faced by Female Technical Leaders
  • Opportunities for Women in International Companies
  • Leadership: A Diverse Perspective
  • Non-Traditional Ways to Advance Your Career
  • Research in Industrial Labs: How Collaboration Aids Innovation
  • Balancing Your Career and Family
  • The Technical Career Path
  • Another Ride on the Crazy Train: Work/Life Balance

Distinguished Lecture Series

The Distinguished Lecture Series sends faculty and researchers working in labs to campuses to encourage women and minorities to attend graduate school and consider careers in research. Each Distinguished Lecturer gives a talk about her research at the campus and participates in a panel describing research careers, graduate school, and the process of applying for graduate school. The lecture itself provides an opportunity to showcase the work of a woman researcher.

Mentoring Workshops

CRA-W has sponsored a series of Career Mentoring Workshops, targeted to women in all stages of their research careers. Women often find themselves a minority in their own institutions, and the CRA-W workshops bring them together with women already established in their fields. The established professionals provide practical information, advice, and support to their younger colleagues. Each of the workshops is associated with a major professional meeting, providing many attendees with the opportunity to attend technical talks and make contacts in their research areas. There is material targetted at both academics and women working in research labs.

Grad Cohort

The Graduate Cohort Program addresses the underrepresentation of women in computer science careers by building cohorts of graduate students, creating a community through their graduate years. Each cohort is brought together at an annual two-day workshop. Many of the panelists who speak at the meeting work in research labs, so the workshop also serves as an opportunity for women working in research labs to network and share their experiences with each other and graduate students in computer science.

Discipline-specific Mentoring Workshops

CRA-W and CDC are jointly soliciting proposals for discipline-specific mentoring workshops in the broad field of computing. The goal of these discipline-specific mentoring workshops is to increase participation of members of underrepresented groups within a specific research area by providing career mentoring advice and discipline specific overviews of past accomplishments and future research directions. Specifically, the workshop should focus on helping young researchers at the graduate or post-graduate level in either industry, government labs, or academia become interested in and knowledgeable about the research and research paradigms of a specific discipline. Speakers are drawn from both academia and research labs.

Profile of the Month

Kathrin Berkner is a senior research scientist at Ricoh Innovations, Inc. in Menlo Park, CA. Her research focused on document image processing for applications used by digital multifunction machines, digital cameras, and mobile phones.

Kathrin's approach has applied multiresolution data representations and analysis to a variety of document processing problems. In 2003 she was awarded Ricoh's internal "Minori" award for outstanding creativity for development of wavelet-based enhancement technology used in Ricoh's multifunction products. More recently her interest has focused on combining image-and text-based representations of document information in order to develop frameworks that enable content- and device-dependent rendering of document information. This research has resulted in document viewing and browsing applications suitable for small-size display devices and mobile phones. In these applications, an image, a part of an image, or a collection of images serve not just as pictures or bits, but as an interface betwee the human and the computer. For the work on Multimedia Thumbnails Kathrin was awarded the Best Paper award at the ICME conference in Toronto in 2006.

Currently Kathrin conducts research in the field of optical-digital image processing, an area of computational imaging that studies systems consisting of optical elements and digitial image processing capabilities in a joined framework.

Besides publications in academic journals and proceedings, Kathrin has more than 20 pending patents in the area of image and document processing. She is also serving on various conference program committees as reviewer and chair.

In addition to the technical challenges in her work for Ricoh, Kathrin especially enjoys the cross-cultural experience of working for a Japanese company out of a satellite location. During trips to the company's offices in the Tokyo area she seeks the opportunity to learn first hand from Japanese colleagues about technical problems, challenges, and futuristic dreams. She takes great joy in forming and maintaining communication channels between colleagues across the Pacific Ocean to work on identifying and solving Ricoh's technical needs as well as practicing her basic Japanese language skills.

Kathrin received her Ph.D in mathematics from the University of Bremen in Germany in 1996. After her graduation she was awarded a Feodor-Lynnen fellowship of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation that enabled her to join the wavelet group at Rice University, Houston, TX, headed by Prof. Raymond O. Wells, Prof. Sidney Burrus, and Prof. Richard Baraniuk, as a postdoctoral researcher. Her work focused on the use of non-critically sampled wavelet transforms for image analysis and denoising.

Besides work Kathrin has always tried to balance her life through sport (team handball and soccer), music (violin playing), languages, reading, and traveling. In 2006 she and her husband adopted a brittany puppy and in 2008 welcomed their twin babies into this world. Kathrin enjoys living in this family of five that is currently occupying most of her time outside of work.

Past Profiles

Research Labs


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