Ellen Spertus

Summary

My passion is increasing access to computer science education, which I have done through my decades as a Mills College computer science professor and by helping create App Inventor, Blockly, and the first Hour of Code. I worked at Google for 11 years, where I was a core engineer of App Inventor, which enables computing novices to create mobile apps. I co-authored a book on App Inventor with David Wolber, Hal Abelson, and Liz Looney. I spent 2013 at Google working on Blockly, the visual programming environment behind App Inventor and the first Hour of Code tutorial, which has reached millions of students. My work including technical implementation, curriculum development, i18n, documentation tools, and community outreach. At Google, I also worked on social networks, recommender systems, and extending the knowledge graph. I began working on structure- and network-based approaches to information management in 1995. Well before the crowd, I argued and demonstrated the importance of graph-based approaches to Internet information retrieval. My 1997 paper "ParaSite: Mining Structural Information on the Web" has been referenced more than 300 times, including by the Google PageRank paper. Another interest of mine is information management. I was the first person to create software to categorize personal email based on content (a flame detector), and I created an open source extension to mailman for AnitaB.org that has been in use for over a decade. I have been a member of the computer science faculty of Mills College, a Hispanic-serving women's college, since getting my PhD from MIT in 1998 and have served as chair of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science and director of the Interdisciplinary Computer Science graduate program. I worked at Mozilla on open source Android software during my 2019-2020 sabbatical. After Mills merged with Northeastern University, I became a Teaching Professor for NU's Khoury College of Computer Sciences, still teaching on the Mills campus. Specialties: online programming environments, computer science education, open source, online communities, diversity