Women past and present have made countless valuable contributions to technology, but how often do we hear about it? Probably not enough. Hoping to help change this state of affairs, this post is written in honour of Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw more attention to women excelling in technology. The idea is to highlight inspirational role models for current and future generations of budding female programmers, developers, researchers, tech journalists, entrepreneurs, innovators and everything else tech.

Women are, sadly, under-represented in UK human-computer interaction (HCI) research. Yvonne Rogers is a great inspiration for women hoping to buck this trend. She's a respected teacher and researcher of HCI with a rich and varied career in this field. We're lucky enough to know her personally here at Cogapp, too. That's why she's our 'tech heroine' for Ada Lovelace Day.

Yvonne is currently professor of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in the Computing Department at the Open University, and she's been based at other Universities around the world including Indiana, Sussex, San Diego and Queensland. In her work, her particular focus is on augmenting and extending everyday learning and work activities using novel technologies.

As such, Yvonne has been involved in a wide range of compelling, creative research projects. For example, the Equator project was a 6-year interdisciplinary research collaboration to explore the relationship between the physical and the digital for a range of user experiences, including playing and learning. One of the studies conducted for this project was Ambient Wood, "a field trip with a difference" which encouraged children to explore biological processes in a real woodland using a range of wirelessly connected probing devices. The children who took part in this study proved keen adopters of the new technology, and used it to explore the Ambient Wood in collaborative, imaginative and reflective ways.

A 'periscope' in the ambient wood enabled children to access digital information about 'invisible' aspects of the wood such as seasonal changes or creatures not normally visible to the naked eye. (c) Equator Project

Yvonne is currently involved in the ShareIT project, an investigation into how a new generation of shareable technologies like gesture-based wall displays and multi-touch tabletops, designed specifically for more than one person, can enable groups to collaborate more effectively.

(image (c) Jeff Rick)

For this, Yvonne and her team designed a collaborative digital construction kit called DigiTile to investigate how learners worked together using this technology and whether collaboration changed the nature of the construction task. Have a look at the project and download the open-source software yourself here.

Yvonne Rogers is an inspiration to us because hers is an interdisciplinary, user-centred approach to understanding and designing for interactions between people and technologies in everyday contexts. In her research she works in a collaborative, innovative way, coming up with unexpected approaches to exploring HCI. She is an influential researcher in a very important field - a field which is an integral part of Cogapp's work and which can only grow as these technologies are taken up by more and more institutions.

Learn about some more of the interesting projects Yvonne's currently involved with:

The e-sense Project (building novel augmentation devices to explore sensory, bodily and cognitive extension) 

LilyPad (designing mobile learning technologies for supporting indoors and outdoors collaborative learning)

PRiMMA (Privacy Rights Management for Mobile Applications)

... And read posts from the 1,656 (and counting!) people who pledged to blog about women in technology today, via a handy mash-up. Why not get involved yourself?