Women in the History of Computing Technology

"My job is simply done. When I started in January 2005, many people thought was a joke, including Craig Barrett and Bill Gates. I took it from that stage -- just an idea of a $100 laptop -- through invention, design and partnering and to delivery. The laptop is in high volume mass production, it's the lowest cost laptop ever made, the lowest power laptop ever made, it's the greenest laptop ever made, it's the only sunlight-readable laptop on the market, it's more rugged than a Toughbook, it's in the Museum of Modern Art for it's look -- and countries are buying them en masse."

Mary Lou Jepsen

Mary Lou Jepsen is the founding CIO of One Laptop per Child (OLPC), an organization with a mission to provide low-cost, mesh-networked laptops en masse to children in developing countries. Under her tenure, notebook computers go from a concept that was scoffed at to mass produced products.

Mary Lou Jepsen was born in 1965. She earns her bachelor’s degree in Studio Art and Electrical Engineering and her Ph.D. in Optical Sciences from Brown University. She also receives a master’s degree in Holography from the MIT Media Lab. Her Ph.D. thesis combines rigorous theoretical coupled-wave analysis combined with lab work, during which she creates large-scale, embossed surface-relief diffraction gratings with liquid crystal-filled grooves with high diffraction efficiency in un-polarized illumination.

After graduation, Mary Lou continues to research the new technologies in the fields of Holography and Optical Sciences and builds some of the largest ambient displays ever. Her inventions receive worldwide adoption in head-mounted display, HDTV and projector products. In Cologne, Germany she designs a holographic replica of pre-existing buildings in the city’s historic district and creates a holographic display encompassing a whole block. She also works on building mathematical models for the purpose of reproducing what would have been the largest display ever for mankind – images displayed on the dark side of the moon.

Furthermore, Jepsen is famous for co-creating the first holographic video system at the MIT Media Lab in 1989. Her system serves to inspire a new subfield of holographic video and receives a number of different awards.

In 1995, Mary Lou Jepsen co-founds Microdisplay, a company whose sole effort is the development of tiny displays. As a CIO there, she makes significant contributions to the development of single-panel field sequential projection display systems. In 2003, however, she resigns her post to become CIO of Intel’s Display Division.

Jepsen’s greatest professional achievement, for which she is best known, though, is the forming of One Laptop per Child (OLPC). When in 2005 she joins Nicholas Negroponte in order to lead the design, development, and manufacture of the new brand of laptops, she is the only employee of the organization. This does not prevent her from completing the initial structure of the machine, leading the development of its initial prototype, and signing up some of the world’s largest manufacturers to produce the XO-1 computer by the end of the year. As a result of her outstanding performance, in 2007, XO-1 is already into high volume mass production.

While at OLPC, Jepsen also designs one of the unique features of the XO-1 model – the pioneering sunlight-readable display technology, and co-invents its ultra-low power management system. Thus, the work of her team results in the production of notebook computers one have hardly imagined could exist. The XO becomes the lowest-power, most environmentally friendly, and at the same time cheapest laptop ever made.

In 2008, after spending 3 years with OLPC, Mary Lou Jepsen resigns her position at the organization in order to form her own for-profit company, Pixel Qi, and commercialize some of the technologies she invents while working at OLPC. For her invaluable contribution to the creation of the XO notebook computer Time Magazine names her to its 2008 list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Sources

The information presented above is taken from the following online sources:

• -- Ada Lovelace Day: Mary Lou Jepsen (TGAW)
• -- Mary Lou Jepsen (www.joeinc.tv)
• -- Mary Lou Jepsen (Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia)
• -- Who We Are: Mary Lou Jepsen (Pixel Qi)
• -- Interview with OLPC's Founding CTO Mary Lou Jepsen, by Sean Daly (Groklaw)