Anita Borg ANZ Memorial Scholarship

Murdoch University PhD student Ning Chamchong has been named as a finalist in the 2009 Google Australia and New Zealand Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship which aims to inspire and motivate women to become active participants and leaders in creating technology.

Ms Chamchong is one of 12 finalists from across Australia and New Zealand, and will travel to Sydney for a three-day workshop between October 8 and 10, with Google paying her expenses.

“The scholarship is a great opportunity for me to get to know more people and to share my experience,” Ms Chamchong said.

As part of her PhD Ms Chamchong has been working with Murdoch’s School of Information Technology Associate Professor Lance Fung to uncover the secrets of thousands of ancient inscribed, preserved palm leaves from Thailand.

The palm leaves, which are written in ancient Thai script, contain historical, cultural and medical information.

“The digitised documents are enhanced and extracted by a character recognition program to recognise the writing,” Ms Chamchong said

The project is challenging because some of the manuscripts are written in different ancient Thai scripts, some are in black ink and the Thai language has 44 letters and doesn’t use punctuation or vowels.

The Google Anita Borg scholarship is named after the American computer scientist, who worked towards revolutionising the way we think about technology and dismantling barriers that keep women and minorities from entering computing and technology fields.
In 1997, Anita founded the Institute for Women and Technology in California.