I received my undergraduate degree in computer science from University of Maryland in 2009. I moved out to California in 2010 to pursue a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley, but chose to leave the program early (with a Masters) in pursuit of more entrepreneurial goals.
I have been coding since I was 15 when I had the opportunity to take a high school class on Visual Basic and C++. I was encouraged to take the class by my father, who is also a software engineer. In fact, largely due to his influence, I have known since before I knew how to program that I was a going to be a computer scientist. At age 8 I asked my parents to get our first family computer (admittedly because I wanted to play KidPix). At age 12, I wrote in my 6th grade year book that my future career would be as a "software engineer."
In the spring of 2015, Mapistry participated in MergeLane, an amazing accelerator for startups with at least one female cofounder. I really encourage startups to apply. You do not have to be an all female team (we weren't) and once you are there the fact that there are so many women doesn't matter, you're all just founders. (But it is pretty refreshing to be surrounded by so many women!) As Sue, one of the cofounder says, the ultimate success of MergeLane will mean that MergeLane isn't necessary anymore because women are no longer minorities in the startup community. I hope that is true someday soon, but until then, checkout MergeLane!
Janoch, A., Karayev, S., Jia, Y., Barron, J. T., Fritz, M., Saenko, K., & Darrell, T. (2013). A category-level 3d object dataset: Putting the kinect to work. In Consumer Depth Cameras for Computer Vision (pp. 141-165). Springer London.
Saha, B., Hoch, A., Khuller, S., Raschid, L., & Zhang, X. N. (2010, January). Dense subgraphs with restrictions and applications to gene annotation graphs. In Research in Computational Molecular Biology (pp. 456-472). Springer Berlin Heidelberg. (my maiden name is Allison Hoch)
Saenko, K., Karayev, S., Jia, Y., Shyr, A., Janoch, A., Long, J., Fritz, M., & Darrell, T. (2011, September). Practical 3-D object detection using category and instance-level appearance models. In Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on (pp. 793-800). IEEE.
Culpepper, Benjamin J., Pierre Garrigues, Allison Janoch, and Huy X. Nguyen. Automatic Image Piling. Yahoo! Inc., assignee. Patent US 20140254946 A1. 11 Sept. 2014.