Alison J Derbenwick Miller of the Association for Computing Machinery explores how, in a time of transformation, computing can be a significant force for good.
Deciding what you want to do with your future is no mean feat and often, when navigating post-secondary education, you can find that the subjects and career routes you envisioned are no longer aligned with your current interests.
This was the case for Alison J Derbenwick Miller, CEO and executive director at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). During her senior year of university, she happened to take a graduate-level course on constitutional law and society, sparking an as-of-then undiscovered interest in how law and legal theory interact with social systems.
She told SiliconRepublic.com, “I ended up abandoning my initial plan to pursue a PhD in Soviet history to explore a potential career in law. My first post-college job was as a legal assistant at Oracle.
“This was in the early 1990s, just as computing was becoming increasingly important in industry and society, and I quickly realised that understanding the intersection of law, technology and society would be essential to shaping the future.
