Keynote by Cristina Cifuentes

Title: A Latina in Tech

Abstract:

Having started my Computer Science degree while growing up in Colombia and later completing it in Australia, I went from being an overrepresented Latina to being an underrepresented one. Further, the female to male ratio in CS in both countries was also rather different.

Being a mum, a wife, a teacher, a researcher, a manager and a leader, in this talk, I provide some of my lessons learnt throughout my career, with examples of successes and failures throughout my PhD, academic life, and industrial research life.

Bio:

Cristina is the Director of Oracle Labs Australia and an Architect at Oracle. Headquartered in Brisbane, the Lab focuses on Program Analysis as it applies to finding vulnerabilities in software and enhancing the productivity of developers worldwide.

Prior to founding Oracle Labs Australia, Cristina was the Principal Investigator of the Parfait bug tracking project at Sun Microsystems, then Oracle. Today, Oracle Parfait has become the defacto tool used by thousands of Oracle developers for bug and vulnerability detection in real-world, commercially sized C/C++/Java applications. Parfait's success is founded on the pioneering work in advancing static program analysis techniques by Cristina’s team of Researchers and Engineers at Oracle Labs Australia.

Cristina’s passion for tackling the big issues in the field of Program Analysis began with her doctoral work in binary decompilation at Queensland’s University of Technology. In an interview with Richard Morris for Geek of the Week, Cristina talks about Parfait, Walkabout and her career journey in this field.

Before she joined Oracle and Sun Microsystems, Cristina held teaching posts at major Australian Universities, co-edited Going Digital, a landmark book on cybersecurity, and served on the executive committees of ACM SIGPLAN and IEEE Reverse Engineering.

Cristina continues to play an active role in the international programming language, compiler construction and software security communities. On the weekends, she channels her interests into mentoring young programmers through the CoderDojo network.