In her acceptance speech, Yuqing Gao, winner in the Innovation category for her development of a speech to speech translation technology, spoke of her two guiding principles, “focus and risk taking” and that “without the sense of being challenged and the desire of conquering the challenges, there would be no path for progress and innovation.”

… Leadership winner, Mitchell Baker, spoke about her hope that “all of us work to empower ordinary people or seemingly ordinary people to enable more of us to do extraordinary things and see what kind of results we can achieve.”

…She was also the principal investigator of DARPA CAST and TransTac Programs at IBM and led the research and development of IBM MASTOR (Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator) systems which is leading the industry in automated speech translation. Her work in speech processing has led to the development of an English-Iraqi speech to speech translation system, which is deployed with the US military and enables personnel to interact directly with civilians in Iraq.

… The three Women of Vision award winners were selected from a field of more than 65 nominees, all of whom are engaged in technology professions in industry, academia, NGOs or government chosen by a selection committee of industry and academic leaders.