In honor of Ada Lovelace Day, I want to shine a light on a very important woman in modern computing: Dr. Rebecca Mercuri.
I was lucky enough to have Dr. Mercuri (while she was working on her Ph. D.) as my professor for Programming Language Concepts, the first serious comp sci course in the curriculum when I was in school. This was the course after the intro programming courses where you learned the mechanics and basic data structures, but before the serious topics like system architecture, operating systems and artificial intelligence.
The course had a rather large footprint. It was the first time we used C as the language of instruction, and the first time we had to work on a project that spanned the entire term. The course was about all about parsing (specifically writing recursive descent parsers by hand), and slowly moved towards writing a small Scheme interpreter by the end of it all. That's a lot of material to cover in 10 weeks, especially for a sophomore.
Although the class was daunting, the goal wasn't to learn Scheme, C or basic parsing theory. Dr. Mercuri told us in as many words that this was "a class about learning how to learn a programming language". A good computer science curriculum isn't about learning today's set of fashionable skills, it's about learning the fundamentals. Languages come and go (how many have you used over the past 5 years? 10 years?), but the fundamentals don't change nearly as much.
Sometimes, I think I owe my career to Dr. Mercuri. Whenever I go back to the well and pull something out of my undergrad education, more often than not it's something I learned in that one course. Thank you, Dr. Mercuri.
While I feel privileged to have been one of her many students over the years, that's probably not why you should know about her work. Dr. Mercuri is one of the few people who have spent the last few decades speaking out about the evils of electronic voting machines. When shrouded in secrecy, these inscrutable proprietary systems subvert the very democratic processes they claim to promote. (HBO's documentary Hacking Democracy illustrates some of the problems with actual systems in use in the field.)
The issue isn't that electronic voting machines are an inherently bad idea. Electronic voting machines can simplify balloting and speed tabulation in a secure manner, if they offer voter-verified balloting (also known as the "Mercuri Method"). Current systems merely speed tabulation with no way to detect tampering or perform a recount, making their results worth less than the paper they're printed on.
The world needs more people like Rebecca Mercuri. And we all need to join her to help voter verified ballot systems sweep away egregiously bad electronic voting machines.
