Baltimore, MD - Anita Borg, president and founding director of the Institute for Women and Technology (IWT), will share her thoughts and experiences on "Women and the Future of Technology" at UMBC on Tuesday, October 26 at 4 p.m. in Lecture Hall V.

This lecture is a first in an inaugural series hosted by UMBC's Center for Women & Information Technology (CWIT). The series is being sponsored by the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation and is supported by numerous academic departments on campus.

Regarded by many as one of the top minds in Silicon Valley, Borg is perhaps better known for her advocacy of women in the design and production of new technologies. She founded the Institute for Women and Technology in 1997 to help bridge the gap between women and technology through awareness programs and workshops. Since then the institute has received support from Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard, Compaq Computer and Lotus Corporation.

"It's difficult to envision a more auspicious inaugural speaker for a lecture series on women and information technology than Anita Borg," says Sandra Shattuck, associate director of the Center for Women & Information Technology. In June of 1998 UMBC Professor Joan Korenman launched the center, focusing on bolstering women's literacy with technology and encouraging more women to pursue careers in the computer/information sciences.

The next lecture in this series will feature Aliza "Cybergrrl" Sherman, founder of the women-focused search engine Femina, the Cybergrrl Web Station and WebGrrls; and author of A Woman's Guide to the World Wide Web. Her lecture, "Women in Cyberspace: Changing the Gender Landscape of the Internet," is scheduled for November 17 at 4 p.m. in Lecture Hall 3.