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Indian Women Win Web Awards

J M Shenoy

Deb Agarwal, a top scientist at a national laboratory, and Radha Ramaswami Basu, a high-tech entrepreneur, are among the Top 25 Women on the Web award winners for this year.

WoW is a San Francisco-based grassroots women's Internet association that provides networking and professional development opportunities for Bay Area women on the Internet and in new media industries.

The three-year-old association recognizes the achievements of 25 women who have most inspired people worldwide with their efforts to advance technology, contribute to the community, and set an example as successful business women in the Internet and new media industries.

Agarwal, a computer scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, serves the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization as an expert in the area of reliable multicast communication.

She has been a staff scientist since 1994 and has designed and developed software to allow remote experimentation and collaboration between sites connected by a wide-area network. This project is creating a virtual laboratory in which users no longer need to travel to conduct experiments. The remote operators have monitoring and control capabilities along with an Internet multicast video conferencing link between sites.

She is also developing WWW pages to aid people learning how to use the Internet Multicast Backbone and the video conferencing tools vic, vat, and sdr.

Agarwal, who has a MS in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara, earned her BS in mechanical engineering from Purdue University in 1985.

Basu is the CEO, www.support.com (formerly Tioga Systems). She was general manager for international software at Hewlett Packard. She is also the co-founder of Maitri, an empowering organization for South Asian women in the Bay Area.

The theme of this year's awards -- Leaders of the Millennium -- recognizes the achievements of women who have made significant contribution to the advancement of technology and to the advancement of women in technology-related fields, the organizers said.

The awards will be given on January 31 in San Francisco.

Additionally, this year's awards program honors those who have helped increase the number of women on the Internet to nearly half the population online. It also emphasizes on a community-based network of women who help each other in technology-related fields.

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