IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2013 - 28

"The role of
a project manager
at Google is about
bringing together
different enginering
teams to work together
to put out new
products...."

earned a bachelor's
degree from The
American University in Cairo and then
worked at Microsoft for
a few months before deciding she wanted to go to graduate school in the United States, "to be
near where technological innovation is
happening," she says.
The problem was that moving abroad
for graduate school wasn't commonplace
for women in Egypt. "This is a cultural
barrier that I think does exist in Egypt
but doesn't exist here in the U.S., which
is travel in order to pursue other studies
...and acquire different technical skills
or experiences at a new level or a higher
level," says Youseff. "So that was a little
bit challenging in the beginning with my
family. Maybe it took me a year and a half
to convince them that I wanted to go to
graduate school in the U.S., but once they
were convinced, they were very helpful."
Youseff was awarded a scholarship to UCSB, where she joined a lab
that was conducting research on grid
computing-bringing together different machines from different regions to
provide computational power. During
the years when she was working toward
her doctorate in computer science, she
interned at the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory and the IBM Thomas
J. Watson Research Center and spent
two months as a researcher working on
high-performance computing at The University of Tennessee. Her wide-ranging
experience led to a dissertation on virtualization technology.
Virtualization technology "at the very
high level can allow different users to
share the same machine without compromising their security or the encapsulation of their own processing time
or computational resources," Youseff
explains. "When we take this technology
and apply it for high-performance computing or distributed computing, that
would take us to what today is known as
cloud computing. Cloud computing is

28

IEEE womEn In EngInEErIng magazInE

basically the ability
to bring together
enormous amounts
of computational
resources to be able to
share across different users
without compromising
the
security of these users."
One of the achievements of which
Youseff is proudest is a paper on the
ontology of cloud computing she wrote
back in 2008, when cloud computing was
just getting started. To date, she says, the
paper has been cited hundreds of times
and translated into six languages. "It's
definitely very rewarding to see that," says
Youseff, "to see that everybody is using it
and everybody's referencing it, and it's
bringing real differences in understanding of the field."

Going Google
After earning her doctorate, she worked
in the Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),
first as a postdoctoral associate and then
a researcher in cloud computing, and
about two years ago, she came to Google.
In some ways, it was an unexpected turn
of events-she had been preparing for
an academic job, after all-but she had
come to realize, she says, that applying
the concepts she had been studying at
a tech company like Google could help
her be more productive and impactful.
"It's a different environment," she says,
"but you learn not only technology skills,
but also to move and to be proactive in
changing and introducing new ideas that
are going to change people's lives."
Youseff now works with the company's
cloud computing division "to bring new
and innovative cloud solutions to the
world," she exults. "It is always amazing to
learn how to operate cloud systems at the
scale of Google and bring new cloud products to the international market. The role
of a product manager at Google is about
bringing together different engineering
teams to work together to put out new

DECEMBER 2013

products and to introduce the new products to the market. This role requires deep
technical experience and business skills
and needs strong creativity, vision, leadership, and innovation to be able to be an
influential leader in a company like Google
and in an area like cloud computing."

Creating Networks and Resources
Throughout her career path, Youseff has
combined hard work and grit with inventive ideas and strategic insights. When
she realized she was one of only a few
women in computer science at UCSB,
she founded a group called Women in
Computer Science, to bring together the
female students and faculty in the department to share news about resources
and create a support network through
a mailing list and social events. While a
postdoctoral researcher at MIT, she cofounded the nonprofit Egypt NEGMA
with a few other Egyptians from MIT and
Harvard University to promote, through
an annual conference, innovative projects that would contribute to social and
economic development in their home
country. (NEGMA stands for networking,
entrepreneurship, growth, mobilization,
and action.)
She also knows firsthand, from her
days looking for her first job during the
economic downturn of 2008, how important persistence is. Positions were scarce,
funding was uncertain, her visa was running out, and she was under pressure. But
she never gave up; instead, she buckled
down and tried harder, and it paid off. She
would tell young women starting out today
to "follow their dreams and to believe in
themselves, and if they are interested in
computer science, they should pursue it,
and not let cultural challenges stop them,"
Youseff says. "Every person can achieve
what they aspire to attain," she believes,
"no matter what challenges they face."
-Heather Wax is a freelance writer
living in Brookline, Massachusetts.



Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2013

IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2013 - Cover1
IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2013 - Cover2
IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2013 - 1
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IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2013 - Cover3
IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2013 - Cover4
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https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/womenengineering_winter2012
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/womenengineering_summer2012
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/womenengineering_winter2011
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/womenengineering_winter2010
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