Women of '75 Leading the Way

There had been whispers in the ivy at private liberal arts colleges for years. The women were coming. It was only a matter of when. So when the 60 or so women who comprised Bowdoin's Class of '75 started showing up in the fall of 1971, no one was surprised exactly.

At first, these women were interesting in the broadest sense - much as the busloads of women who were ferried in for dances and social activities - notable almost more as a concept than as individuals. But individuals they were. And as male and female students began to mix in classes, as fraternities began to recruit women, and as the Bowdoin athletic program stretched to accommodate a new strain of competitors, these women's experiences helped to shape the institution to come.

Joyce Ward
Although she is the architect of one of the most sophisticated search engines on the Internet, Joyce Ward, '75, has relied more on questions and intuition to guide her life choices than on logic. You can see the beginnings of this in the way she selected Bowdoin. "I was not particularly rigorous about data collecting. I just stood on campus and thought, this is what a college campus should be. The trees, the containment of the quad, it gave me a sense that I would have an intimate academic experience."

Never mind that her presence there would, in part, alter a 175-year all-male tradition. "I kind of got a clue when I started getting all these letters in the summer inviting me to smokers, as they were called at the time," recalls Ward. "I thought, 'This is weird.' "

Ward lived off campus for much of her tenure, which made "the fishbowl effect not quite as marked," she says. In any case, it was Bowdoin's academic excellence that formed the most lasting impression from her college years, not her vanguard presence there as a woman. "For me, it was a time when I could really luxuriate in learning. There I was on campus. I had this library at my disposal, a catalog crammed full of interesting courses. All I had to do was take advantage of it."

Her greatest joys were found in the library, she says. "Just the idea that I would have an assigned carrel at the library, all those books to pick up, read, write notes, was remarkable to me. In any given spot on any given shelf, I could pull something down and absorb myself in it. The unlimited possibility of knowledge was really attractive to me. I even got to go into the special collection at the library and pick up a copy of Dante's Inferno that Hawthorne - or was it Longfellow? - had picked up on his trip to Europe. There was this feeling that I was studying at a place where it had been happening for centuries."

When she graduated, Ward panicked. "I was a Romance Languages major, studying things that were fairly useless in the working world. I had zero idea of business. My colleagues were interviewing for investment banking and I couldn't even type. I thought, how does one make a living?"

When she wasn't pounding the pavement in Boston looking for work, Ward took solace in the public library. She began asking herself a string of basic questions - the kind of inquiry that would eventually form the intuitive logic of Northern Light's search engine - What do I like to do? Where do I like to spend time? What do I want to do more of? It was a case of Dorothy in Kansas, as Ward realized she was sitting in the very place to which she wished to travel: the library.

She enrolled in an accelerated Masters in Library Science program at Columbia University, and a year later was employed as a cataloguer for Mitre Corporation, where she wrote abstracts on satellite technology and command control communications. "It was the driest of dry jobs," she recalls. "I wanted something more dynamic. So I went to work for what was a hot growing company at the time, Digital Equipment."

Her arrival at Digital in 1979 was propitiously timed. The company had just announced its VAX 11780, which revolutionized the semiconductor industry. Ward was the librarian for the engineering team that first put the VAX on a microchip. Working for the first time at a computer, instead of a library table, Ward began researching current practices in the field and posting the information on Digital's internal computer network - one of the largest that existed in the world at that time, and a precursor to the Web. In her 17 years there, she moved from being team librarian to managing the entire library network - 16 libraries worldwide and 90 librarians supporting 130,000 Digital employees.

Digital started downsizing late in the '80s, and Ward was moved into MIS systems, where she managed telecommunications. "I was not particularly happy," says Ward. "Info systems did not fulfill my intellectual passion - advancing the art of information retrieval. I was working on plumbing and putting the pipes down, when I was really more interested in what was in those pipes."

It was perhaps inevitable that Ward would make the leap from information systems to the Internet. She had the background in information system design, coupled with an expertise in textual systems - as opposed to numeric data. When she sent out her resume to technical headhunters in 1996, she was soon plucked out of the pile by Northern Light, which was then a "totally raw startup with five engineers and me in a basement."

Ward spent her first six weeks on the job doing nothing but searching the Internet. Again, she negotiated a complicated territory by performing a basic inquiry. What kinds of mistakes did early search engines make? How do you communicate better with the user without being able to speak to them? How can a user navigate the volumes of information retrieved to find a specific answer?

Ward realized that the only way to solve the inherent problem in existing search engines - the preponderance of information - was to develop a technology around the idea of information classification. "It came right back to library science," she says. "To figure out a classification scheme, an ontology, of everything in the data base." Ward hired several people with similar backgrounds, and together they did nothing short of developing an outline of all human knowledge. The ontological approach was nothing new - Yahoo had done it, organizing their search results into a kind of pop-culture orientation - but Northern Light's search engine was geared toward a different kind of end-user. Ward wanted to cater to corporate or business or even academic users, "to be both a web search engine and an online information service that can take information available in journals and make them all available under one search."

Yahoo's approach, says Ward, was to "hire boatloads of people to read web pages and then assign them to a category. They have hundreds of editors and have classified about 2 million pages." But with Web pages estimated to burgeon to one billion by the year 2000, Ward realized "you can't hire that many people to classify." To meet this challenge, Northern Light took an unparalleled course: They developed a robot to assign data to categories through artificial intelligence.

"The humans, my group," quips Ward, "wrote the ontology and trained the robotic engine how to recognize documents. You have to go into every single term, every subject heading, and train the engine to recognize documents that are about that. You teach it frequent terms that appear, which become markers for the subject. And you give it many, many examples."

It has been a gargantuan undertaking, consuming a full four years of her team's work, but Ward says there has been a big payoff. "Northern Light, with its five editors, has 80 million pages classified. As opposed to Yahoo with 2 million pages and hundreds of editors."

Northern Light's interface is easy to navigate, offering users a series of electronic "folders" containing all information that qualifies under the search word or words. It is designed to provide the most specific information possible, while allowing for the broadest, simplest input from the user. A search of the word "depression," for instance, brings up custom search folders on the side showing several classification values: Depression and Mood Disorders, Prozac, Antiques and Collectibles, The Great Depression, Hurricanes. Any category in which the word "depression" may bear reference is included, reducing the amount of sub-searches a user may have to perform in order to reach a specific destination.

Ward refers to Northern Light as her "cognitive pet," and is still surprised by the inventiveness of a hybrid intelligence. "You get results that are sometimes astounding. I've seen queries like, 'Why are people homeless?' Folders come up: Vietnam Vets, Drug Dependence, Low-Income Housing. Then you get a weird one, like Buddhism, and you think, uh oh. But then you open it up and it talks about the voluntary homelessness of Buddhists. It's amazing to see a human-directed automatic process."

Ward cites her liberal-arts education at Bowdoin as "a real building block and cornerstone" in the development of Northern Light. "A place where your job is to sit and explore knowledge … I think there are so many parallels. And the idea of taking a product, and in the face of all kinds of adversity and skepticism, to persevere and build something is the dream of a lifetime."

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