Attendee: Karen Olsen

It was long ago but I still remember my days at the University of Maryland. I continued on to get my Master's Degree in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins. While I was still studying at the University of Maryland I took on an co-op position at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (then the National Bureau of Standards) and that's where I ended up taking on a full-time job after graduation. My degree at the University of Maryland prepared me well to take on many different types of research. I chose to work in the areas of Telecommunications and Network and later also worked in the areas of Software Engineering and Computer Security. One of my early projects was working on IPv6 which is just not coming to fruition.

After a reorganization at NIST I decided to take on some more challenging work and in 1995 I started working for the Physics Laboratory as a web developer and designer of software that would interface with valuable physical reference data such as the Fundamental Physical Constants. Seeing my work quickly available all over the world via the WWW was quite a change from the slowly moving standards development process. I continue to work for NIST and have been working the development of an XML Markup language call UnitsML which will allow XML documents to unambiguously encode scientific units of measure. Similar projects have been done for smaller disciplines (e.g. biology) but this project will be more global.