The American Computer and Robotics Museum sponsored the Stibitz-Wilson Awards, so they invited all the 2025 award honorees and guests for a guided tour of the museum, given by the museum president, Barbara Keremedjiev. Barbara was a very knowledgeable tour guide who talked about the museum collection with great enthusiasm and passion. I was excited to see some familiar computers and toys from my childhood in the collection. My elementary school had a PET. We had an early PC, a luggable, and a Sinclair at home. My high school had Apples and a lab of original Macs. I also had a Simon game, which I used as part of a science fair project.

After the museum tour we went to Montana State University for lunch with the new university president, Brock Tessman (he’s on the left side of the bottom photo).

The awards ceremony was held that evening at the Ellen Theater on Main Street. I wore my passwords ball gown and Chuck wore his matching passwords tie. Each honoree was invited to give a 15-minute presentation about their research. We had to send our slides in advance and the museum director was a bit concerned when I sent her 65 slides for a 15-minute talk. So we compromised on 50 slides, and I did finish my presentation in just under 15 minutes, briefly discussing my work on passwords, privacy notice and choice, and the art of privacy. It was fun hearing from the other honorees as well. Yasmin Kafai and Mitch Resnick both talked about their work teaching creative computing skills to children. They were both involved in the development of the Scratch programming language (which was very popular with my children). Serge Belongie and Pietro Perona helped build Visipedia, which underpins iNaturalist and the Merlin Bird ID apps.

Next up…. Part 3: Yellowstone