It was on this date (June 23) 1943, that Vinton Cerf, who is hard of hearing, was born in New Haven, Connecticut. (image Royal Society) President Clinton presented the U.S. National Medal of Technology to Cerf and his colleague, Robert Kahn, in 1977 for founding and developing the Internet. In 2004, the pair received the ACM Alan M. Turing Award, often called the "Nobel Prize of Computer Science." In 2005, President George W. Bush awarded Cerf and Kahn the Presidential Medal

Karen Alkoby became the first deaf woman in the U.S. to earn a Ph.D. in computer science on this date (June 15) in 2008. She graduated from Chicago's DePaul University, helping to pioneer a computer-animated dictionary. Alkoby’s dissertation involved determining how the human brain interprets shapes like those made by hands in ASL. This may help with the creation of an ASL-to-English dictionary. She now teaches computer science at Gallaudet University. Read more about her acc