Attending Grace Hopper Celebration 2017

First of all, I would like to thank Anita Borg Institute and Google for selecting me as a GHC Scholar 2017. Attending this conference is one of the best things that has happened to me because of the inspiring stories I heard, the technology projects that women are managing and that now I am aware of and the ladies I met that are very avid to learn, help and connect.

I will start citing and commenting few quotes from some of the key-note speakers like:

• “Machine values are Human Values” - Fei Fei Li. Which addresses one more time the fact that algorithms and AI are not dangerous by themselves. However, we should try to avoid as much as possible the bias developers/researchers and other stake holders add in the machines’ models.
• “Let’s help 10 women get into or stay in tech” - Melinda Gates. This remind me one of the reasons I’m doing a PhD. I want to do research to contribute to the innovation and social problem solving in my home country: Peru and teach in undergrad and graduate level. I want to find motivations for students, specially women, in order to not be discouraged for continuing their career in science and technology.
• “Think deeply. Be bold. Help others” - Deborah Berebichez. Let’s not only focus in the scientific part of the problems but in why we really want to solve them and the impact the solution can have in our lives. Let’s be bold for not to be discouraged on what we want to do because what others say about us. Let’s believe in ourselves and how far we can get. Finally, problem solving needs the contribution of the different human approaches in gender, race, age, etc. We need to make sure that all of us are represented in order to get the best of the solutions/products/services.

Between the sessions I pass by the career fair where all the big companies and some smaller have their booth. I, anyways, have to return back to Peru after my program or Academic link is done because of my Fulbright Scholarship. However, I wanted to search for research internship positions and I didn’t find too many. Most of the companies just had recruiters but no people from the Research Areas so I couldn’t do more than leave my resumes or/and upload them in their pages.

The technical sessions that I liked the most were three where predictions, data mining, artificial intelligence and machine learning are involved. The first one was the panel “Treading Water in a Sea of Data:Practitioners’ perspectives” where I got particularly interested in Meredith Lee’s experience. She is Executive Director of the West Big Data Innovation Hub where they bring together Academia, Government and Industry to address solutions for social problems through the huge amounts of data available. I believe this is the way to build more bridges between these stake holders and build solutions that would really benefit societies and allow Industry to provide products and services guaranteed by our Governments. I hope one day I can do the same in Peru. Actually a lot of efforts are already being done from IAPUCP and the Center of Research in Computer Science (PUCP).

The second session that took also my attention was “Emerging Applications of AI” where Sameera Ponda talked about the Loon Project from Google. She explained to us the Learning Algorithm for Stratospheric Wind Predictions to Enable Balloon Navigation. I was particularly interested on this one because it was tested in Puerto Rico and Peru, for the emergencies for the mudslides we had at the beginning of the year. So this reminded me how important is to support the Research and Development Department to innovate in services and products. This project might be interesting for an operator that would like to provide Internet Services in rural zones or difficult-accessible ones.

Finally, I met Dr. Aysegul Gunduz, Assistant Professor from University of Florida. On of her research interests is neural signal processing and so it is mine. I am working with sequential data and still trying to define the projects that will composed my final dissertation. I believe I want to got further in figuring out the best approaches to analyze sequential data through deep learning. I’ve been working with sign language recognition and energy disaggregation.

Overall I can say it was an amazing experience to celebrate women in computing this year in Orlando. I came out inspired and very motivated to not only think about doing things but actually starting to do it. That is why after the conference, I visited mi family in Orlando and teach my niece to code in code.org and talk to her about keep searching for the opportunities (fellowships, fundings) she has to become a Woman in computing.