Upcoming WiDS Regional Events include: WiDS Barcelona & Madrid: June 14 & June 21 WiDS Paris @ Women Power IT: June 18 WiDS Delhi: June 18-19 WiDS Mumbai & Kerala: June 18 & June 25 WiDS Guanajuato: June 20 WiDS Toronto: June 22 WiDS Rio de Janeiro: June 22-23 WiDS Managua: June 25 WiDS Mysuru: June 26 WiDS Santiago @ UC: July 2 WiDS Regensburg: July 5-6 WiDS Santiago: August 5 WiDS ambassadors provided the following event summaries, screenshots, and videos for you to enjoy: WiDS Antwerp @ University of Antwerp The first edition of WiDS Antwerp, organized by WiDS ambassadors Yanou Ramon and Sofie Goethals, took place at the University of Antwerp. The event was designed to cater to students, researchers and professionals who are passionate about data science. Industry experts Ellen Tobback from AXA, Roshnee Devi Naveen from Robovision and Adeline from Accenture shared their journey and expertise on tech talks, "Data Science in Insurance", "The AI Era: Impact of Deep learning in Computer Vision Applications", and Adeline Decuyper (Accenture): "Building trust through Responsible AI", respectively. The audience included a mix of students and professionals working in academia or industry, and the crowd was very enthusiastic, curious, and interactive. WiDS Antwerp @ University of Antwerp was a great success, and Yanou and Sofie look forward to hosting a second edition next year! WiDS @ SAP  WiDS @ SAP was held in May with the theme, “Data Science Around the World”. Globally, WiDS @ SAP was spread across Asia Pacific, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. WiDS ambassadors Hannah Sperling, Abinaya Rajeshkannan, and the SAP NextGen team led over 1,200 registrants on a global data science tour, with speakers from different industries, companies, and the public sector. They successfully delivered 16 hours of content and featured 47 female speakers who spoke about trends in AI & machine learning. WiDS Villach The third annual WiDS Villach was hosted on May 19th to exchange the latest research results in the field of data science. More than 250 experts and interested people from more than 40 nations attended the event. The conference has been a fixture for data science enthusiasts in Villach, offering a broad stage for exchange and each year features female role models from the STEM field with a focus on data science. Olivia Pfeiler, Team Leader Data Science at the KAI (Kompetenzzentrum Automobil-und Industrieelectronik), and Anita Kloss-Brandstätter, professor of mathematics at the Carinthia University of Applied Sciences, together with their Women in Data Science Villach team, have established a cross-gender platform and network for exchange and discourse in the field of data science. Women are encouraged to gain a foothold in this field and to present their scientific contributions to a large audience. "Our goal is to make the data science community more diverse by increasing the proportion of women.” says Olivia Pfeiler. "AI algorithms make decisions based on data and information. Objectivity and trustworthiness are immensely important in this process. When algorithms get the same data 100 times they make the same decision 100 times, they don't have good or bad days. However, this does not mean that algorithms are objective, per se; they are shaped by the developers. If there is a lack of diversity in a development team, there is also a lack of different perspectives and information on how the algorithm should decide, which can lead to discrimination. With WiDS Villach, we want to make an important contribution here." The event covered a spectrum of important topics in three thematic blocks: Sustainable research in the truest sense of the word; Data is the data scientist's gold; Information is beautiful - Data Science and Art. Follow WiDS Villach on LinkedIn and watch their conference videos on YouTube. WiDS México City  WiDS México City hosted their first regional event on April 29th, organized by WiDS ambassadors Andrea Bazán and Mariana Barreto. The event was organized and sponsored by Le Wagon México, an international Coding Bootcamp, and also sponsored by X-Data MX, a Business Intelligence Company. WiDS México City featured 12 speakers who participated in 6 talks and panels, covering the basics of what a data scientist does and going further with an interesting topic of Quantum Machine Learning Innovation. With more than 200 participants, it was a very inspirational event. Videos in Spanish can be found here. WiDS NYC @ Dataiku  The inaugural WiDS NYC @ Dataiku was hosted by WiDS ambassadors at Dataiku on May 19th. The event was open to the public and gathered over 110 attendees in person and via livestream for 5 hours of engaging tech talks, career-driven panels, and panel breakout sessions. The event featured expert speakers Alicia Parrish, Amanda Pogue, and Sibongile Touré on a panel, “Breaking into Data Science”. In their tech talks, Emma Huang and Livia Salgueiro shared how they built recommendation systems. There was also a Career Panel with Alex Simonoff, Melissa Royo, Triveni Ghandi, and Ngozi Bell who dove into topics like failures and how they can be seen as successes, what the future of data science looks like, how to stay relevant in this evolving field, and managing mental health in work (and in life). The ambassadors at Dataiku were thrilled with the conversations both during and after the event and look forward to hosting another conference next year! You can watch the entire event on YouTube. WiDS London @ Dataiku  The inaugural WiDS London @ Dataiku was hosted by WiDS ambassadors at Dataiku. The event focused on themes and types of sessions ranging from AI in healthcare, Responsible AI and AI for social and environmental impact. Sigourney Waibel passionately shared her work on behavioral analytics focused on innovating in respectful wearables for better patient care. Serena Yuen and Karrie Liu, engaged in a fireside chat, speaking about Karrie’s journey into the data science field. WiDS ambassador Camilla Nieman led a panel discussion on Responsible AI joined by Kaitlyn Bové, Oriana Medlicott and Lucie Audibert. Speaker Mandeep Soor talked about her inspiring business showcasing how tech can be harnessed to advance social and climate justice by improving fashion supply chains’ transparency and business’ neocolonialist heritage. Sophie Chauvet presented a bold, thought-provoking and timely perspective on our approach to data and empowered our collective imaginations in integrating compelling feminist alternatives. WiDS ambassador Valentine Reltien led a panel with three speakers about ways in which we can reimagine a shared, collective future, with more women-centrality in fields such as data science. Ambassadors express that it was humbling to sense the keen attention and interest in the diverse stories that their speakers had to share. WiDS Recife  WiDS Recife was held as a virtual event on June 4th, organized by WiDS ambassadors Joyce Sá, Luiza Ribeiro de Lima, and Cris Oliveira, with the support of Twilio and PyLadies Recife. The event had a workshop, lectures, a conversation circle and a mentoring proposal. Cynthia Moreira gave a workshop on advantages, basic concepts, operation and libraries of AutoML. Virginia Heimann shared her expertise with "Data Literacy (Fluency in Data) and analytical skills", indicating the skills needed for anyone who wants to become fluent in data, with tips for identifying their fluency stage and how it can be better developed. Fernanda Santos demonstrated how Python libraries allow the creation of applications, based on an analysis of Ibovespa data. Researcher Shevine Risso highlighted how data science contributes to assessing the interdependence of water, energy and food resources, as well as its impact on society. Julia Hornick demonstrated how the health area benefits from artificial intelligence, from cases related to brain age prediction, cancer detection and indication of medicines. To close the event, the conversation "Day by day in the Data Science Job Market" was held with data scientists Bruna Costa, Fernanda Souza, Joyce Sá and Virginia Heimann. The guests shared their motivations for joining the field and how they arrived at their current positions, and answered questions from the audience. Virgínia Heimann offered a free mentorship to the online audience, which should be carried out in person in the coming weeks. Watch the lectures, workshop and discussion on the WiDS Recife YouTube channel: WiDS Recife 2022 and Oficina "AutoML: Conceitos básicos e suas aplicações" WiDS Geneva The inaugural WiDS Geneva was held on April 28th, opening its doors to a very excited public audience! Boasting 150 online and 45 in-person registrants, combining on-line and in-person attendees and speakers – was an all-around success! This success can be attributed to the high quality of the talks and the workshops. Carlotta Favarro from Natural Cycles began the event with a timely talk on women’s health and the impact of COVID vaccines. Elena Tverdokhlebova gave an educational talk about how to win hackathons. Speakers Clara Jordá Lope and Lydia Y Chen tested the audience's technical knowledge, where Clara talked about Expedia Group’s innovative feature embedding algorithm, Hotel2Vec, and Lydia gave a fascinating talk about how to handle privacy issues with synthetic data. To allow every attendee to walk away with new, practical skills, the conference then split into three workshops. Adele Kuzmiakova led a class on 3D deep learning with Pytorch, Fatima Soomro spoke on building effective visualizations, and Eun-Kyeong Kim addressed how to analyze trajectory data. Overall, the event feedback was overwhelmingly positive, the team is looking forward to returning next year! WiDS Taipei  The 5th annual WiDS Taipei was successfully held on May 15th, with ~300 attendees. This year's theme "Critical Thinking For Data-driven Decision Making: From Definition of Problem to Solution” emphasized using facts, metrics, and data to guide strategic business decisions that align with goals, objectives, and initiatives. They invited 10 outstanding women speakers working in various industries including tourism, e-commerce, FMCG, tech-enabled coffee chain, technology, management consulting, academia, media and publishing industry to share their experience of applying data-driven decision-making methods in the work. WiDS Istanbul  WiDS Istanbul hosted a virtual conference on May 21st. Two panels and six talks attracted several participants from the data science communities in Turkey and outside of Turkey. The event was advertised with the support of public relation teams of Sabanci University and The Center of Excellence in Data Analytics (VERIM). The student chapters of various universities made the event possible to reach a broad audience. Keynote speaker Professor Berrin Yanikoglu talked about deep learning for medical image understanding. Her talk was followed by Meltem Ballan, where she talked about the trends in AI. Her talk was followed by the panel “Data Science in the USA”, led by moderator Aslihan Demirkaya with panelists Ozlem Bilginer, Zeynep Erkin Baz, Fatma Gunturkun and Seymanur Capoglu. The panel was followed by a networking event where three different Zoom Meeting channels were offered for participants to ask questions directly to the panelists. The second half of the event started with Gozde Bozdagi Akar’s talk on multimodal data analysis. It was followed by Merve Noyan, where she talked about building machine learning and data applications in python. The next speaker Elif Ozkirimli talked about opportunities and challenges of using NLP in life sciences. The last talk was made by Hatice Osmanbeyoglu on interpretable deep learning and cancer genomics. A second panel, “Young Data Scientists'' was moderated by Ozge Ozmen with panelists Begum Yolcu, Sukejna Valjevac and Cisem Altan. The panelists shared the experiences they had in their early careers. Access the virtual event on the WIDS Istanbul YouTube channel. WiDS Stanford @ Lane Medical Library  WiDS Stanford @ Lane Medical Library was hosted for the 4th year in a row on May 26th. The half-day conference was well attended with almost 100 participants joining virtually. The event started with an opening keynote on “Data Visualization for All: The Art and Science of Communicating with Data” by Peace Ossom-Williamson the Associate Director, National Center for Data Services (NCADS) at Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM). The opening keynote was followed by a data science panel featuring Nancy Shin (NNLM), Michelle Cawley (UNC Chapel Hill Health Sciences Library), Li Gong (Stanford University Department of Biomedical Data Science), and Kayla Marginean (Vanderbilt University Medical Center). Each panelist presented their current work in data science, and discussed questions about data tools, equity and access to data, and how to encourage more women to get involved in the data science field. The event closed with the keynote, “Equity Considerations for Digital Health Technologies in Research” by Michelle Holko, Principal Investigator at International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) Berkeley and Principal Architect & Scientist at Google Cloud. Lane Medical Library looks forward to hosting another regional WiDS event next year! WiDS Abuja  WiDS Abuja hosted a successful virtual conference on May 28th with ~55 participants. The three-hour conference featured sessions from four excellent speakers on subjects related to the theme "Demystifying Data Science", as well as Q&A and networking. Attendees provided the WiDS Abuja team a lot of positive feedback. The team hopes to host more events in the future and to foster a sense of community in Abuja. You can watch recordings of the WiDS Abuja 2022 conference on YouTube. WiDS Zurich  WiDS Zurich celebrated its fourth annual event! Since its inaugural event in 2017, WiDS Zurich grew to become a large gender-diverse community with more than 2,000 social-media followers united by the common mission of empowering women in data science. This year, WiDS Zurich returned to an in-person event format. WiDS Zurich 2022 took place at Swiss Re Centre for Global Dialogue, welcoming more than 220 participants from academia and industry. The conference featured talks by outstanding experts from Roche, AWS, EPFL, Databricks, ETH, Meta AI, Huawei, and IBM. Topics included the future of machine-learning in the cloud, causal inference in complex networks, opportunities and challenges of using NLP in life sciences, ability of AI to detect emotions, to name a few. Mentorship sessions were a big success, offering guidance on negotiating as a woman; having children and a successful career; the first data science job: the different flavors, skills, and paths; transitioning from academia to industry (and back), and much more. The event was made possible by the generous support from Swiss Re Institute, Logitech, QuantCo, BCG GAMMA, Swisscom, Quantum Black a McKinsey company, AWS, Databricks, AXA, the Ella fund, Zurich Tourism and help from community partners including NLP Zurich, University of Zurich, SIT academy, and SwissDevJobs. You can watch their conference highlight videos and presentations on YouTube. You can also reach out to them at wids.zurich.ch@gmail.com. WiDS Buenos Aires  WiDS Buenos Aires was held on May 11th. This new edition of the event brought together prominent speakers from various areas of knowledge related to data science, who delivered presentations and led discussions on a set of highly topical topics, selected from those that make up the “Vectors Project” of the Faculty of Engineering of the UBA. Topics included: Information and Communication Technologies, ICTs; Agrifood System; Satellite Applications; Sustainable development; Oil and Gas; and Naval System. WiDS Tirana  WiDS Tirana was held on June 10th, led by WiDS ambassador Marjana Skenduli. Students of UNYT engaged in a watch party, viewing conference videos from WiDS Worldwide including the Keynote talk, "What makes intelligent visual analytics tools really intelligent?", presented by Vidya Setlur. Participants provided a lot of positive feedback on the event. Females in the room felt empowered and showed a lot of interest. They loved the Keynote, which ignited thoughtful discussions. Male students participated too, at first reluctant, but when exposed to facts, figures and impact of WiDS, they started to show interest. Students also expressed interest in joining and contributing to WiDS through upcoming events or wider community-based initiatives. WiDS ambassadors are pleased with the outcome and generated interest that WiDS Tirana created, and look forward to the next edition in 2023! WiDS Kuwait @ PAAET The fourth annual WiDS Kuwait event was hosted successfully in-person on May 23rd. The event theme focused on data and education beyond the pandemic. The audience was interactive and desirable with more applications at the service of education and their field of focus. There was considerable media coverage before and after the event on Kuwait TV before and after the event, Al-Majlis TV, and Al-Anbaa, and Al-Jarida, and PAAET. WiDS Chemnitz  The first WiDS Chemnitz took place on May 19th, organized by WiDS ambassadors Franziska Nestler and Theresa Wagner. The event was held in-person and attracted 50 data scientists, students and professionals from industry across several disciplines, from Germany and other European countries. The event featured 6 plenary talks from excellent speakers, a career panel, a poster session in which the participants were able to present their work, and a fantastic networking session. Since the event was a manageable size, networking was easy and the exchange was fruitful. WiDS Chemnitz ambassadors are thankful for the great event feedback. Both are very satisfied with how everything worked out and took a lot from that day about how the next edition might turn out even better. They are very much looking forward to future collaborations with WiDS. WiDS Shikoku  The inaugural WiDS Shikoku Symposium was held on May 14th as a hybrid event, organized by WiDS ambassadors Marino Yamamoto and Yukiko Kan. The Shikoku region of Japan is known as a countryside rich in nature. However, it is also a region where many people do not even know what the term "data science" means. The ambassadors used this as an opportunity to share and spread knowledge about data science. They chose "Data Science and Wellness" as the theme of the event and invited two speakers who could communicate from the region to the world.
The first keynote speaker was actress Ms. Maiko Ito, who entered the university in her 40s and has studied robotics, basic aging, and locomotive syndrome, an issue for an aging society, and is currently a fellow and outside director of an AI venture and a member of the Cabinet Secretariat's "Education Future Creation Council" in her research field. They asked her to talk about anti-aging and data. She also spoke about data science and encouraged people of all ages, genders, and regions to be courageous in learning about it. The second keynote speaker was Ms. Yuriko Kato, a member of the Cabinet Office's National Strategy Council for Digital Rural Cities and active in projects to solve various issues with the keywords of agricultural production, distribution, aggrotech, and human resource development. She spoke about the fusion of agriculture and data that she is currently working on, as well as regional revitalization. WiDS Shikoku will continue to hold educational programs and workshops to share the fun and excitement of data science with many people. Thank you, WiDS ambassadors! Thank you to all of the WiDS ambassadors for your dedication and hard work organizing and hosting WiDS regional events, worldwide! You’re making an impact in your cohort, your colleagues and your community, and are a crucial part of the WiDS Worldwide movement. Related Articles: Comments are closed.
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