WiDS Workshops, Now Available to All

At the virtual Women in Data Science (WiDS) Worldwide Conference on International Women’s Day, we launched the first fourteen WiDS Workshops, aiming to educate everyone, regardless of gender, while inspiring women and girls with role model instructors.

Today, we are providing access for everyone to the initial set of workshops on a variety of topics such as actionable ethics, linear algebra, automating machine learning, and recommender systems. The WiDS Workshops, curated by Stanford University faculty, are led by women from several universities, including Stanford University, Cornell University, and Virginia Tech; industry, including Microsoft, Walmart Global Tech, MathWorks, and Thoughtworks; and nonprofits, including the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG). 

Here are just a few highlights from the WiDS Workshops:

Megan Price and Maria Gargiulo from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), conducted a workshop titled, “Data Processing and Statistical Models to Impute Missing Perpetrator Information”. HRDAG is a non-profit that uses methods from statistics and computer science to help answer questions about mass violence using incomplete and unrepresentative datasets. Their workshop presented the context in which HRDAG works and how open-source tools are crucial to their analytical projects, including a specific example of work imputing missing perpetrator information. Along the way, emphasis is placed on the four core principles that guide HRDAG’s workflow to ensure that statistics about human rights violations are generated with as much rigor and scientific accuracy as possible.

Louvere Walker-Hannon, Shruti Karulkar, and Sarah Mohamed from MathWorks provided a workshop titled, “Do You See What I See: Exploration of Using AI and AR”. This workshop explains artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR) via hands on exercises where you can interact with your augmented world. This workshop includes applications where the technologies of AI+AR are combined, shows their limitations, and demonstrates the potential impact in society.

Sita Syal, PhD Candidate at Stanford University, taught the “Design Thinking for Data Science Problems” workshop. In this workshop, Sita uses concepts taught at the Stanford d.school, applying these techniques to solving real world problems, providing hands-on exercises along the way.

New WiDS Workshops are currently in production, and will launch soon. To make sure that you don’t miss out, subscribe to the WiDS Worldwide YouTube channel.