Women in AI

Welcome to season 2 of the podcast, AI for Good. In this episode, Gracelyn Shi from The Knowledge Society spoke with Alice Xiang from the Partnership on AI who is working as a research scientist in the areas of fairness, transparency, and accountability in AI.

Find out about our upcoming series focusing on the applications of AI for social good.

In recent years, we are becoming more conscious of our eating habits and our health, and with the help of personalised health platforms, we are able to better monitor our diet, which in turn better our wellbeing. Amice is currently working on her app, eatrite, a personalised food recommendation platform, which, through AI and machine learning algorithms, identifies the dishes on the menu and provides the user with the nutritional value that the dish would provide. This way, users are able to make a better choice when opting for their meal.

Martha’s primary research goal is to develop techniques for adaptive autonomous systems that learn on streams of data with an applied focus on computational sustainability. She focuses on reinforcement learning and representation learning to achieve this goal. In particular, Martha cares about efficient, practical algorithms that enable learning from large amounts of data. Areas of expertise: algorithms & theory, artificial intelligence, machine learning, reinforcement learning.

Vielka is working on supporting underserved students towards their goal of graduation with little debt. At Bridge to College, Vielka is aiming to match students to colleges that will fund and graduate them on-time. In this episode of the podcast, we spoke about her work in education and her journey into AI.

Viola works to create an enriched experience in education and has been doing this in various ways for over 12 years. Viola also won the “Entrepreneur of the Year 2015” award of the Youth Business International, which is one of the world's most honorific awards for young entrepreneurs in over 68 countries. In this episode of the podcast, we spoke about her work as a social entrepreneur and her journey into AI as well as the current landscape of AI in Hong Kong.

Deep learning has enabled significant advances in a variety of domains; however, it relies heavily on large labeled datasets. Chelsea explains how we can use meta-learning, or learning to learn, to enable us to adapt deep models to new tasks with tiny amounts of data, by leveraging data from other tasks.

Jessi has been working in lobbying, policy, communications, reputation and crisis for over a decade. During that time, she has worked for political parties, businesses (start-up to FTSE 100), consultancies, think tanks and NGOs. Her particular area of expertise is highly regulated, highly politicised, technology-driven sectors, including telecoms, energy, and Fintech. She was previously a capital markets solicitor at City firm Linklaters, after graduating from Oxford and subsequently the LSE.

Maya has fifteen years of experience working in the asset management industry and specialises in targeted fundraising and marketing campaigns for the alternative fund industry.

Maroussia works at the crossroads of law and technology. She has a background in interactive arts, having lead interdisciplinary teams at the Obx lab for experimental media within the Hexagram research-creation institute. She was called to the Bar in 2013 and clerked for the Chief Justice at the Quebec Court of Appeal, Canada. She participated in the inquiry commission on the protection of journalists’ sources, investigating law enforcement’s electronic surveillance practices. More recently, she researched AI and human rights at the Digital Inclusion Lab within Global Affairs Canada. She is a member of IEEE’s working group on algorithmic bias.

Giewee has an extensive mathematics background which she uses to resolve complex problems for Upstream E&P. She is a Lead Data Scientist for her division and has strategized and filled the need for constructing a productive advanced data analytics team to meet the demands of upstream advanced data analytics projects. She lectures and participates in Houston Data Analytics, a meetup which she founded in January 2018. She highly values the importance of data preprocessing, data exploration, model validation and model interpretation. She holds the following master degrees: Actuarial Science and Analytics.

Conversational systems like Siri and Google Assistant have been around for several years now; and have recently started to play increasingly ubiquitous roles in people's daily lives, through smart home devices, phones, or social media (like Messenger). Despite this, the conversational experience that these systems provide has evolved only incrementally. At the same time, however, interest in conversational AI from the research community is growing fast, and there’s more potential than ever for using machine learning to power these systems.

Even if you’re not completely clued up on the technicalities of machine learning, you’ve most probably heard of or use Netflix. This means that you’re interacting with a whole myriad of ML every time you use the platform. Julie leads the Machine Learning Infrastructure at Netflix, with the goal of scaling Data Science while increasing innovation. She previously built streaming infrastructure behind the “play” button while Netflix was transitioning from domestic DVD-by-mail service to international streaming service.

We’re really excited that it’s international women’s day this week, we have a whole bunch of exciting things going on like interviews from rising stars in AI and a list of emerging talent in the space, so make sure you have a read on our blog at re-work.co/blog. On today’s episode, I’m really excited to chat to Julie Pitt about applied machine learning at netflix. Even if you’re not completely clued up on the technicalities of machine learning, you’ve most probably heard of or use Netflix. This means that you’re interacting with a whole myriad of ML every time you use the platform. Julie leads the Machine Learning Infrastructure at Netflix, with the goal of scaling Data Science while increasing innovation.

Londa is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science at Stanford University and directs the EU/US Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment project. She is a leading international expert on gender in science and technology and has addressed the United Nations on the topic of “Gender, Science, and Technology.” She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize and Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work on Gendered Innovations harnesses the creative power of sex and gender analysis to enhance excellence and reproducibility in science and technology.