WOMEN IN TECH
WOMEN IN TECH
WOMEN IN TECH
Women in Data Science conference spreads out via virtual and regional channels
Women in Data Science is not what some might expect a women in tech conference to be.
It’s not a huddle of technologists picking apart problems peculiar to women in the industry. It’s a diverse group of tech pros — who happen to be women — discussing the hardest problems in data science today and sharing their findings globally across multiple channels.
“It’s not built for the trend of having a women’s conference,” said John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. “There’a actual horsepower here. And the payload of the content agenda is second to none.”
Speakers at the conference are tackling the toughest challenges in data science and analytics. And WiDS is unique in the way it disseminates the content. “They created a real open environment around opening up the content, not making it restrictive,” Furrier said.
Furrier and co-host Lisa Martin provided analysis during the Stanford Women in Data Science event at Stanford University. They discussed WiDS’ open approach to creating and sharing content about data science.
Human elements fill in data-science blanks
About 20,000 people joined in by watching the WiDS video livestream. Many others are engaging in 150 regional WiDS events in 50 countries. A key focus of the conference is the intersection of hard computer science with the “humanization of data” to solve problems, according to Furrier.
“It’s a whole new cutting-edge area of science and social science,” he said. “Look at fake news and all these things in the mainstream press as you see it playing out every day. Without that contextual analysis and humanization, the behavioral data gets lost sometimes.”
Communication and collaboration are crucial to solving real-world problems with data, Martin pointed out. Most data-science Ph.D. programs aren’t doing a good job of teaching them, she added.
WiDS generates content and programs to educate data scientists and encourage collaboration.
“They had their second annual Datathon this year, which is looking at palm oil production plantations, because of the huge biodiversity and social impact that these predictive analytics can have,” Martin said.
Here’s the complete video discussion, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Stanford Women in Data Science event Monday.
Photo: Women in Data Science
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