Grace Hopper Celebration 2023 - The Way Forward
By Rohitha Bhushan
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is an annual conference that is designed to celebrate and empower women, bringing the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront. It is the world’s largest gathering of women & non-binary technologists attended by well over 80,000 this year.
This year’s theme “The Way Forward” was to empower women and promote equity across all the different aspects of work life. The conference reinforces the importance of women's role in the workplace and highlights achievements and strategies that help propel careers.
The conference this year was held in Orange County Convention Center and two adjacent hotels - The Hyatt & Rosen all in Orlando, FL. GHC was split into 3 concurrent sections: A Career Expo, Sessions and A Connection Zone. As the name indicates, the Career Expo is a career fair with companies setting up booths. The career fair, while challenged with diversity hiring in tech, promoted conversations around equity and inclusion by establishing evaluation criteria, and promoting clear expectations. The Connection Zone is where one can avail networking opportunities by meeting professionals from different levels and backgrounds. Sessions were talks/workshops that were both in-person and/or virtual and the cream of the conference for they highlighted the latest advancements in tech.
Some of the sessions I attended were Accessible Web Development and Fluent UI for design and interaction. There was a session on AWS Deep Racer that was very novel as it involved a hands-on workshop where all participants were provided an AWS Account to load an ML Model onto a car and see it work/race. This used reinforcement learning and the reward function was to incentivize the car to drive in a straight line. The model was trained in a continuous action space where speed interval & steering wheel angle were both modified parameters. I got to learn about new LLMs such as Llama-2 and how they were useful if you wanted to create your own LLM.
A few of the non-technical sessions were informative and mostly based on the speaker’s experiences from her own career or an insight into how a particular company tends to add value. Building a data science team was one such session - this emphasized how the focus should be on data insights and business intelligence, adding machine learning to business analytics to solve problems, and expand seamlessly to artificial intelligence. With the advent of Generative AI/ChatGPT, there were a lot of panels centered around Responsible AI. Possibly one of the impactful sessions I attended was one titled Phase transition in AI. The speaker talked about Human-AI collaboration, socio-technical challenges, empathy and emotional intelligence in GPT4, and adversarial use and its ramifications. It was a riveting session as it centered around ethical AI and as much as Gen AI and its implications are felt around the world, the landscape of data protection and cybersecurity is fast evolving as well.
Data Machines proudly champions the empowerment of women, fostering a culture of inclusivity and support. We actively recruit fresh college graduates and mothers, recognizing the unique strengths and perspectives they bring to our team. Our commitment lies in creating a harmonious balance between professional growth and personal well-being, ensuring every individual thrives both at home and in their career.
