The virtual Women in Data Science (WiDS) Worldwide Conference showcased data science thought leaders from around the world as we followed the sun from APAC to EMEA to the Americas for 24 hours on March 8, 2021. We celebrated International Women’s Day by recognizing achievements by women in data science on a wide range of topics from healthcare and agriculture to security and fintech, and from data ethics and democratization to reproducibility and robustness of algorithms.
You can view the entire conference schedule here, and you can watch videos of the main stage sessions including keynote addresses, technical talks and panel discussions with more than 40 thought leaders from 25 countries in academia, industry, non-profits and government. In this first completely virtual event, the conference had more than 2000 attendees from 85 countries on the virtual event platform, with an additional 25,000 participants on live stream.
The WiDS Worldwide conference continues to draw large diverse audiences from around the world. WiDS regional events are expanding, and over 30,000 attendees have participated in nearly 100 WiDS regional events so far in 2021. In all, we expect that that WiDS ambassadors will host more than 200 regional events in 60 countries. In total, between the WiDS Worldwide conference, WiDS Regional Events, and online, WiDS will have more than 100,000 participants worldwide this year.
Here are some highlights from the WiDS Worldwide conference:
Nobel Laureate Andrea Ghez describes her groundbreaking research about black holes in a fireside chat with Stanford Professor and WiDS Cofounder Margot Gerritsen. The fourth woman to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, Andrea is one of the world’s leading experts in observational astrophysics and heads UCLA’s Galactic Center Group. Professor Ghez won the 2020 Nobel Prize for her discovery of a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
Ghez describes an early interest in the scale of space, both in space and in time. Questions about the boundaries of things really captured her imagination. What is the beginning and the end of time? Where do space and time mix? She explains that black holes are intriguing to physicists because these are objects where the pull of gravity is so intense that nothing can escape them, not even light. One of the keys to her discoveries has been the use of adaptive optics in large telescopes that correct for the distorting effects of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Ghez says one of her biggest surprises over the past 25 years was when they discovered young stars in the vicinity of the black hole. It was believed there would be no young stars in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole as the environment is inhospitable to star formation. She explains how almost every prediction for what you should see near a supermassive black hole has been inconsistent with their observations. She finds it most exciting when things don’t work because that’s when the potential for discovery is high.
The Democratization of Data panel discussion explores would it take to truly democratize and globalize data science with panelists Mary Gray, Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and Associate Professor, The School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University; Zhamak Dehghani, Director of Next Tech Incubation at ThoughtWorks and developer of Data Mesh; and Amanda Obidike, Executive Director of STEMi Makers Africa that oversees the design and implementation of STEM education across 19 sub-Saharan countries.
Gray says companies are hoarding our data and there really isn’t a way forward to democratization of data science without regulation. Every citizen needs to recognize their fundamental right to control information about themselves and their social relationships. Obidike agrees that we need reliable data to analyze and unfortunately, the data is not in our control. Citizens need to know their rights in having access to data and how we can use it. Dehghani talks about the need for data to be connected for broader access. For distributed ownership, we need to make data shareable and accessible at the point of origin and figure out how we can share data with a high level of trust that privacy is respected.
Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern opened the APAC session with a brief address that celebrates women and hopes for a more equal future for young girls on International Women’s Day.
Be Great, Be You: Building Character and Resilience for Organizations of the Future: Jean Liu, President of Didi Chuxing, China’s largest mobile transportation platform, shares her learnings on redefining her tech company’s connection to the community, supporting and empowering women, and using data science to build a resilient organization to navigate future uncertainties. In her talk she explains the importance of empathy, authenticity and the power of vulnerability. She says being a confident and determined “super hero” can’t solve everything, we need empathy to understand people we are serving. We need to show vulnerability and our authentic selves to serve our customers and communities.
Improving Livestock Health with Deep Learning: Dina Machuve, Lecturer and Researcher at the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology, discusses the impact of livestock disease on small to medium scale farming (crop and livestock) which accounts for 70% of the food production of the developing world and supports over 380 million farming households. The understanding and mitigation of these diseases is hampered because farm data is not collected or analyzed systematically. She describes the potential application of CNNs (deep learning) to help farmers better diagnose poultry diseases and improve livestock health.
Doing Data Science in Data Deserts, Fatima Abu Salem, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the American University of Beirut (AUB) describes how grassroots initiatives are facilitating data collection efforts in countries where data is less abundant and accessible. She reports on a series of works associated with the Syrian conflict with help from data obtained from the Violations Documentation Center (VDC). Fatima discusses fake news detection, predicting primary health care demand by Syrian refugees in Lebanon, and understanding Syrian refugee mobility in Turkey instigated by peaks in the Syrian war. She also describes social impact such as smart irrigation, predicting birth defects in Lebanon using air pollution data, and quantifying anti-refugee bias across Lebanese news corporations.
Paths to Leadership in Data Science panel discussion moderated by Martina Lauchengco, Operating Partner, Costanoa Ventures with industry and academic leaders Afua Bruce, Chief Program Officer, DataKind; Daniela Braga, Founder and CEO of DefinedCrowd; Aishwarya Agrawal, Professor, University of Montreal and Research Scientist, DeepMind; and Michelle Rodriguez, Dean, Engineering School Universidad del Pacífico.
These industry and academic leaders said while technical skills and knowledge are crucial, it’s equally important to learn how to effectively communicate your ideas. When you are young your technical expertise can be enough but as you advance, especially as a woman, you need to have confidence in your ideas, be unafraid to ask questions, and learn how to effectively communicate your ideas and influence others.
Read the Paths to Leadership in Data Science Q&A.
Data Visualization as Exploratory Medium: Fernanda Viégas, Principal Scientist at Google,
describes a variety of ways in which data visualization can help people effectively engage with data, ranging from generating scientific insight and enabling public debate to boosting artistic expression. Fernanda presents projects that illustrate how the coupling of visualization techniques and design thinking not only empowers experts, but also welcomes non-experts into the world of data and statistics.
We invite you to continue participating in WiDS 2021 by exploring and registering for upcoming WiDS regional events.