Meet Amazing #WomenInData: Celebrating our 3rd birthday! HER+Data MCR - September 2020 Meetup
Channel: Her Plus Data Manchester
Date: 2020-09-11

HER+Data MCR is a community working to connect, inspire, support and empower the NW UK’s Women in Data through monthly meetups. For our September 2020 event, we celebrated 3 years of HER+Data MCR events with lightning talks from inspiring leaders working to improve diversity in tech, tackling bias in AI, and actionable tips for Natural Language Processing.


Speakers:

06:15 - Annette Joseph (https://twitter.com/DiverseNett, https://www.linkedin.com/in/annettejoseph/) - Founder of Diverse & Equal (https://www.diversetechnw.com/, https://twitter.com/DiverseTechNW), is an award winning Agile Coach/Delivery Manager who has worked in and around Tech for over 20 years. As Chair of Co-op’s BAME colleague network, Rise, Annette was instrumental in affecting lasting change in the organisation. In D&E, she marries her varied experiences -- in tech and behaviour dynamics with equality, diversity and inclusion. D&E’s mission is “to use tech as a vehicle to create a fair society for everyone -- by equipping people from under-served backgrounds with the skills to fulfill crucial roles while empowering organisations to embed cultures that embrace and celebrate difference.” Annette’s #icantbreathe article (https://medium.com/@Diversenett/icantbreathe-704081cc0d8f) in response to the murder of George Floyd has been viewed over 24k times. In response, a BlackTech GoFundMe was created to fund research and training to measure the impact of tech on Black people and Black communities in the north of England (https://www.gofundme.com/f/diverse-and-equal-black-tech-gofundme).

25:20 - Natalie Jameson (https://twitter.com/njco2design, https://www.linkedin.com/in/natcityzenai/) - Human Centred Designer, mum, 3x best-selling co-author, Founder of 2 businesses, The Heroworx (https://www.theheroworx.com/, https://twitter.com/theheroworx) - filling the diversity in tech gap with Tech Skills and Human Centred Design training for women and CityZen AI – she’s developing A.L.M.A. a voice 1st AI Co-Bot to tackle racial, age, disability and gender bias in speech recognition and voice AI for social housing sector. She’s also on the board developing an Institute of Coding & Chester University ground breaking MSc Data Science, for women.

50:35 - Anna Scaife (https://twitter.com/radastrat, https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-scaife-manchester/) - Professor of Radio Astronomy at the University of Manchester, where she is head of the Jodrell Bank Interferometry Centre of Excellence and academic co-Director of Policy@Manchester. She also holds the 2017 Blaauw Chair in Astrophysics at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. She was the recipient of a European Research Council Fellowship for her research group’s work investigating the origin and evolution of large-scale cosmic magnetic fields, and leads a number of projects in technical radio astronomy development and scientific computing as part of the Square Kilometre Array project. In 2019, Anna received the Jackson-Gwilt Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, awarded for advances in astronomical instrumentation and techniques. She is currently one of the five inaugural AI fellows of the UK’s Alan Turing Institute. As well as scientific research, Anna runs two training programs that provide bursaries for students from Southern Africa and Latin America to pursue graduate degrees in the UK focusing on Big Data and data intensive science (https://www.darabigdata.com/). In 2014, Anna was honoured by the World Economic Forum as one of thirty scientists under the age of 40 selected for their contributions to advancing the frontiers of science, engineering or technology in areas of high societal impact.

1:18:38 - Miruna Tecusanu - (https://twitter.com/MirunaTecusanu, https://www.linkedin.com/in/miruna-tecusanu/) NLP placement intern at HelloSoda (https://hellosoda.com/), working alongside the data team on personalised and novel solutions. On the way to completing her Masters in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Manchester, she is proud of her contributions and impact in the industry, all whilst expanding her skills. She specialises in building production-ready natural language processing products, using a range of both traditional and modern techniques, and is responsible for improving and maintaining data models. Outside of work, she embraces language learning (Portuguese being the latest), playing ukulele melodies and trying out new matcha flavours!


More information:
- HER+Data MCR Meetup page: https://www.meetup.com/herplusdatamcr
- HER+Data MCR Twitter page: https://twitter.com/herplusdatamcr
- HER+Data MCR LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/herplusdatamcr