NEWS RELEASE: STEM Camping Conference Pivots Virtually Thanks to Fibit Due to COVID-19
By: Kevin L. Nichols
Tags: Stem Education, Diversity, Diversity And Inclusion, STEM, Diversity In Tech

OAKLAND, CA (November 2, 2020) — This time last year, The Social Engineering Project, Inc. (“TSEP”) took over 100 Black and Brown high school students of color from Oakland, San Jose, and Sacramento to the Santa Cruz Mountains to learn the following: 1.) Work/Life Balance; 2.) STEM Careers; 3.) Entrepreneurship; 4.) College Readiness; and 5.) Personal Branding and Networking at its 3rd Annual TSEP Overnight Camping Conference. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it would nearly be impossible to conduct a hands-on, experiential STEM related workshop for high school students. Never say never…

On Saturday, November 14, 2020, Fitbit will lead two interactive workshops to motivate and inspire Black and Brown high school students to pursue STEM related careers. The first workshop, “Operation Security 101: Protecting your privacy on Social Media,” will be led by Ann Hadley & Jonathan Werrett (members of Fitbit’s Information Security team) who will demonstrate how bad actors use ‘open source’ intelligence to find out more about their targets and how students can better protect their online privacy. The second workshop, “Converting Signals to Steps,” will be led by Alicia Kokoszka, Eric Friedman, Conor Heneghan, Paul Stetson, and Dan Howe (members from the Fitbit Research Team), who will illustrate how the sensors that make up the Fitbit deliver step counts, heart rate and other useful data to its users. Moreover, the students will work collaboratively to build a clock face that allows them to visualize how Fitbit goes from sensor stream to digestible metrics on its devices.

The icing on the cake will be a welcome by Vice President of Global Talent Management & Inclusion, Jaison Williams, and workshop presenter, Eric Friedman, is an actual Fitbit Co-Founder! Students do not want to miss out on this opportunity! Registration opens on Tuesday, November 3, 2020.

VIRTUAL CAMPING CONFERENCE PART 1 -FITBIT

DATE: Saturday, November 14, 2020

TIME: 9:00 am (PST) to Noon (PST) or Noon (EST) to 3pm (EST)

LOCATION: Zoom

About

The Social Engineering Project, Inc. (http://www.TheSocialEngineer.org) is an Oakland-based social impact venture with Stanford University that is designed to address the lack of diversity in the tech industry through STEM related pipeline programs for underrepresented students of color.

About

Kevin L. Nichols is the Founder, President & CEO of The Social Engineering Project, Inc., an Oakland based, social impact venture with Stanford University designed to address the lack of diversity in the tech industry through STEM pipeline programs for underrepresented students of color and diversity, equity, and inclusion consulting for tech companies. Nichols has been featured on LinkedIn’s Hall of Fame, Yahoo’s Blog, in the Examiner, Black Enterprise, CNN Money, Reuters, MarketWatch and the Wall Street Journal. Millions saw Kevin while logging in to LinkedIn.com from 2011–2014. For more information and full CV and Bio, please visit http://bit.ly/KLNport.

About

Jaison Williams is VP of Global Talent Management for Fitbit, where he is a key member of the HR leadership team. He is responsible for Inclusion & Diversity, learning & leadership development, talent & performance management, and engagement.

About

Eric Friedman is Fitbit’s Co-Founder and CTO. Previously, Eric served as an Engineer Manager at CNET Networks, as a Co-Founder of Wind-Up Labs, a founding engineer of Epesi Technologies, and a technical member of the Real-Time Collaboration Group at Microsoft Corporation. Eric holds a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from Yale University.

About

Shawna Kovacs has spent 25+ years in the Talent & Organization Development world as well as the Technical Sales/Sales Management side for various technology companies including Microsoft, Pandora Radio, and most recently Fitbit, where she has been for 2.5 years as the Director of Talent & Organization Development.

Shawna lives in Piedmont California and has a 17-year-old (senior) daughter.

About

Paul Stetson grew up in the Central Valley, came to Berkeley for college, and has remained in the Bay Area ever since. He has over 25 years of academic and industrial experience in retinal imaging, pulse oximetry, and other areas of biomedical technology. In his work in the industry, he has been fortunate to also work with clinical academic groups to validate several product developments, generating over 50 academic publications and 26 patents. His work at Fitbit has focused on signal analysis for heart rate and exercise, and evaluation of tracker performance on kids.

About

Dan Howe is a Research electrical engineer at Fitbit who designs and tests new sensors for measuring health and activity. He studied electronics for medical devices at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He enjoys running, biking, and weight lifting as part of maintaining a healthy lifestyle. As someone who was inspired to study engineering by a middle school robotics competition, he is looking forward to working with the TSEP students to help ignite a passion in technology.

About

Alicia Kokoszka is a Research Scientist at Fitbit, focusing on algorithm and hardware performance. She has her Master’s in biomechanics where she focused on the degradation of balance and stability with age. Her passion for healthy aging pushed her to apply her skills into industry to inspire individuals to live healthier lives.

About

Jonathan Werrett is Head of Information Security at Fitbit and has spent 15 years helping a range of companies both build and break their security.

About

Ann Hadley is the lead for Governance, Risk and Compliance and works with engineers to implement security as a first-class feature.

Please find a video overview of a previous year’s camp here.