Are We ready for the Next On-Ramp: Big Data, Analytics, and Human-Centric Computing (another perspective)

I was really excited for this particular session, as big data an area that people are increasingly tackling, with fascinating results. The panelists included Janet Ramey who is a Senior Director at Cisco, Moira Burke who is a data scientist at Facebook, and Eva K. Lee who holds a professorship at Georgia Tech. Monica Martinez-Canales, a Principal Engineer at Intel, hosted the panel. We started with a broad overview of that question everyone’s asking: what is big data anyway?...

GHC12: Tempering the Impostor Syndrome by Managing the Fear of Failure

As I walked into this session led by Francine Gordon (F Gordon Group) and Sabina Nawaz (Sabina Nawaz Consulting), I was a little surprised. Instead of rows of chairs facing the front, it looked like we were about to sit down to an organized lunch. Worksheets On the tables were worksheets for attendees to fill out, looking something like this: If you’ve filled out any psychological survey, there’s a high probability that you’ve ranked statements like the ones that were on this sheet, including:...

How the Boston Python user group grew from 0 to 15% women and over 1800 members

This session focused on how to build diversity within user groups, told through Jessica McKellar’s experience with the Boston Python User Group. She gives compelling reasons for wanting diversity within these groups, including the development of the group as a community and growing the size and leadership of the community. Goals Jessica set out with the goal to increase the number of women participating by 15%, to showcase women engineers, and to start a movement....