Merve Noyan: giving women in Machine Learning a voice
Google Developers Experts is a community of passionate developers who love to share their knowledge with others. There are over 150 women GDEs. #WomenAreExperts is a series that features their stories and achievements, with an aim to inspire more women to follow their path.
Today, meet Merve Noyan — a Google Developer Expert in Machine Learning and Machine Learning Engineer.
When and how did you become an ML Engineer?
I got to know data science and machine learning during my undergraduate years when I took a data science course, and I absolutely loved it! After I graduated, I took six months off to join bootcamps and learn more, prepare a portfolio and attend interviews, then I got my first job as an ML Engineer.
I was very impressed by the movie “Her”. It’s about Joaquin Phoenix falling in love with a virtual assistant voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Today, I’m making a virtual companion called “Syd” that also improves your life quality. I love talking machines. I also give workshops on how to make your own chatbot, and about natural language processing in general. Currently, I work as an ML Engineer, doing a masters in data science and try to find time to be active in the developers community in the same time.
How is it like to be a woman in the ML world?
I don’t think it’s different than being a man. What we do is basically the same. I feel like success is doing what you love with understanding and kind people, and I define myself as successful in this way. I like where I am today, but I also know not every woman is lucky to work in as friendly environment as I do.
How and why are you giving back to the developer community?
I love to be out there. It’s really easy to access the community, especially now that everything is happening online. I’ve learned so much from the community, and another way of learning is to teach other people what you’re trying to learn. So far, I gave workshops on natural language processing, language models and data science in Google Developers ecosystem and other communities and summits.
In 2020, we organised an event called ML days where we taught people how to establish an end-to-end machine learning pipeline from exploratory data analysis to deployment in tensorflow.
At the end of last year I started a video series called “Experts in AI” in GDG Turkey, where I have been hosting ML Engineers, researchers and Artificial Intelligence professors.
I did four episodes so far, talking to amazing women like Dr Fatma Güney, Assistant Professor in Koç University. She was previously working at the Visual Geometry Group at Oxford University. Her latest work was on computer vision in autonomous driving and we talked about her work and challenges in robustness of vision in self-driving cars.
My recent guest was Dr Beril Sırmaçek, Assistant Professor in Computer Vision working at Jonkoping University. She previously worked at German Aerospace Center and developed a crowd surveillance project that prevented people from dying in human stampedes at large events. An accident like this happened at German Love Parade in 2010. Dr Sırmaçek also talked about potential malicious uses in crowd surveillance tech.
Her main research interests are 3D reconstruction in medical imaging and mobile robot navigation. We talked about the challenges in data scarcity and the quality of data due to lack of adequate imaging equipments in the hospitals in developing countries and how medical imaging could save time of doctors dramatically.
My main purpose with Experts in AI project was to give women working in this area a platform to tell their stories, share challenges in their work, paradigm in their area of expertise and what they endured as women in working in AI. I really enjoyed every talk. Next month, I’ll start to host my own podcast with people I really admire in the industry.
If you could have one wish related to women in tech, what would it be?
It would be for them to be more brave. There’s a cognitive bias which women think they’re not as good as men when it comes to coding, when it’s Ada Lovelace who was the first programmer ever, Margaret Hamilton who took us to moon with her code, Grace Hopper who invented the first compiler (fun fact: she was the first person ever to find an actual bug, a moth, inside a computer, so I think of her when I debug!). I met amazing women working in my area doing incredible work and I want their words to be out there to inspire girls everywhere to stop doubting themselves.
Thank you for the chat!
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