Reflektive at Grace Hopper Celebration India, 2018

Written by Nandita N Shastry and Pragya Daga

The Grace Hopper Celebration India (GHCI) is one of the largest gatherings of women technologists in India. This year in 2018, we had the excellent opportunity of representing Reflektive at the conference on 14th & 15th of November.

Day 1 (14th November)

The welcome session was by Geetha Kannan, Director of Anita Borg Institutions, India. She spoke about the goals and vision of the GHCI. One of the major goals set by the conference was to help increase women ratio in the field of technology to “50:50 by 2020”.

The first keynote speech was by Lori Beer, Global Chief Information Officer of J.P. Morgan. She talked about her journey so far in the industry: the struggles of managing her aspirations and family at the same time and the importance of being part of a women community. She also gave constructive advice on prioritization of work and time.

The last keynote speech for the day was by Vaishali Kasture, Co-founder of Sonder Connect. She spoke about her journey and dedication, and the importance of setting goals.

She talks about pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone and dispelling the general biases on women. She used the following quote, which really resonated with the crowd and the vision of the GHCI.

“There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.” Madeleine Albright

The day was wrapped up with some snacks and an opportunity to network with others.

Day 2 (15th November)

On day two, there were various talks, panel sessions, workshops, tech expo, and a career fair scheduled.

We attended the following talks:

1. The concept of “Distance Measures” by Neelima Vobugari: Distance measures in machine learning are used to find similarities in the data and grouping them. It is helpful in identifying closeness associated with the data points both in a supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms. She talks about the different types of Distance Measures like Manhattan, Euclidean, Edit, Hammit, etc and the common examples where they are used
2. Microservices by Aparna Shetty: It introduces the microservices architecture and value of implementing it. The talk focused on the various challenges faced while applying the principles of Microservices to a large Imaging Modality Monolith Desktop Application(ex: MRI Scanner)
3. Big Data by Neha Singh: She talks about the famous “Big Five” Personality traits: OCEAN and how it has become the standard technique of psychometrics. Data collection proved to be a major blocker for implementing this in an ML model. She talks about how with the help of Facebook, Twitter, and our smartphones, we are continuously consciously or unconsciously providing the data to help create the OCEAN Model.
4. Analyzing Gender Stereotyping on the Bollywood Movies Dataset by Nishtha Madan: She talks about studying gender stereotypes and biases in the Movie Industry. The dataset for the study was movie plots and posters for movies released since the 1970s. Semantic Modelling on the Movie plots detects the gender biases. Features like occupation, introductions, associated actions and descriptions are captured to highlight the stereotypes and gender biases. The study also showed that such biases are not applicable to the movie posters, irrespective of the biases on female character roles in movie plots.
5. Building Conversational Experiences with Google Assistant by Google: It explained the different stages of the typical conversation with the Google Assistant. The various stages include — Speech to Text, Natural Language Understanding, Dialog Flow Control, Natural Language Generation, etc. The talk gave a walkthrough on how to integrate custom actions with the Google Assistant.

There was a speed mentoring session organized at the GHCI. This was a unique setup where we got to interact with different mentors. We were divided into a group of 6 - 8 people. Each group gets a 15 minute time window to interact with a mentor. In total, we get a chance to interact with 4 mentors. Each mentor is given a topic to discuss on the table. The topics vary like - becoming better managers, dealing with gender biases in office, taking career leaps, etc. This session was very helpful, as you get a vision of the different challenges faced by everyone in their career and common solutions to some of them.

We attended the tech expo fair, where we got to see the new innovations being done by the different companies. We saw new applications developed with the help of AR/VR, IBM research on creating small-scale robots, Game Development by EA.

In the evening, there was a networking dinner hosted by Google Techmakers. It is a global community in which women can connect, be inspired, and encourage each other to realize their passions. From 2014 to present, Women Techmakers is continually launching global scalable initiatives and piloting new programs to support and empower women in the industry.

The event was started with a brief presentation by Lakshya Sivaramakrishnan. As per statistics, women underestimate their skills by 30% and one of our takeaways from this workshop was to accept our achievements and be proud of what we’ve accomplished.

In a small exercise, we were divided into a group of 8 and were told to write things from our personal and professional lives that we have done which makes us remarkable. It helped us relish our achievements and boost our confidence.

The event was followed by a dinner where we were given an opportunity to network with each other, talk about our experiences and even get and provide some form of mentorship. We could even volunteer to join this community as a contributor, member, mentor or guide.

Takeaways from the conference

As women in tech, attending GHCI was an empowering and enriching experience. We were surrounded by a large group of women who share the same passion for technology. We felt the need and the drive to help and encourage other women to grow their careers in technology.

Thanks for reading! Let us know your thoughts on this article.

At Reflektive, we are building a team of empathetic and passionate people. If this resonates with you, join us on our journey.