10 Talks We Can’t Wait to Hear at the 2019 Grace Hopper Celebration

We’re heading to the 2019 Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) October 1–4 in Orlando, Florida. GHC is the world’s largest gathering of women technologists and we’re excited to be sponsoring for the ninth year in a row. Our main goal at GHC every year is to meet students who will make great interns as part of our FutureForce program…and every year we do! We’re able to do interviews and extend offers on-site at the conference.

While the expo and interview halls are action-packed and where we spend a lot of time, there are also three days worth of talks for the 24,000+ conference attendees. With multiple tracks to choose from, not to mention the great keynote and the poster sessions, it can be overwhelming to narrow it down. We perused the Artificial Intelligence, Career, Data Science, Products A-Z, and Software Engineering tracks and found these 10 talks we can’t wait to check out.

1. Microservice Architecture: Orchestration to Reactive Approach
   Wednesday, October 2; 11:30am; OCCC W224D
   Speakers: Divya Goel and Chandni Jain
   “Microservices are something you grow into, not begin with.” In this presentation we will discuss orchestration, reactive and hybrid approach to the microservice paradigm. We will dive into how we applied these to Walmart’s catalog serving millions of items.
2. AI Will Change Everything. Who Will Change AI?
   Wednesday, October 2; 1:00pm; OCCC W415B
   Speakers: Tess Posner, Fei-Fei Li, Rekebah Agwunobi, and Ayori Selassie (Salesforce Speaker)
   There is a diversity crisis in AI. As artificial intelligence goes full speed ahead, it’s critical to ask who is building and shaping this important technology. When diverse voices are left out of AI, the reliability and fairness of AI systems come into question. Join technologists and leaders in AI to talk about challenges and concrete solutions in shaping an inclusive and ethical future of AI.
3. Same Skills, New Title: How to Become an AI Developer
   Wednesday, October 2; 1:15pm; Hyatt Regency Ballroom O
   Speaker: Natalie Casey (Salesforce Speaker)
   Organizations need AI to remain competitive. For many software developers, finding an opportunity to transition to this field often reads as a career transition to data science. In reality, companies need many more talented individuals in software to realize their AI goals. In this session, we will discuss how software developers can be part of AI and continue to leverage their talents.
4. Three Tips for Better Predictive Models
   Wednesday, October 2; 3:00pm; OCCC W315B
   Speaker: Stephanie Yang
   This talk contains three tips, typically not covered in data science or machine learning classes, on how to increase the effectiveness of predictive models. The three tips are: (1) optimize for the right metric, (2) invest in feature engineering, and (3) examine your data. These tips will be illustrated using examples drawn from location intelligence.
5. Building a Multi-domain Chatbot With Artificial Intelligence
   Thursday, October 3; 1:00pm; OCCC W304C
   Speakers: Xiaoqian Jin and Amy Eliason
   At Travelers we wanted to design a chatbot that could reduce the conversation volume for our technical support center. To achieve this, we’ve built a multi-domain chatbot to integrate various chatbots within a single conversation. In this talk we will explain how we customized an open source chatbot framework with state-of-the-art AI models and unique features to build a multi-domain chatbot.
6. Better Together: The Inner Source Journey
   Thursday, October 3; 2:30pm; OCCC W224A
   Speakers: Rocio Montes and Aliza Carpio
   When engineers collaborate and learn from each other’s code, both the business and the engineers benefit. Engineers grow their skills, broaden their network, contribute to the common goal and take pride in tech. Business solutions are more complete, have higher quality and reach customers faster. We’ll share Intuit’s model and lessons learned in the journey to create an inner source community.
   (Psst….we’ve written about this too!)
7. Building Product That Developers Love
   Thursday, October 3; 2:45pm; OCCC W230C
   Speakers: Kathy Simpson, Nancy Wang, Nahid Samsami (Salesforce Speaker), Priya Lakshminarayanan, and Helen Fan
   The rising influence of developers in business decisions makes it ever more critical to build products that developers love, but developers are rarely treated as customers. We’ve invited product leaders from developer-centric companies including AWS, Heroku, GitHub, and PayPal to share their tips and best practices for you to learn how to build developer-friendly products.
8. Labor Force: Survive and Thrive Your Maternity at Work
   Friday, October 4; 12:00pm; Hyatt Regency Ballroom O
   Speaker: Vivienne Wei (Salesforce speaker)
   “Labor Force” celebrates women’s strength during child delivery and recognizes the importance of women’s participation in the labor force. The session will reveal unspoken truths about working motherhood and provide a blueprint to have a fulfilling career and a thriving family, based on interviews with C-level working moms. Women should never again worry about motherhood derailing their careers.
9. Mental Illness in the Workplace: How to Have a Real, Honest Conversation
   Friday, October 4; 12:15pm; Hyatt Orlando Ballroom L
   Speakers: Caeley Looney, Nandita Gupta, Leslie Carr (Salesforce Speaker), Akshaya Aradhya Veerabhadraiah, and Amy Higgins
   According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 1 in 5 adults in the U.S. experiences mental illness each year. And yet, the stigma of mental illness leaves us wondering: how do we talk about it? This panel gives employees and managers the conversational tools to discuss mental illness, ask for and give accommodations, and respond to mental health needs with support and compassion.
10. Embedding Social Responsibility and Ethics into the Engineering Lifecycle
    Friday, October 4; 12:30pm; OCCC W224A
    Speakers: Amanda Casari, Kathy Pham, Sarah Hubbard, Hallie Benjamin, and Niveditha Kalavakonda
    Social responsibility exists at the periphery of the tech industry, starting with limited ethics classes in CS curricula and later codified in engineering practices and company culture. This panel brings together software engineers, data scientists, product managers, AI researchers, and policy specialists to discuss the societal impacts of what we build and how we build it.

For more great talks, be sure to check out the full conference agenda and build out your own schedule!