Everything Is Learnable
How Kristina Mach Uses Machine Learning For Societal Good
While growing up in Sweden, Kristina Mach knew she wanted to make a positive change in the world. Hoping to find her niche in politics, she began her career as an advisor for the Moderate Youth League, her country’s largest (13,000+ member) political youth league. Although she found the work rewarding, she also excelled at math and science in high school, and began to miss the challenges those subjects offered.
“I went to a Swedish high school, where you pick a track to focus on such as politics, business, natural science, etc. My track was natural science, which was mostly math and physics. I grew up around science since both my parents were doctors, so I really missed the more technical side of myself while I was working in politics.”
Feeling that she could make a more meaningful difference in her community through more technical work, Kristina enrolled in Uppsala University’s Sociotechnical Systems Engineering program, which combined information technology, business, and engineering classes to help students tackle society’s most difficult problems.
After taking her first few information technology classes, Kristina became hooked on coding, and decided to make it her focus for her undergraduate studies. Beyond her required coursework, she began working nights and evenings on her programs and often took on extra projects out of personal interest. In order to teach herself new material, she began using online video coding tutorials and soon noticed that almost all of the tutorials she found were made by men. Feeling frustrated by the lack of female representation in her field, she launched a Youtube channel and Instagram page under the alias “Kixcodes,” a portmanteau of her childhood nickname (Kix) and her trade (coding), which she still maintains to this day.
“I was inspired to found Kixcodes to give other women out there someone to identify with. Through Kixcodes, I try to post lifestyle images that a normal girl can identify with so people know that any girl should be able to code.”
After receiving her bachelor’s degree in 2018, Kristina began her first full-time job with Accenture in Stockholm, where she was a data scientist and a member of the company’s robotics and computer vision group. During her first few months, she worked with clients across a variety of industries, including a construction company that needed to standardize its system for taking inventory when trucks offloaded their cargo into buildings. As one of the youngest engineers in her group, Kristina led the development of a computer vision system to track what deliveries were offloaded and where they were physically deposited. To use the system, the head of the construction site would don augmented reality (AR) glasses and draw out a 3D map of where deliveries should go. The system would then compare the intended delivery map to computer records of deliveries, and the AR system would instruct the supervisor on how to resolve any discrepancies.
Although the work at Accenture was exciting, Kristina found herself wanting to use her experience in machine learning for greater societal good. In pursuit of this goal, she left Accenture after a year to begin studying towards a master’s degree in Biomedical Computing at the Technical University of Munich, a school she selected due to Munich’s booming artificial intelligence (AI) industry. Today, she still lives in Munich and is researching methods of automatic landmark detection in x-rays as part of her degree program. The work involves experimenting with deep learning algorithms to fully automate image guidance for surgeons during surgery. To use this form of automatic detection, hospital staff must take a CT scan of the patient before the operation, which is then merged with x-rays taken during the operation to increase precision of diagnoses.
Throughout her work and studies, Kristina has been grateful to her mother for the lasting influence she had on her decision to pursue STEM. While she feels confident enough to take on technical challenges now, she remembers feeling differently as a child before her mother helped her learn how to study.
“When I was younger, my mother would sit and do math with me for hours until I understood. My mother always said that everybody can understand mathematics — it can take a while sometimes, but everyone can learn math if they choose to do it. I didn’t realize until later how lucky I was to have her as a role model. She made STEM less scary for me from the start.”
As Kristina nears completion of her master’s degree, she looks forward to continuing her outreach for other women in STEM, while looking for a new career opportunity that allows her to use her technical talents for societal good. When asked to share her best advice for women pursuing a technical path, she stresses that everyone’s most important asset is simply their ability to learn.
“STEM is not scary; sometimes you just have to put time into it. Everything is learnable.”
This story was written by Charlotte Kiang, Wogrammer Journalism Fellow. Connect with her on LinkedIn. Support our mission to celebrate more amazing women in tech, like the one featured here, by donating to AnitaB.org.
