GHC News: Don’t Miss This Year’s Invited Technical Speakers
Invited Technical Speakers are an important part of a conference like the Grace Hopper Celebration. These speakers are experts in their technical fields, and in their sessions, they give in-depth presentations about the work that they are doing. The Grace Hopper Celebration highlights outstanding technical experts by inviting them to the conference to give these talks about their subject areas. By highlighting the work that technical women and men are doing, the conference provides invited speakers with visibility opportunities, showcases the speakers as role models to conference attendees, and enables meaningful dialogue about technical topics.
Here is a look at this year’s Invited Technical Speakers:
Lili Cheng
Thursday, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM, BCC: 309
Lili Cheng is General Manager of the Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Labs in Microsoft Research.
FUSE Labs works with product and research teams to ideate, develop, and deliver new social, real-time, and media-rich experiences for home and work.
Her session, “Creativity, Learning, and Social Software,” part of the Social Collaboration track, showcases the work that she is doing at FUSE to inspire kids to be creative by making the kind of software they love to use: games, search, and social networking programs, and to and create future versions of the tools they use every day. She will show projects her team is creating for students, such as Kodu (game making), Montage (topic pages), So.cl (search and social networking), as well as the Social Media Student Advisory program.
Lori A. Clarke
Thursday, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM, BCC: 324-326
Lori A. Clarke is Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Co-Director of the Laboratory for Advanced Software Engineering Research.
Her session, “Using Process Modeling and Analysis Techniques to Reduce Errors in Health Care,” will describe the technologies, discuss in-depth case studies, and present findings to date of the work that her team is doing in the University of Massachusetts Medical Safety Project. They are exploring the use of process modeling and analysis technologies to help reduce medical errors; specifically, they are modeling health care processes using a process definition language and then analyzing these processes using model checking, fault-tree analysis, discrete-event simulation, and other analysis techniques.
Judith Olson
Thursday, 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM, BCC: 324-326
Judith Olson is the Bren Professor of Information and Computer Sciences in the Informatics Department at the UC Irvine, with courtesy appointments in the School of Social Ecology and the Merage School of Business. She has researched teams whose members are not collocated for over 20 years. Her current work focuses on ways to verify the theory’s components while at the same time helping new scientific collaborations succeed. She studies remote collaboration in telemedicine where a remote physician is connected via videoconferencing but seated atop
a remote controlled robot.
Her session, “Working Together Apart: Technology and Social Practices that Make Distance Matter Less,” showcases some of the work she is doing currently to optimize working at a distance. She will introduce the Collaboration Success Wizard, an online assessment tool that embodies this theory and provides help to people who are living with distance work while providing data to refine the theory of collaboration success.
Vivek Wadhwa
Thursday, 3:45 PM – 4:45 PM, BCC: 319-320
Vivek Wadhwa is Vice President of Academics and Innovation at Singularity University; Fellow, Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance, Stanford University; Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at the Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University; and distinguished visiting scholar, Halle Institute of Global Learning, Emory University. He lectures on subjects such as entrepreneurship and public policy, helps prepare students for the real world, and leads groundbreaking research projects.
Positing that this will be the most innovative decade in human history, in his session, “Where the Next Billion Dollar Opportunities Lie: At the Intersection of Exponentially Growing Technologies,” he will discuss technologies are rapidly evolving and converging that will make it possible to solve some of humanity’s grand challenges—in fields such as robotics, AI, computing, synthetic biology, 3D printing, medicine and nanomaterials.
Caroline Watteeuw
Friday, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM, BCC: 324-326
Caroline is currently the Global Chief Technology Officer and SVP Business Information Solution Services of PepsiCo Inc. She develops and executes a strategic agenda for technology programs that drive significant value, supports the fast growth in operating capabilities, increases the value-contribution of IT and manages all infrastructure and enterprise services operations.
Her session, “The Game is Changing,” will provide an in-depth look at the role of CTOs, who make fundamental contributions to their company, from IT consumerization, social networking to Big Data Analytics, self-healing networks or virtualization. She will illustrate how technology innovation was a constant objective throughout her career and talk about out how innovations in technology and global accessibility to these sophisticated platforms have changed the game for companies.
Lori Beer
Friday, 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM, BCC: 324-326
Lori Beer is Executive Vice President of Enterprise Business Services for WellPoint, Inc. She is responsible for driving the business, technology and service solutions to deliver innovative health care products
and services to the more than 34 million members
of the company’s affiliated health plans. She leads Enterprise Business Services, including operations, technology, real estate, information management, vendor partnerships, and strategic project portfolio. She manages more than 30,000 employees and
a portfolio exceeding $3 billion.
As Lori Beer watched IBM Watson defeat Jeopardy’s top champions, a thought crossed her mind – how can health benefits company WellPoint harness this technology to improve the healthcare system? Nine months later, WellPoint and IBM announced an agreement making WellPoint the first company to create commercial applications utilizing IBM Watson. In her session, “Transforming Healthcare Through Data,” learn how WellPoint’s vision to develop Watson-based applications can transform health care for millions of Americans.
Hilary Mason
Friday, 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM, BCC: 309
Hilary Mason is the Chief Scientist at bit.ly, where she finds sense in vast data sets. Her work involves both pure research and development of product-focused features.
Her session, part of the Social Collaboration track, will illustrate how Bitly began as a simple URL shortener and has evolved into a content sharing and analytics platform. She will discuss the algorithms and infrastructure that were developed to understand attention on the Internet, and the process of integrating them into new products.
Jane Margolis
Friday, 3:45 PM – 4:45 PM, BCC: 319-320
Jane Margolis, UCLA Senior Researcher at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, is the author of two award-winning books: Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing, which examines the gender gap in computer science at the college level, and Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing, which examines the disparities in computer science learning opportunities in Los Angeles public high schools. Her research consistently leads to innovative organizational reform.
In her session, “Unlocking the Clubhouse: A Decade Later and Now What?” she will reflect on why despite the uptick of interest in computer science, the numbers of women majors are still abysmally small. While doing so, she will make connections to the issues raised in the last decade since the publication of Unlocking the Clubhouse. She will also reflect on how underrepresentation in computing relates to larger issues we face as world citizens and the upcoming national elections.
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