There are an increasing number of female entrepreneurs in technology with CEO’s and COO’s like Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook, and Susan Wojcicki of Youtube leading the way, but it isn’t enough to break the stereotype of a male dominance in the industry.

Professor Maja Pantic from Imperial College London’s Department of Computing recently said that London ‘won’t reap the benefits of the fourth industrial revolution if we don’t find ways to recruit more female computer engineers.’ In the UK fewer than 10% of computing engineers are women, and there are over 13,000 more male than female students in computer science.

But why does it matter?

A lack of women in the industry will not only mean future products could be skewed towards a male market, but gender diversity will improve the sector’s influencing capacity and help to guide government policy in the development of the economy. Plenty of jobs that were traditionally considered to be ‘women’s jobs’ are threatened by automation from librarians, to lawyers and everything in between.

As an all female team, RE•WORK understand the importance of empowering women in technology and are excited to continue the Women in Machine Intelligence Dinner Series. These evenings bring together industry experts and researchers to discuss the latest advancements in their fields and showcase women working in AI.

It was a great get together, very inspiring and interesting to find out about the chances, but also challenges which come with machine intelligence for our society. The event gave me a great opportunity to connect with women in this field to learn from each other. Keep pushing boundaries!

Vivien Richter, CEO of Seatris. (WIMI Dinner in London)

Part of the reason for the lack of women in the field stems from the absence of role models and mentors for women to look up to. Whilst they are indeed there, they are less prominent than their male counterparts. Currently working in a prominent role in AI is Layla El Arsi, Research Manager at Maluuba. At the Women in Machine Intelligence Dinner, Montreal, 11 October, we will hear from Layla who is, along with her team, solving the problem of ‘Artificial General Intelligence” by creating literate machines that can think, reason and communicate like humans. Speaking at the dinner, Layla will discuss her research in artificial intelligence in the context of language understanding, dialogue and human-machine interaction. She will talk about her experience in leading a team seeking to build artificial intelligence systems that are knowledgeable and can exchange information with users to help users accomplish tasks or gain knowledge.

As the ‘deep learning revolution’ continues, the ability for its technology disrupt and improve industries across the board is evident and we are seeing transformations in healthcare, fashion, transport, finance, as well as many more areas.

Adriana Romero, Post-Doctoral Researcher at Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms will also be presenting at the dinner and will discuss into the challenges faced in deep learning models for personalised medicine. The medical industry is characterized by high variability of data including text, imaging and genomic data, and recently the recent advancements in imaging and genomics are helping to overcome the segmentation problem which Adriana will explore in detail.

Adriana is currently researching under the advice of Yoshua Bengio, one of the most highly regarded leaders in AI, who is appearing on the Panel of Pioneers at the Deep Learning Summit in Montreal on October 10 & 11.

Frequently attending companies include: Microsoft, Vodafone, Bupa, DeepMind, Babylon Health, Playfair Capital and RBC.

Early Bird discounted tickets for the dinner are available until August 18, as well as Early Bird passes for the Deep Learning Summit in Montreal, October 10 & 11.
Register now for discounted passes.

As well as the Canadian Women in Machine Intelligence Dinner, we will also be hosting events in London and San Francisco: