When Fei-Fei Li, the director of Stanford’s AI Lab and now a chief scientist at Google Cloud, was asked in an interview in the MIT Technical Review: The Artificial Intelligence Issue why she advocated more women be involved in technical fields, and AI in particular, she said:

“When you are making a technology this pervasive and this important for humanity, you want it to carry the values of the entire humanity, serve the needs of the entire humanity. If the developers of this technology do not represent all walks of life, it is very likely that this will be a biased technology. I say this as a technologist, a researcher, and mother.”

It is only fitting that Women in Big Data has become a global movement. And rightly so. With local chapters running meetups in cities around the globe, they promote, strengthen, and encourage the diversity in the big data fields. They aspire to “carry the values of the entire humanity, serve the needs of the entire humanity” in this zeitgeist of big data we are undergoing.

In collaboration with the local chapter of Women in Big Data Meetup, we hosted a meetup with a diverse and highly-accomplished women in their respective technical fields as speakers at our Bay Area Spark Meetup at Databricks.

For those who missed the meetup, below are the videos and links to the presentation slides.

You can peruse slides and view the videos at your leisure. To those who helped and attended, thank you for participating and continued community support. And to those who wish to be part of the diversity, join your local Women in Big Data chapter—and be a champion, amplify your voice, no matter your gender.

Fitting in CS When the Stereotypes Don’t fit

By Prof. Colleen Lewis

View the slides here

Apache Spark Performance: Past, Future, and Present

By Kay Ousterhout

View the slides here

Deep Learning Pipelines: Enabling AI in Production

By Sue Ann Hong

View the slides here

What’s Next

Our next BASM will be held in January 2018 at Twitter HQ in SF. If you are not a member, join us today. If you missed our Spark Summit EU, 2017, in Dublin, Ireland, you can get a recap here.