The Women in Tech Show: A Technical Podcast

Hospital patients can end up with an infection they didn’t have when they arrive. This leads to complications and sometimes death. Jenna Wiens, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, worked on building a computational model that can learn to prevent infections by determining the risk of getting one. We talked about what data is useful for building this model and the algorithms involved. Jenna also explained different approaches to building a machine learning model for a hospital.

From idea to execution, starting a tech company is a rewarding experience. Wen-Wen Lam, Founder and CEO of NexTravel (YC W15) explains what it took to launch a tech company. We talked about the process of exploring ideas, talking to clients and the execution of building a product. In the early days of NexTravel, a huge player in the market pulled their partnership. This could have meant the end of the company. However, Wen-Wen and her Co-Founder believed in their idea and worked even harder. Wen-Wen explained the process of building the company. We talked about the problem they’re solving in the corporate travel space, finding clients and pricing strategies. We also talked about her experience at YCombinator.

Technologies like Kubernetes and Google Kubernetes Engine make it easier for anyone to manage their applications in the cloud. With decades of experience in managing systems at scale, Google brings that knowledge to the community through its products and open source contributions. Chen Goldberg Director of Engineering at Google Cloud explains the motivation behind Google Kubernetes Engine, also known as GKE. We talked about its capabilities and about what aspects of Google’s Engineering culture are present in it. We also talked about developer productivity, site reliability engineering and open source software.

Containers are being widely adopted as part of an application infrastructure. For existing systems and applications that want to make the switch, they have to migrate part of their infrastructure. Nicole Hubbard, Architect at WP Engine walks us through migrating from virtual machines to containers. We talked about what a VM infrastructure consists of and the reasons why you should consider to use containers instead. Nicole talked about the challenges of the migration and about scaling an infrastructure.

As women enter the technology field they can come across challenges to grow in their careers. Part of these challenges are because there are still not a lot of women in technology so we might encounter biases that affect our development and the tech community. Fortunately, as other women learn from their experiences, they have built support groups and platforms to help other women learn and grow in the tech industry. Seema Gururaj, Founder and CEO of Square Circle, talks about a platform that she built to empower women technologists to become industry influencers. We are also joined by Maya Ackerman, Founder and CEO of WaveAI, and also a computer engineering professor at Santa Clara University. Maya talked about her work in artificial intelligence, and how Seema’s work has helped her in her career. Dima Ghawi, Executive Coach and Founder of a Consulting Company focused on advancing individuals in leadership, also joined us. Dima explained the role of networking in advancing your career and tips to improve in leadership. Dima has two decades of corporate experience at IBM, Intuit, and Merrill Lynch.

As software engineers we are constantly updating our skills and learning about new tools and technologies. Amy Chen, Systems Software Engineer at Heptio explains how she learned to use Kubernetes by building helm charts. We talked about common ways to learn Kubernetes by using the command line interface and later discussed the benefits of learning Kubernetes by building Helm Charts. We also talked about Amy’s side projects which include a YouTube channel called Amy Codes and Ladies Storm Hackathons.

Available on: iTunes | Android | RSS Artificial Intelligence is being used in...

Available on: iTunes | Android | RSS Evelina Gabasova is developing machine learning...

Every 98 seconds a person in the united states is abused. Every 16 hours a woman in the united states is murdered by her romantic partner or ex-partner. Unfortunately sexual abuse and harassment are still very common in the world. Manisha Mohan, a recent graduate from the MIT Media Lab, invented a sticker that can detect sexual assault. The sticker can detect, communicate and prevent sexual assault. Manisha explained the technology behind this sticker and the different prototypes that were considered.

The telecom industry has been around for over a hundred years. From radio, to television to the internet, it is crucial to how we work. Since it has been around for a long time, there are a lot of challenges in how hardware and software products are developed. Heather Kirksey, Linux Foundation VP, joins us to talk about this and explains how deployment of services is accelerated through network services. We talked about Network Function Virtualization, also known as NFV, among other things.