The Women in Tech Show: A Technical Podcast

We live in a great time to start a company. The resources which were only accessible to big companies are now at our fingertips. Erica Brescia, COO of Bitnami gave advice on how to start a company. We talked about what she learned at YC and the status of the company when it was admitted. Erica explained what Bitnami is building, and pricing strategies. At the end we talked about her role as an investment partner in XFactor Ventures.

Most of us have come across a form of bias when we interact with others. These biases can make their way to a machine learning system, leading to unfair decisions. Rachel Thomas, co-founder of fast.ai and researcher in residence at The University of San Francisco explains the origins and implications of bias in machine learning. We also talked about solutions to limit bias. Rachel also explained the role of linear algebra in machine learning and how to teach it effectively for people working in ML applications. We talked about the fundamental concepts and how they are applied in machine learning.

Becoming a better developer is easier than ever. With unlimited resources and the ability to connect with other people, we can learn from other developers. Jess Lee, COO at The Practical Dev, explains how they are building a community to help developers. We talked about how developers are engaging and the type of content they are posting on the platform. Jess also explained the technologies used to build The Practical Dev.

Everyone should learn how to code. Felienne, Assistant Professor at Delft University of Technology, explains the importance of learning to code even if we are not going to code for a living. We talked about her approach to teach kids about programming and software engineering. Felienne is bringing teaching methods seen in other disciplines like writing into programming. She explained the progress the children make and how to create an inclusive environment that keeps them engaged.

Pokémon Go, an augmented reality game, was released in 2016. The level of popularity it reached was more that the expected. This provided interesting technical challenges to make sure it was available to millions of people. Aparna Sinha, Group Product Manager at Google, and Dawn Chen, Software Engineer Tech Lead at Google, explain how Kubernetes enabled Pokémon Go to quickly scale.

Nature has its own computers, from worms to bacteria, these organisms use calculus and gradient descent to survive. Sabrina Rashid, PhD student in Computational Biology at Carnegie Mellon, explains how bacteria are using gradient descent. We also talked about what computational biology is and the problems that are being explored. Sabrina also talked about her work on RNA sequence analysis and the type of data that she works with.

Statistics and Machine Learning are two fields that have advanced Artificial Intelligence. Montserrat Gonzalez, Software Engineer at Google, explains the difference between using traditional statistical approaches, Machine Learning and AI.

Podcasts are the fastest growing form of media. I know first hand the process for sharing a podcast is difficult. Kim Hansen, CEO of Signl.fm is building software to solve this problem. Kim explained the challenges as well as the solutions they are working on to improve the technology podcasters have access to.

In the 80s, Compaq became one of the fastest growing companies in American History. Compaq pioneered the idea of building a computer that was compatible with IBM’s software. Back then, IBM was the dominant player in the personal computers space and their software was used everywhere. Karen Walker was Vice President of Operations at Compaq. She controlled capital investments totaling $1 Billion. Karen oversaw the construction of 11 million square feet of Compaq’s offices around the world and helped grow Compaq, which became the largest supplier of PCs in the 90s.

As more robots are available in the market, we are seeing the different ways in which humans can interact with them. Some people think robots are alive they even feel bad when a Roomba gets stuck. Other people find robots that look a lot like humans scary. Kate Darling, Research specialist at the MIT Media Lab explains the different types of human-robot interactions. We talked about how the design of the robot affects how it is perceived and the role of the person’s culture. At the end we talked about questions that lawmakers will need to address in this space.