Computer Vision News - March 2017

from the dinners: the PhD students that come to the events and the younger generation that are looking to start their careers in startups or in the corporate world are looking for role models and mentors in the field. They are looking to see how they can advance and progress. A lot of the more experienced women that we’ve had attend and present at the dinners that are really quite influential in the field, they’ve been quite happy to spend time chatting with the younger generation about how they have progressed in their career and give them some pointers, feedback and internships which has really been great to see. How has the role of women evolved since you first had the idea of working toward these programs? Over the past 3 or 4 years, we’ve definitely seen more women attend our events. However, there is still a gap between the number of male and female attendees. We’ve also seen more demand in having women support women’s events. For example, dinners that we hold every 6 months or so always sell out. They’ve always been popular, but we’ve seen the number of attendees pick up much more in advance every time. We’ve also seen, not just our events, but more women- supported events from other companies as well. There are lots more women in AI meetups and networking- based events over the past few years. Also, there is so much more discussion around the topic of imbalances at the moment and why we need more women in the field in general and the advantages that they bring to a company. Let’s make a call to action from the pages of Computer Vision News to repair the gender imbalance in our community: what would you say? I’d call for providing an opportunity for women to feel supported in the field, so that they have a chance to share their work, a chance to progress in the field, and a chance to really make their mark in artificial intelligence. That can be done by hosting supportive women events where we encourage more women to attend… also to have female speakers on the agenda at conferences and events or have women on the committees that arrange conferences. Also, there are more and more international women in science. We do things like interview different women that have attended our events to ask them to share how they got involved in the fields, what advice they would give to other women just starting in the field, and really promoting those national and global days. They can encourage, especially girls, to get interested and to see more and more pioneers that they can look up to and see as mentors so that they could then Guest A nice video about RE•WORK’s Deep Learning Summit, Singapore 2016 18 Computer Vision News Guest “ Women want to be able to support other women coming into the field at the very start of their career ”