>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE, covering Grace Hopper's Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference, here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Vipul Nagrath. He is the Global CIO at ADP, a provider of human resources management software in New York. Welcome, Vipul. >> Thank you. >> It's great to have you on the show. So, before the cameras were rolling, you were talking about how this is your first ever Grace Hopper. How do you find things? >> I think this is exciting. Just the sheer numbers: 18,000 attendees, all the various different companies that are represented over here, the talent. I'm here with a sizeable team, there's about 30 of us. Many of my colleagues have been walking the floor and they've been just thoroughly impressed with the talent that they're meeting and the people that they're talking to. We're here actively recruiting. We've actually been doing on-site interviews. So, we're looking for top talent and if we can find it right here at the show, we'll do it. >> So, there are a lot of tech conferences that you attend, but what is it about Grace Hopper in particular? >> Well, this one specifically, one of our initiatives is around diversity and inclusion. So, what better place to come than Grace Hopper if you want to talk about diversity and inclusion? In addition to that, is we were talking earlier, right? The marketplace that engineering and tech and computer science is going to go into, the need is actually only increasing. Everything is run by software today or very shortly will be. In the end, every company's becoming a software company and offering some other services with it. We're all headed that way. Yet, the talent pool's actually getting tighter and smaller, yet more jobs are going to be created in that industry. So, I think it's a phenomenal and wonderful opportunity, and specifically from a Grace Hopper perspective and the Anita Borg perspective, is get more women involved in this. The pie is going to get bigger, and I think women have an opportunity to gain more of that share of that pie. >> So, is ADP doing anything to actively engage more women earlier in their career trajectories to get them interested in this area? >> There are a number of multiple- Sorry, there's a multiple set of initiatives that we have. In fact, I was joined here at this conference with our Chief Diversity Officer. She's also responsible for corporate social responsibility. So, diversity and inclusion is really huge for her, not just for us at ADP, but she actually has a larger message for the entire industry. So, she's pushing that agenda. So, there are actually many different things that we're working on. >> And as a human resources company that message can get through. >> Exactly. >> So, talk to me. We always hear about the business case for diversity and inclusion. How do you view it? >> How do I view it, is I start with, again, top talent, and then it's thought diversity. When you bring multiple disciplines in together, bring people with multiple backgrounds in together, even a different point of view, you realize, or I think you open up and realize that you might have had some blinders on some things. Now you start really getting rid of those blinders. Instead of them being blinders, they turn into opportunities. I think if you have too many people thinking exactly the same way, doing exactly the same thing, you fall into a not-so-good method, right? You fall into a not-so-good idea of just really channeling the same idea over and over and over again. >> The groupthink that is a big problem in so many companies. So, how do diverse teams work together in your experience? You talked about seeing wider perspectives and different kinds of ideas and insights that you wouldn't necessarily get if it's just a bunch of similar people from similar backgrounds, similar races, all one gender, sitting in a room together. How do these teams work together in your experience? >> Well, what I believe in is you got to put these teams together and you got to empower them. Absolutely, there's a stated goal. There is an outcome. There is a result we have to achieve. Give 'em the outcome, give 'em the goal, give 'em a loose framework, and then give 'em guiding principles. Then, after that: team, go ahead. You're empowered to do the right thing. But, these goals will be aggressive, right? We may want to make something two orders of magnitude faster. That's no small task. We may want to expand our capabilities so that we can handle six times the load that we handled today. That's no small task. So, they're very large goals to achieve, but they just have to go out and do them. If you leave that creativity to the team, and you let everyone bring in what their different viewpoints, some that have expertise today, and some that don't necessarily have expertise in it but they're really good programmers or they're really good software developers. So, they can learn from those folks that have the expertise, then develop a new solution that's more powerful than the one that exists today. >> What are some of the most exciting things you're working on at ADP right now? >> Well, me personally, we're going through a huge transformation in my group within ADP. That transformation is really just implementing more of what I just talked about, is these small, nimble teams that are multidisciplinary, and they're given, again, guiding principles and goals, and they go out and be creative and be innovative, and figure out how to do this. >> So, what your customers expect on the pipeline though, in terms of products coming out of ADP, and helping them manage their human capital? >> Sure, well actually, we have a lot of exciting, new, and innovative products coming out of our company, which in the coming months, in the coming years, will be released and put into production. But, basically, they should expect a better way to work. 'Cause that is our job. We're really out there to make work better. >> Rebecca: And more inclusive, too, and more, okay. >> All those things actually just go into being and making work better. Inclusion is in there, diversity is in there, creativity is in there, innovation is in there, stability is in there. But, all of that makes work better. >> Is there more pressure on a company like ADP to walk the walk? Because, you are a human capital management company. That is your bread and butter. >> I believe there is, sure. Just naturally, yes, there is. >> So, what is your advice to companies out there? I know you said your Chief Diversity Officer had a wider message to companies about the importance of diversity and inclusive teams. What would you say from your perspective as CIO? >> From my perspective, again, I do believe that diversity, that inclusion, makes for a more powerful team, makes for a wider understanding of what we're actually trying to do. So, I would just encourage others to do that, too, and not be very narrow-minded. >> Great. Well, Vipul, it has been so much fun talking to you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> We will have more from the Orange County Convention Center, Grace Hopper, just after this. (light, electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's the Cube, covering Grace Hopper's celebration of women in computing, brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. Welcome back to the cube's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here at the Orange County Convention Center. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Jigyasa Grover. She is a new graduate of Delhi technological university and a Facebook scholar here at Grace Hopper, thanks so much for joining us Jigyasa. >> Thank you so much. >> And you're actually a Cube alum, you were honored at the Red Hat summit in Boston this spring as a woman in open source, academic awards, so you're back, we're glad to have you. >> Yeah it's nice to be back here, I'm really enjoying the conference so far. >> Tell our viewers a little bit about what it is to be a Facebook scholar here. >> Facebook is a very nice company which gives scholarships to around 50 graduate women all across the world to come and attend the much acclaimed Grace Hopper Conference, make new friends, network with new people and most importantly, find jobs in the technological sphere. >> Do you apply for it, how do they find you? >> They publicize the scholarship a lot, obviously on Facebook and all of the social media networks, the application procedure is very simple, you just have to write an essay question, it's about who you are and what you want to achieve further in life and what have you done in the technological sphere so far, what would you like to do further, give your resume and school name, that's pretty much it. >> You have been, this is your first ever Grace Hopper. What has been the experience? >> It has been overwhelming I would say, seeing 18,000 plus women all in the same working in technology, it's like meeting your sister because you can feel how they feel and for the expo hall, you have loads of opportunities, you can make friends, I have seen so many people find their first jobs and internships. I would say come on, get your resume and there are lots of interviews going on, I'm sure you'll not only find software engineering jobs, but you end up finding jobs in product management, design, research, and there's a wide spectrum of companies out there. >> You're talking about the sisterhood that you feel here at Grace Hopper, but at the same time, the future, it's a little uncertain for women in tech just because of the headlines that we read about the sexism, the biases, the chauvinism in the industry, how do you feel as a woman on the verge of starting your career. >> I would rather say stay strong and do not let negativity affect you and what you are doing. It's more about working in sync with the other gender and in proportion, the numbers should be in proportion, there shouldn't be any gender gap. Just do your best and don't let the negativity affect you. >> How are you going to single handedly change things? >> Obviously no one can do this, no one can single handedly change the world, that's true, but doing my part, I'm just going to stay strong, work lots of open source and work with companies and hopefully my work will add contribution to the social upliftment of the world. >> What's next for you Jigyasa, you've already won a big award from Red Hat, you're a Facebook scholar. >> Next, I'm still finding my calling and I'm exploring all kind of works that will be with research, with open source contributions and of course traveling, that's my love. >> Wonderful, thank you so much for being on the Cube again, it's always fun talking to you. >> Yeah nice to meet you as well, have a nice day. >> We will have more from the Grace Hopper Conference in Orlando, Florida just after this. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the CUBE. Covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We are winding down day three of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Orlando. It's 18,000, mainly women, a couple of us men hangin' out. It's been a phenomenal event again. It always amazes me to run into first timers that have never been to the Grace Hopper event. It's a must do if you're in this business and I strongly encourage you to sign up quickly 'cause I think it sells out in about 15 minutes, like a good rock concert. But we're excited to have our next guest. She's Rachel Faber Tobac, UX Research at Course Hero. Rachel, great to see you. >> Thank you so much for having me on. >> Absolutely. So, Course Hero. Give people kind of an overview of what Course Hero is all about. >> Yup. So we are an online learning platform and we help about 200 million students and educators master their classes every year. So we have all the notes, >> 200 million. >> Yes, 200 million! We have all the notes, study guides, resources, anything a student would need to succeed in their classes. And then anything an educator would need to prepare for their classes or connect with their students. >> And what ages of students? What kind of grades? >> They're usually in college, but sometimes we help high schoolers, like AP students. >> Okay. >> Yeah. >> But that's not why you're here. You want to talk about hacking. So you are, what you call a "white hat hacker". >> White hat. >> So for people that aren't familiar with the white hat, >> Yeah. >> We all know about the black hat conference. What is a white hat hacker. >> So a "white hat hacker" is somebody >> Sounds hard to say three times fast. >> I know, it's a tongue twister. A white hat hacker is somebody who is a hacker, but they're doing it to help people. They're trying to make sure that information is kept safer rather than kind of letting it all out on the internet. >> Right, right. Like the old secret shoppers that we used to have back in the pre-internet days. >> Exactly. Exactly. >> So how did you get into that? >> It's a very non-linear story. Are you ready for it? >> Yeah. >> So I started my career as a special education teacher. And I was working with students with special needs. And I wanted to help more people. So, I ended up joining Course Hero. And I was able to help more people at scale, which was awesome. But I was interested in kind of more of the technical side, but I wasn't technical. So my husband went to Defcon. 'cause he's a cyber security researcher. And he calls me at Defcon about three years ago, and he's like, Rach, you have to get over here. I'm like, I'm not really technical. It's all going to go over my head. Why would I come? He's like, you know how you always call companies to try and get our bills lowered? Like calling Comcast. Well they have this competition where they put people in a glass booth and they try and have them do that, but it's hacking companies. You have to get over here and try it. So I bought a ticket to Vegas that night and I ended up doing the white hat hacker competition called The Social Engineering Capture the Flag and I ended up winning second, twice in a row as a newb. So, insane. >> So you're hacking, if I get this right, not via kind of hardcore command line assault. You're using other tools. So like, what are some of the tools that are vulnerabilities that people would never think about. >> So the biggest tool that I use is actually Instagram, which is really scary. 60% of the information that I need to hack a company, I find on Instagram via geolocation. So people are taking pictures of their computers, their work stations. I can get their browser, their version information and then I can help infiltrate that company by calling them over the phone. It's called vishing. So I'll call them and try and get them to go to a malicious link over the phone and if I can do that, I can own their company, by kind of presenting as an insider and getting in that way. (chuckling) It's terrifying. >> So we know phishing right? I keep wanting to get the million dollars from the guy in Africa that keeps offering it to me. >> (snickers) Right. >> I don't whether to bite on that or. >> Don't click the link. >> Don't click the link. >> No. >> But that interesting. So people taking selfies in the office and you can just get a piece of the browser data and the background of that information. >> Yep. >> And that gives you what you need to do. >> Yeah, so I'll find a phone number from somebody. Maybe they take a picture of their business card, right? I'll call that number. Test it to see if it works. And then if it does, I'll call them in that glass booth in front of 400 people and attempt to get them to go to malicious links over the phone to own their company or I can try and get more information about their work station, so we could, quote unquote, tailor an exploit for their software. >> Right. Right. >> We're not actually doing this, right? We're white hat hackers. >> Right. >> If we were the bad guys. >> You'd try to expose the vulnerability. >> Right. The risk. >> And what is your best ruse to get 'em to. Who are you representing yourself as? >> Yeah, so. The representation thing is called pre-texting. It's who you're pretending to be. If you've ever watched like, Catch Me If You Can. >> Right. Right. >> With Frank Abagnale Jr. So for me, the thing that works the best are low status pretext. So as a woman, I would kind of use what we understand about society to kind of exploit that. So you know, right now if I'm a woman and I call you and I'm like, I don't know how to trouble shoot your website. I'm so confused. I have to give a talk, it's in five minutes. Can you just try my link and see if it works on your end? (chuckling) >> You know? Right? You know, you believe that. >> That's brutal. >> Because there's things about our society that help you understand and believe what I'm trying to say. >> Right, right. >> Right? >> That's crazy and so. >> Yeah. >> Do you get, do you make money white hacking for companies? >> So. >> Do they pay you to do this or? Or is it like, part of the service or? >> It didn't start that way. >> Right. >> I started off just doing the Social Engineering Capture the Flag, the SECTF at Defcon. And I've done that two years in a row, but recently, my husband, Evan and I, co-founded a company, Social Proof Security. So we work with companies to train them about how social media can impact them from a social engineering risk perspective. >> Right. >> And so we can come in and help them and train them and understand, you know, via a webinar, 10 minute talk or we can do a deep dive and have them actually step into the shoes of a hacker and try it out themselves. >> Well I just thought the only danger was they know I'm here so they're going to go steal my bike out of my house, 'cause that's on the West Coast. I'm just curious and you may not have a perspective. >> Yeah. >> 'Cause you have niche that you execute, but between say, you know kind of what you're doing, social engineering. >> Yeah. >> You know, front door. >> God, on the telephone. Versus kind of more traditional phishing, you know, please click here. Million dollars if you'll click here versus, you know, what I would think was more hardcore command line. People are really goin' in. I mean do you have any sense for what kind of the distribution of that is, in terms of what people are going after? >> Right, we don't know exactly because usually that information's pretty confidential, >> Sure. when a hack happens. But we guess that about 90% of infiltrations start with either a phishing email or a vishing call. So they're trying to gain information so they can tailor their exploits for your specific machine. And then they'll go in and they'll do that like actual, you know, >> Right. >> technical hacking. >> Right. >> But, I mean, if I'm vishing you right and I'm talking to you over the phone and I get you to go to a malicious link, I can just kind of bypass every security protocol you've set up. I don't even a technical hacker, right? I just got into your computer because. >> 'Cause you're in 'Cause I'm in now, yup. >> I had the other kind of low profile way and I used to hear is, you know, you go after the person that's doin' the company picnic. You know Wordpress site. >> Yes. >> That's not thinking that that's an entry point in. You know, kind of these less obvious access points. >> Right. That's something that I talk about a lot actually is sometimes we go after mundane information. Something like, what pest service provider you use? Or what janitorial service you use? We're not even going to look for like, software on your machine. We might start with a softer target. So if I know what pest extermination provider you use, I can look them up on LinkedIn. See if they've tagged themselves in pictures in your office and now I can understand how do they work with you, what do their visitor badges look like. And then emulate all of that for an onsite attack. Something like, you know, really soft, right? >> So you're sitting in the key note, right? >> Yeah. >> Fei-Fei Li is talking about computer visualization learning. >> Right. >> And you know, Google running kagillions of pictures through an AI tool to be able to recognize the puppy from the blueberry muffin. >> Right. >> Um, I mean, that just represents ridiculous exploitation opportunity at scale. Even you know, >> Yeah. >> You kind of hackin' around the Instagram account, can't even begin to touch, as you said, your other thing. >> Right. >> You did and then you did it at scale. Now the same opportunity here. Both for bad and for good. >> I'm sure AI is going to impact social engineering pretty extremely in the future here. Hopefully they're protecting that data. >> Okay so, give a little plug so they'll look you up and get some more information. But what are just some of the really easy, basic steps that you find people just miss, that should just be, they should not be missing. From these basic things. >> The first thing is that if they want to take a picture at work, like a #TBT, right? It's their third year anniversary at their company. >> Right. Right. >> Step away from your work station. You don't need to take that picture in front of your computer. Because if you do, I'm going to see that little bottom line at the bottom and I'm going to see exactly the browser version, OS and everything like that. Now I'm able to exploit you with that information. So step away when you take your pictures. And if you do happen to take a picture on your computer. I know you're looking at computer nervously. >> I know, I'm like, don't turn my computer on to the cameras. >> Don't look at it! >> You're scarin' me Rachel. >> If you do take a picture of that. Then you don't want let someone authenticate with that information. So let's say I'm calling you and I'm like, hey, I'm with Google Chrome. I know that you use Google Chrome for your service provider. Has your network been slow recently? Everyone's network's been slow recently, right? >> Right. Right. >> So of course you're going to say yes. Don't let someone authenticate with that info. Think to yourself. Oh wait, I posted a picture of my work station recently. I'm not going to let them authenticate and I'm going to hang up. >> Interesting. All right Rachel. Well, I think the opportunity in learning is one thing. The opportunity in this other field is infinite. >> Yeah. >> So thanks for sharing a couple of tips. >> Yes. >> And um. >> Thank you for having me. >> Hopefully we'll keep you on the good side. We won't let you go to the dark side. >> I won't. I promise. >> All right. >> Rachel Faber Tobac and I'm Jeff Frick. You're watchin the Cube from Grace Hopper Celebration Women in Computing. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. (light, electronic music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Joanna Parke. She is the Group Managing Director, North America, at ThoughtWorks based in Chicago. Thanks so much for joining us, Joanna. >> Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here. >> Your company is being honored for the second year in a row as a top company for women technologists by the Anita Borg Institute. Tell our viewers what that means. >> Yeah, we're incredibly proud and super humble to be recognized again for the second year in a row. Our journey towards diversity and inclusivity really began about eight or nine years ago. It started with the top leadership of the company saying that this is a crisis in our industry, and we need to take a stand and we need to do something about it. So, it's been a long journey. It's not something that we started a couple of years ago, so there's been a lot of work by many people over the years to get us to where we are today, and we still feel that we have a long way to go. There's still a lot to do. >> So, being recognized as a top company for women technologists, it obviously means there are many women who work there. But, what else can a woman technologist looking for a job expect at ThoughtWorks? >> So, we think about, not just the aspects of diversity, which is what is the make up of your work for us look like, but also put equal if not more importance on inclusivity. So, you can go out and you can make all sorts of efforts to hire women or minorities into your company, but if you don't have a culture and an environment in which they feel welcome and they feel like they can succeed and they can bring themselves to work, then that success won't be very lasting. So, we've focused not only on the recruiting process but also our culture, our benefits, the environment in which we work. We are a software development company and we come from a history of agile software practices, which means that we work together in a very people-oriented and collaborative way. So, in some ways we had a little bit of a head start in that, by working in that way, our culture was already built to be more team-focused and collaborative and inclusive, so that was a good advantage for us when we got started. >> So, how else do you implement these best practices of the collaboration and the inclusivity? Because, I mean, it is one thing to say that we want everyone to have a voice at the table, but it's harder to pull off. >> It is, absolutely. So, a couple things that we've done over our history, one is just starting with open conversation. We talk a lot about unconscious bias, we do education and training through the workforce, we try to encourage those uncomfortable conversations that really create breakthroughs in understanding. We look for people that are open and curious in the interview process, and we feel like if you are open to having your views about the world challenged, that's a really good sign. So, that's kind of one step. Then, I think, when bad behavior arrives, which it always does, it's how you react and how you deal with it. So, making it clear to everyone that behavior that excludes or belittles others on the team is not tolerated. That's not the kind of culture that we want to build. It's on ongoing process. >> So, how do you call out the bad behavior, because that's hard to do, particularly if you're a junior employee. >> Yes, so we try and create a safe environment where people feel like, if I have an issue with someone on my team, particularly if it's someone more senior than me, we have a complete open-door and flat organization. So, anyone can pick up the phone and call me or our CEO or whoever they feel comfortable talking to. I think, what happens is, when that happens and people see action being taken, whether it's feedback being given or a more serious action, then it reinforces the fact that it's okay to speak up and that you are going to be heard and listened to. >> One of the underlying themes of this conference is that women technologists have a real responsibility to have a voice in this industry, and to shape how the future of software progresses. Can you talk a little bit more about that, about what you've seen and observed and also the perspective of ThoughtWorks on this issue? >> Absolutely, we all have seen the power that technology has in transforming our society, and that is only going to grow over time. It's not going away. So, it really impacts every aspect of our life, whether it's healthcare or how we interact with our family or how we go to work every day. Having a diverse set of perspectives that reflects the makeup of our society is so important. I was really impressed by Dr. Faith Ilee's keynote on Wednesday morning-- >> She's at Stanford. >> Yeah, Stanford and at Google right now as well. She spoke about the importance of having diverse voices in the field of artificial intelligence. She said, no other technology reflects its designers more than AI, and it is so critical that we have that diverse set of voices that are involved in shaping that technology. >> Is it almost too much though? As a woman technologist, not only do you have to be a trailblazer and put up with a lot of bias and sexism in the industry, and then you have this added responsibility. What's your advice to women in the field? Particularly the young women here who are at their first Grace Hopper. >> Absolutely, our CEO-- Sorry, our CTO, Rebecca Parsons, often says that the reason that she put up with it for so many years is because she's a geek, and because she's passionate about technology. So, when you're in those trying times, being able to connect with your passion and know that you're making a difference is so important. Because, if it's just something that you view as a job, or a way to make a living, you don't have that level of passion to get you through some of the hardships. So, I think, for me, that sense of responsibility is kind of a motivating and driving force. The good news is it will get easier over time. As we make progress in our industry, you don't feel so alone. You start to have other women and other marginalized groups around you that you can connect with and share experiences. >> What are some of the most exciting projects you're working on at ThoughtWorks? >> We really try to cover a broad landscape of technology. We think of ourselves as early adopters that can spot the trends in the industry and help bring them into the enterprise. So, we're doing some really exciting things in the machine-learning space, around predictive maintenance, understanding when machine parts are going to fail and being able to repair them ahead of time. Things like understanding customer insights through data. I think those areas are emerging and super exciting. >> Excellent. What are you looking for? Are you here recruiting? >> Absolutely. >> And, with a top company sticker on your booth, I'm sure that you are highly sought after. What are you looking for in a candidate? >> We for a long time have articulated our strategy in three words: attitude, aptitude, and integrity. Because we feel like if we can find a person that has a passion for learning, the ability to learn, and the right attitude about that, we can work with that, right? The world of technology is changing so fast, so even if you know the tech of today, if you don't have that passion and ability to learn, you're not going to be able to keep up. So, we really look for people in terms of those character traits and those people are the kind of people that are successful and thrive at ThoughtWorks. >> If you look at the data, it looks as though there is a looming talent shortage. Are you worried about that at ThoughtWorks? What's your-- >> Absolutely. There is a huge talent gap. It's growing by the day. We see it at our clients as well as ourselves. For me, it really comes down to the responsibility of society as well as companies to invest in upscaling our workforce. We have seen some clients take that investment and realize that the skills they needed in their workforce a few years ago look very different from what they're going to need into the future. So, we believe strongly in investing in and training and upscaling our employees. We help work with our clients to do so as well. But, I think we can't rely on the existing educational system to create all of the talent that we're going to need. It's really going to take investment, I believe, from society and from companies. >> And on the job training. >> Absolutely. There's no replacement for that, right? You can do the kind of academic and educational studies but there's no replacement for once you get into the real world and you're with people and the day to day challenges arise. >> Excellent. Well, Joanna, thanks so much for coming on. It was a real pleasure talking to you. >> Thank you, it was my pleasure. >> We will have more from the Orange County Convention Center, the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing just after this. (light, electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Orlando, Florida, it's theCube, covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Brought to you by SiliconAngle Media. >> Welcome back to theCube's coverage of Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have a great panel here today, we have three guests. We have Hilary Burns and Caroline Lester, both Reporting Fellows for the GroundTruth Project, and Tori Bedford, who is a Field Producer for the GroundTruth Project. It's great to have you guys on here. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> So, I'll start with you, Tori, since you were a reporting fellow last year at the Grace Hopper Conference, tell our viewers what the GroundTruth Project is, and what your mission is. >> So, the GroundTruth Project is a non-profit based in Boston and it hopes to encourage young journalists and earlier-career journalists all around the world. So there is a series of fellowships going on, pretty much at all times. Different projects, there's one going across America right now that's looking at, it's called Crossing the Divide, it's looking at divides in America. It's a very divisive time for American politics so they're doing stories about that. And, obviously, we are re-upping our women in tech, women in leadership fellowship this year which we're really excited about. >> And so, each of you are working on your own, individual stories and then you will get back to Boston and produce. So, Hilary, let's hear from you, what are you working on here, what's your topic? >> Sure, so most of my time spend at the Grace Hopper Celebration so far has been spent talking with student about their career aspirations, any barriers they foresee, coming across any concerns they have about entering a male-dominated industry. And it's really been fascinating hearing their stories, some of them are international students, others are from universities all over the world and including Canada and the U.S. So, it's been very inspirational to hear. >> So, but here the ones that are aspiring to careers in technology and they're here at Grace Hopper, but there must be other ones who are too discouraged so they're not here. Are you also getting that angle, too? >> Well, I think it's important for that group of women to see these women who do feel empowered and are, a lot of them use phrases like, "We are making a difference in the gender gap "and if I don't do it, who else will do it?" So, I think it's important for all aspiring technologists to hear these women's stories. >> Are they discouraged, though? Because the headlines are bleak, I mean, we know that it's the numbers, but it's also the Google manifesto, it's the shenanigans of Travis Kalanick and people like him in Silicon Valley. What do they make of that? >> It's interesting, all of them are very intelligent, very aware of what's going on in the world. I've heard a mixed bag of responses from, "I try not to "read too much because I don't want to go in expecting "and having my own biases, I want to see for myself." Others are saying, "Yeah, I am nervous and I want to see "more women creating a path that I can then follow." So, I think there are a lot of people that are optimistically optimistic about their future. >> Cautiously optimistic. >> Thank you. Thank you for correcting me. (laughs) But, it's been interesting to hear all the different perspectives. >> Great, Caroline, how about you, what are you working on? >> Yeah, so, I am personally interested in the more personal stories of some of these women speaking at the conference. I've talked to the four really, wonderful, inspirational women. So, one of my favorites, I've just published a story on her, Chieko Asakawa, who is an IBM Fellow which is the highest honor you can receive at IBM. And she went blind at the age of 11, and has spent her life programming and creating programs and tools to help the blind access the world that is pretty hard to navigate if you don't have eyesight. So, she is super inspirational, super smart, super funny. So, it was a pleasure talking with her. And then I'm talking with three other women, Yasmine Mustafa, who started something called Roar for Good. >> Rebecca: We've had her on the show. >> Oh, you did? >> Yeah. >> Wonderful, great. So, she's fantastic, I'm really glad you covered her. And then another woman named Sarah Echohawk, who, sort of, is an advocate, an activist and is getting more and young, native women involved in STEM. And then, finally, I'll be talking with Stephanie Lampkin of Blendoor, who started this wonderful app to try and overcome the implicit bias, and unconscious bias that happens when people are hiring women or people of color in recruiting for them. >> So she's starting this app that she will then sell to companies, or sell to other recruiters? >> So, she's already started it and she has a lot of major tech companies involved. I think Airbnb uses it, I want to say SalesForce uses it, you're going to have to check me on that one. But she's got about 5,000 people on it right now. >> Wow, so the goal of these stories is to inspire other women by their success. >> Exactly, so these are four radically different women coming into tech in radically different ways and it's just really incredible to see how they've managed to overcome all sorts of obstacles in their way. And not only overcome them, but, sort of, utilize them to their advantage and stake out a place for themselves in this industry. >> Great, Tori, what are the projects that you are working on here? >> So, we've been hearing a lot about diversity, diversity is so important, and we've been hearing about how increasing diversity in a company makes your company better. It just brings in more perspectives, and it also, what's really interesting is that, in tech, it can catch people who have a diverse range of perspectives, can catch problems with products, or with a code, or with something, and how it would be implemented out into the world. I caught this really interesting panel yesterday about disability and looking at how people with disabilities can make companies, specifically tech companies, can help to improve them. This woman, Jennifer Jong, who is an Accessibility Program Manager at Microsoft, she was really interesting. She was talking about how, I wrote a piece on this yesterday, she's talking about how, when you bring people in with a disability, how they can catch things that other people just don't see or wouldn't normally notice. And also how, when we create things for those with disabilities, you know, a lot of things that have been implemented by the Americans with Disabilities Act. She talked about the button that you press to go through the door, how it can also be used by people who don't have disabilities and how it's important to create things that can be used by everybody, but that have inclusion in mind. >> So, why is that true? What is her perspective on why people with disabilities have this special ways to detect blind spots? >> So, if you're creating something, there's no way that you can know how many users are going to be interacting with it, there's no way that you can predict that a person with a disability won't be using it, and so it's diversity, it's really important to bring in different perspectives. So, they had talked about a video, a really beautiful, promotional video that showed a range of visuals, it was very effective but it had no sound and a blind person wouldn't get anything out of it. And so, it's like looking at a product, you need somebody to be in the room, just like you want women and people of color and a range of ethnicities, you want diversity, you want someone to be able to say, "This isn't going to work for me, this isn't going "to work for my child, this isn't going to work "for a range of people." And that's a really effective and important thing that ultimately saves your company's bottom line, because then, you won't have to go back and change your product in the future. >> And fix it, fix it as a problem. >> Right, you'll spend more money fixing your product than you would if you had just talked about, had inclusion and diversity, if you'd just considered that from the get-go, you'll ultimately save your company more money. >> So, the question for the three of you, really, is that as you said, we hear so much about the importance of diversity and of getting a variety of perspectives, and having people of different genders, and races, and cultures feel included and having a voice at the table, I just want to know, I mean, do companies really feel this way or is that what they say at Grace Hopper because this is what makes sense to say to their target audience? >> It's totally possible that it's just a marketing ploy, it's totally possible that they're realizing that half the population makes money and can do things, and that makes more money. I mean, a lot of tech is driven by the bottom line, it's driven by financials, but in the case of the disability thing, it's like, it almost doesn't matter. It is not only the right thing to do, if you need a financial incentive, that's not good. Obviously, it's the right thing to do so you should be doing it for that reason, but if you do also have a financial incentive, that's not bad. And if we're, sort of, driving more towards empowering women and giving women a voice and allowing women to do things and taking them seriously, ultimately that's not a bad thing. >> And just to add to that, I think there is a lot of research out there today, for example, having more women on corporate boards, that that does impact the bottom line and, obviously, that's what companies are most concerned about. So, I think that companies are starting to realize that having that diversity and inclusion is good for business as well as a marketing ploy. >> And I think, I mean, just to add, I also think that, you know, whether or not this is a good thing, I think companies do realize that that is important. And they're realizing that it's necessary, I don't know, it's necessary to impact the bottom line and that is something that, whether or not we like it, it is the most convincing factor for many of these companies. >> I think it's also, when you have women moving up to positions of power, to the C-Suite, to positions of leadership, they understand that women are people with skills and they are the ones who are, you know, hiring more women, and that ultimately helps the bottom line. So, as you have more and more women moving higher and higher to the top, that's when, like when we talk about the companies changing, that's because women are changing. And they're changing the perspectives of men and everybody else in between that works at the company. >> Are women changing? I mean, I think that's a question, too, is that we're all as collectively as a society, becoming more aware that these biases exist in hiring and recruitment practices. But, I think that's the question, are women starting to change, too, the way they behave in the workplace, the way they go about managing their careers? >> I know it's changing minds, like other peoples' minds. >> That's a really interesting question, though. One student I talked to who was from India, talked about the gender discrimination she has faced. And she said she did change how she acted, she shut down all emotions, she took any emotion out of her responses because her colleagues would say, "Oh, you're a woman, "you're so emotional," and she was tired of that. So, it's an interesting question to look at. I don't know, I don't have the data in front of me but it would be interesting to look into that. >> Yeah, great, that's the next GroundTruth project. Excellent, well Hilary, Caroline, Tori, thanks so much for being on theCube, we've had great fun talking to you. >> Yes, thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> We will have more from the Orange County Convention Center, the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, just after this. (upbeat music)

[Techno Music] >> Narrator: Live, from Orlando, Florida it's the Cube covering Grace Hopper's celebration of women in computing. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're at the Grace Hopper Celebration of women in computing 2017, 18,000 women and men here at the Orlando Convention Center it gets bigger and bigger every year and we're really excited to have our next guest, the soon-to-be looking for a new job, and former CEO but still employed by AnitaB.org, Telle Whitney, the founder of this fantastic organization and really, the force behind turning it from, as you said, an okay non-profit to really a force. >> Yes So Telle, as always, fantastic to see you. >> Oh it's great to see you, glad to welcome you back and glad to have you here. >> Yes, thank you. So, interesting times, so you're going to be stepping down at the end of the year, you've passed the baton to Brenda. So as you kind of look back, get a moment to reflect, which I guess you can't do until January, they're still working you, what an unbelievable legacy, what an unbelievable baton that you are passing on for Brenda's stewardship for the next chapter. >> Yes, I mean, I've been CEO for the last 15 years and under that time period, we've grown into a global force with impact, well over 700,000 people. We have well over 100,000 people who participated with the Grace Hopper or the Grace Hopper India. It's grown, and what's been really exciting the last few days, is hearing the stories. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> Of how, the impact that this, the AnitaB.org has had on the lives of young women but also mid-career and senior executives. It's very inspiring to me. >> It is, it's fantastic, and I think the mid-career and more senior executive part of the story isn't as well-known, and we've talked to, Work Day was here, I think they said they had 140 people I think I talked to Google, I think they had like 180. And I asked them, I said, is there any other show, besides your own, that you bring that many people to from the company for their own professional development, and growth. And there's nothing like it. >> That's true. The reason why the Grace Hopper celebration has grown as significantly as it has is because more and more organizations, companies, bring a large part of their workforce. I mean, there are some companies that have brought up to 800 people, and sometimes even 1,000. >> Jeff: Wow >> And there's a reason why, because they see the impact that the conference has on retention and advancement of the women who work for them. >> And that's really a growing and increasing important part of the conversation, >> It is. >> Is retention, and two, getting the women who maybe left to have a baby, or talk about military veterans getting back in, so there's a whole group of people kind of outside of the traditional took my four years of college, I got a CS degree, now I need a job, that are also leveraging the benefits of this conference to make that way back in to tech. So important now as autonomous vehicles are coming on board and all these other things that are going to displace a bunch of traditional jobs. The message here is, you can actually get into CS later in life and find a successful career. >> Yes, we have a real diversity of attendees. So about a third of them are students, and that's really, they're brought here by their universities because that makes a difference. We have a great group from the government. So there's this real effort to bring state-of-the-art technology into our government, initially spearheaded by Megan Smith but really has grown. And the government brought quite a few women. And yes, we do have re-entry people. The companies are looking for women who are very interested in getting back in the workforce. The wonder about our profession, is that they're in desperate need of talented computer scientists. And so, because of that, more and more organizations are being innovative in how they reach out to different audiences. >> And outside of you, I don't know that anyone is more enthusiastic about this conference than Megan Smith. >> Yeah (laughs) >> She is a force of nature. We saw her last year, we were fortunate to get her on the Cube this year, which was really exciting. And she just brings so much energy. We're seeing so much activity on the government side, regardless of your partisanship, of using cloud, using new technology, and that's really driving, again, more innovation, more computing, and demand for more great people. >> Yes, we're very blessed that Megan has continued to come here every year. She came back this year, she sat on the main stage, and she has really been, her message to so many of the young women is that, consider government technology as something you do, at least for a while. And I think that that's a very important message if you think about how that impacts our lives. >> Right, for the good. >> Telle: Yes. >> And that was a big part of her message, she went through a classic legal resume, and some other classic resumes where you have that chapter in your career where you do go into government and you do make a contribution to something a little bit bigger than potentially your regular job. It does strike me though, how technology and software engineering specifically is such an unbelievable vehicle in which to change the world. The traditional barriers of distribution, access to capital, the amount of funding that you used to have to have to build a company, all those things are gone now through cloud, and the internet, and now you can write software and change the world pretty easily. >> Yes. Technology has the possibility of being equal access for anybody. Open-source, anybody can start to code through open-source. There are many ways for anybody, but particularly women to get back in. But I also like to think about many of the companies here who bring their diversity, they bring their senior executives, they bring this large number of women and they create this view across the entire company of how to create a company that's impactful as well as, you know, developing the products that they are invested in. >> Jeff: Right. >> I mean you can have impact in many different ways, through companies, through non-profits, through government, through many different ways. >> Right, and not only the diversity of the people, but one of the other things we love about this show is the diversity of the companies that are here. Like you said, as government, as I look out there's industrial equipment companies, there's entertainment companies, MLB is right across from us and has been there the three days. So it's really a fantastic display of this kind of horizontal impact of technology, and then of course, as we know, it does make better business to have diversity in teams. It's not about doing just the right thing, it's actually about having better bottom-line impact and better bottom-line results. And that's been proven time and time again. >> Well yes, and, so what I know is that every company is a technology company. If you think about the entire banking industry, they have this huge technology workforce. Certainly classic technology companies have a lot of engineers, but insurance, and banking, and almost anything. I mean, we have a lot increasing amount of retail, Target, Best Buy, places like that. >> Right. Okay so I tried to order in a horse so you could ride off into the sunset at the end of this interview, but they wouldn't let me get it through security. >> Okay >> But before I let you go, I'd just love to get your thoughts on Brenda, and the passing of the baton. How did you find her, what are some of the things that you feel comfortable, feel good about, beyond comfortable, to give her the mantle, the baton, if you will, for the next chapter of AnitaB.org? >> I've been very blessed to lead this organization for 15 years, and this is my baby. But there is nothing more heart-warming than to be able to talk to a visionary leader like Brenda. Brenda is extraordinary. She really believes in computer science for all. She believes that all women should be at the table creating technologies. She has a vision of where she wants to take it and yes, she just started last Sunday, so we have to give her a little time. (laughs) >> You were right into the deep end right? Swim! (laughs) >> But she is just, I mean, I just feel very blessed to have Brenda in my life and I will be there in any way that she needs for me to be there to work with her. But she is going to be a great leader. >> Oh absolutely. Well Telle as always, great, and as you said, you're more busy than maybe you expected to be here, so to find a few minutes to stop by the Cube again, thank you for inviting us to be here. It is really one of our favorite places to be every year. Finally my youngest daughter turns 18 next year, so I can bring her too. And congratulations for everything you've accomplished. >> I love to be here, thank you for coming. Glad we could talk. >> Alright, she's Telle Whitney, I'm Jeff Frick, if you're looking for a highly-qualified woman in tech, she might be on the market in 2018. (Telle laughs) Give me a call, I'll set you up. Alright, you're watching the Cube, from the Grace Hopper Celebration of women in computing. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE. Covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. (upbeat music) >> Woman: (clears throat) Here today. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined by Josie Gillan and Laurel McLay. They have just launched a new collaboration, Twinovate. Tell our viewers about Twinovate. You are identical twins, I first of all should say his. >> Yes, we are. So Twinovate one in, what it is is Laurel and I are actually mirror twins and I'm left brain, I'm right-handed. Laurel's right brain and she's left-handed. So what I am is, I'm in my previous background is engineering leadership. I've worked at companies like Salesforce, Atlassian, Cloudera. But Laurel and I saw an opportunity with our diverse viewpoints to start a collaboration together. So I'm the left brain twin. I'm logical, I'm problem-solving, and I love nothing more than to get that code compiled. >> And I'm the right brain twin, so I'm creative, language, any of that messy human emotional stuff. I'm a career coach back in New Zealand. And so I love nothing more that helping people with their identity, their uniqueness, and looking at some of the behavioral challenges which might be holding them back. So we looked at the two of us together and we thought, wow, we've got some great stuff and what are we truly passionate about? We're truly passionate about women, particularly in STEM, being able to contribute themselves fully in a way that works for them. To not only their own legacy, but the legacy of who they're collaborating with. >> Now you are here at Grace Hopper, you're running a workshop, and before the cameras were rolling, you were talking about an apology epidemic. Explain what you mean by that. >> Well, if you think about an epidemic, it's something that spreads, and often it spreads without people even realizing it, before it's too late. And so what we realized was that women, and particularly when you're using language like just, I'm sorry, it's only me. If someone gives us a compliment we say, oh, I bought this, this old thing, I got it on sale. And what we realized was the message of that was saying was I don't count, I'm invisible, please put yourself before me. And the challenge about this epidemic is a lot of people don't realize they're saying it. >> Yeah, and some great examples. This is really resonating with people. So I'm actually on a moms in tech Facebook group, and I asked for some stories. And one woman talked about softball practice. And she practices at the same field where men practice. And what she noticed is every time the women dropped a ball or missed a pitch they would say sorry, sorry, and she turned around and looked at the males and the males never, never did that. So why are we apologizing? >> And we have created this cool little sheet we call Apology Bingo that's available on our Facebook page, and it helps people to look at the many times that they might say these words. One of the words that I have realized I say all the time is actually. And even though actually may not sound apologetic in itself, it's absolutely. >> It's a qualifier, it's, right. >> It's qualifier, exactly. And so what we're talking about apologizing, over-explaining and qualifying. >> And that makes you appear a lot less confident, and really can have career-limiting impact. >> Well, I want to talk about the career-limiting impact, but I also just want to ask you about so it's one thing to understand and acknowledge and become aware that you are using this kind of language. How do you eradicate it from your vocabulary? >> So what we talk about in the workshop is little shifts and big calls. So the little shifts are those small things that you can do to catch yourself. And that's at the language level. So for example, there's a Gmail app called Just Not Sorry. >> It's a Chrome plugin. >> And so what you do is, you add that to your Gmail and it will show and underline some of the language in each email which is apologetic. But then I call it the big calls. And that's really two things. The first thing is do you want to start a revolution? Because let's face it, when you turn up previously apologetic and maybe not too troublesome, let's just say, and you start kicking out your unapologetic language, there are going to be potentially some people around there who don't take kindly to that. And they may call you angry or uppity. >> Or even worse (laughs). >> Or even worse, exactly. So I feel it's about people learning and doing some personal development work on themselves to get the courage to that. Not saying that everyone needs to start a revolution, but for those who feel inspired to do it. And for everyone I believe it is a symptom of the I'm not good enough self-worth and we have an interesting take on self-value, don't we, Josie? >> We do. Being an identical twin is very interesting because what we've found is I might get really quite snippy at Laurel and she said to me, well, why are you so snippy at me? And it was like, well, I see things in you that I don't like in myself. And so we have decided let's turn it around. I want to acknowledge in Laurel things I do like in myself and accept the things that, the bad with the good. >> Right, right and we could all learn from that. I mean, it's just a lesson in humanity. >> And one other point I want to make though, with the people might not appreciate this. We're not dropping manners here. Clearly we are not suggesting that you're no longer courteous. What we want to say is save sorry for when it really counts. >> Rebecca: For when you need to apologize. >> Right. >> Absolutely. >> So in terms of the career-limiting factors that we were talking about, what are sort of the unintended consequences of this apologetic behavior? >> Well, I can talk to that. In some of my roles in the past as an engineering leader, I've really focused on maybe more building up my team, collaboration, and sometimes my management may not agree with the way that I'm doing it, right? Now, rather than having a healthy dialogue about why I'm doing it this way and maybe coming to some kind of general agreement, I have in the past tended to say I must be wrong, he or she must be right. And the ironic thing is, with my experience, I meant to bring that in. I meant to bring my experience in. I've heard in reviews that you don't have enough of an opinion. So really I think that was certainly career-limiting for me and something I'm learning how to do much better. >> So at Twinovate you are empowering women in STEM, you are making sure that they feel included, making sure that they feel like they have a voice at the table, making sure that they are, as you said, not apologizing for being women in the workforce. Do you go in and do you work with individuals? Do you work with companies who say we need to help our workforce deal with these issues? >> Absolutely. So in this workshop we just had an hour and it was a packed audience, it was fantastic. So something that I'm really clear about is it's such a privilege being in front of a room, so we want to make sure that it's just not the talking heads, that people look at their own situation, and we give them examples, both professional and personal, because let's face it, that's a big part of it, isn't it? When people are apologetic in their own worlds. And so they all work together at the table to be able to come up and discuss, and we share that as a room. And the workshop capacity is something that we will deal with people one-on-one because that's when I've done this the whole. I think that one of the reasons I am good at uniqueness and identity is because I'm an identical twin. And so I can work with people and nail their specific challenge in a heartbeat. So for me it's about sharing that power of group but also giving the individual attention so people can walk away knowing the stuff that's particularly relevant to them. >> Okay, alright. So how, I mean I think one of the other questions I would have for you is that you're based in Silicon Valley, you're based in Auckland. Is the tech industry similar? How would you describe the different tech industries in your respective countries? >> Look, it's been so interesting, because I do quite a lot of work in New Zealand and Australia, and not just in technology, but also in engineering, which is the other part of STEM, of course. And it's more flipped the other way because I understand the challenges in new Zealand and Australia, I've been having wonderful conversations on the floor here in the last couple of days, and saying, is it true that when you turn up or someone turns up to your offices that they immediately assume you're the receptionist? And they just go, oh my goodness, absolutely. You know, is it true that you have sometimes direct reports who don't like what you say and they'll literally say it's because you're a woman? And they'll go, yes. So I feel that this is a global epidemic. >> It's a challenge, >> It's a challenge, yes. >> They're facing it everywhere. So what is next for Twinovate? Where do you go from here? I mean you're here at Grace Hopper, which is obviously a receptive audience, a vast audience for the message, but what's next for your collaboration? >> Well, as Josie said, we were really quite surprised about how strongly it resonated here today, and we've got some great feedback. We're both got children, but we're both lucky enough to have fathers of those children that are very, very supportive, and so, hey, we've got this great opportunity to see more of each other. I'm coming back in March, we're coming back next year for Grace Hopper, so I'll be coming to the states twice a year and Josie's coming down to New Zealand and Australia at least once a year. And we're just having very limited partnerships with people who want to work with us and we'll look at some public stuff too. >> And maybe a book in the works? >> So I've already written a book. >> Okay. >> But I wrote it about, I was being unapologetic at the time, and this is what I'm really passionate about. So by the time I come back in March, my unapologetic book, which is literally about unapologetic careers and lifestyles will be in our hot little hands. And Josie's contributing to that with a particular Twinovate chapter that we've been working on. >> Excellent, well, Josie, Laurel, thanks so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure having you on the show. And Josie, you're a Cube alum I should have said, too. >> There you go, yes, exactly. >> Great to see you again, Rebecca. >> Well, best of luck to you both. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> We will have more from the Grace Hopper Conference just after this. (upbeat music)

>>Fly from Houston, Texas. It's the cube covering Grace Hopper celebration of women in computing. >>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of the Grace Hopper conference here in Houston, Texas. I am your host, Rebecca Knight. We have a great panel today. Uh, three distinguished guests, Jeanette Epps, an aerospace astronaut. Uh, an engineer at NASA, Mimi Valdez, a executive producer on the film, hidden figures and Christina DOJ who is a, I want to call her a rocket scientist. She will not let me, she's an electrical engineer at, at, at NASA. Thank you so much for joining me. Hey Jeanette. I want to start with you. Um, recently president Obama has said we're gonna put men on Mars, men and women, men and women on Mars. How realistic is that? I mean, it's exciting for the, for the rest of us, non astronauts to hear this is, is it realistic? >>It is realistic. And one of the things I love that he, he did that was that it gives a national initiative to go back to Mars. And so that means that people will get more involved in STEM careers, especially girls will get more involved. And it's kinda like, you know what JFK did back in the 60s to give us that push a goal, an end goal to do something. Great. >>And do you think that, you know, he said by 2030, it's not very long from now. I mean, is it going to happen? I mean, what's, >>well right now a witness is working on is we have the NASA Orion program and it's a, uh, a power light capsule that will be launched off of one of the largest rockets bigger than the Saturn five or as big. And so that the mission of NASA, Orion is to take us beyond low earth orbit and go deeper into space. So we're looking at NASA, Orion, potentially maybe being the ship that will go to Mars and you know, maybe we have more work to do, but all of getting the nation onboard with going to Mars will inspire a new generation to do great things that will help us to get to Mars. Even >>Obama has said he loves science as a kid. That was his favorite subject in school. And do you think that it will have this galvanizing effect of, as you said, making sure more little boys and girls are studying STEM? >>Well, I've seen it already with some of the tweets and different things, questions that kids ask me nowadays. I think every kid has in their heart this goal to go to Mars now. And um, I can't go to a conference or anywhere without, uh, some young child asking about Mars and what, what are, how are we going to get there? When are we going to get there? And you know, I think one of my jobs is to inspire them to get involved in STEM and help us to get to Mars. There's a lot of technology that we need to develop and produce so that we can get astronauts to live longer away from the earth surface. We have the propulsion system that can get them there faster and bring them back home long. Will it take, well, it depends on the propulsion system that we developed. So there's a number of things that we're working on to make sure that what president Obama has said will get us to Mars in the 2030s if it's pushed out to a little later, that's fine. We're working on it and we're, we're going forward with them. >>Mimi, I want to talk to you now about the film hidden figures. Uh, we'll be out in some theaters and Christmas wide release in January. It is the story of black women mathematicians working in the 1960s at NASA. How did you find out about this story? Well, I give credits at Donna gelato, one of the producers on the film who optioned the book when it was a book proposal. So before the book was even written, she optioned this the story, and it's just this amazing story that the world doesn't even know about. We all know about John Glenn's mission. He came back a national hero. It was a moment in history that galvanized the world. You know, America winning the space race. But we don't know the story of all these brilliant mathematicians, all these women who actually will really responsible Katherine Johnson specifically who hand calculated those numbers for his cause. >>Everybody, I mean, I think this is such an amazing thing to do. And, and again, we just don't know her story. And as well as Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson, I mean, so many women that worked at NASA that were just, um, they were hidden. You just don't know their stories. So, so the film tells their story, it tells their, um, it tells what they did, how they helped John Glenn. Did John Glenn appreciate that John Glenn actually would not go into space unless Katherine double checked the numbers. Like he wanted her to actually, you know, he, he, he trusted her because this is when the IBM computers were first coming into NASA. So they had started asserted use that and he was like, Hmm, I, I need Catherine to check the numbers before I go into say they were friends, professional colleagues. I mean he just knew who, you know, obviously she, she was really responsible and sort of that whole mission. >>And, and you know, for him it was just sort of like, eh, these computers thing, this was like a new thing at NASA. He's like, I need a human to make sure that these numbers are right. Right. Yeah. So we're excited about the film. Who's in it? Taraji P Henson plays captain Johnson. Octavia Spencer, please. I'm Dorothy Vaughan and Janell Monae. Um, she's a, uh, a musician. This is sort of her first really big role and she plays Mary Jackson. Kevin Costner is the head of the space station. Um, we have really great actors, but I think what was really important to everyone who participated in the film was everyone understood the importance of the story and wanting to make sure that we got it right. And also, you know, movies are supposed to be entertaining, but when they can be also inspirational and educate in some way, the fact that some young girls somewhere may see this movie and decide to pursue a career in math or science or any of the STEM careers is really gratifying to us because that's what we would love to accomplish. >>You know, Christina, you have been at NASA for nine years. Uh, tell me about your style, how you got, how you got to NASA in the first place. So I've always loved space since I was like a young child. I was in fifth grade when I told my parents that I wanted to work for NASA. So really since that point, like that was, you know, my dream. And so I, you know, pursued the math and science. Those were some of my favorite subjects. Um, luckily I had some supportive parents who really like saw that desire in me and kind of nurtured and encouraged me to, Hey, if that's what you want to do, then you go for it. We'll do whatever we can. Um, and then I came across some NASA opportunities in high school. Um, and one of the programs was the high school aerospace scholars program. >>And in that program I kinda got a glimpse into what it was like to be an engineer, to work at NASA. I got to speak with, you know, fight directors and um, flight controllers. And there's so many people who contribute to the space program. And that experience really solidified my desire to pursue STEM, STEM. Um, so I started to electrical engineering and then from there, um, you know, did the internship at NASA and I've enjoyed my career so far. It's been a, it's been a great experience. And so you work on the jet propulsion system of spaceships. Um, I work Lena. Um, I work on the power systems power systems. So you are, what do you do? So, um, as an electrical engineer on power systems, I work on the design of the power system testing. Um, basically everything on the spacecraft is going to need power. >>So I'm responsible for how I need to provide power, how much, um, when we talk about going to Mars, that's a, that's a long duration mission and power is something that, um, you have to budget for. So we need to advance that technology to support these missions that, um, our administration has said we want to go there. How are y'all going to accomplish this? So there's a lot of um, design hands on work and it's, you know, it's a challenge. But I mean, together as a team, we can, I believe that will, you know, meet that goal and be able to deliver a power system that will take us to Mars. So this is a question for rip for really all of you. You're an astronaut, you were working at NASA, you just made a movie to encourage young women to, to, to, to get into the STEM field. Why is it NASA recruiting here at, at, at Grace Hopper and, and should it be, do not, do you want to take this? >>Well, that's a good question. It's not that I'm mass and I don't, it's not that I don't think NASA has a desire to recruit here. I think there's recruiting times where people come out and do that. But I think I'm, one of the things that we do in the astronaut Corps, we try to go out and attend conferences like that and try to inspire students to be interested in NASA to understand what NASA is doing, to understand, you know, the shuttle retired. But we're still flying. In fact, when I fly to space and hopefully in 2018 I'll fly with the Russians. But in the meantime, NASA's building two shadows that would take astronauts to the international space station and NASA, Orion, that'll take us deeper into space. So we want to try to inspire with our stories and get people interested in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and now even the arts, the arts play a big part of this. The arts play a big part of the well, yeah, I think I'm as a scientist and looking at patterns and things like that, there's a lot of um, people who, um, begin to work in the arts, even if it's building things with their hands and making, sculpting things, painting things. And so there's a lot of artwork that comes into play in science that is >>really refreshing, exciting, count, counterintuitive. I mean, what would you say are the ways we've talked about getting them, getting them interested through, through film. Um, talking about, uh, Obama making this, this grand announcement and Treme, what are some other ways that we can get the next generation into this field? Well, representation is obviously important. I think when people get to see images in the media of these different fields and all the possibilities, I mean every kid on this planet is obsessed with their phone, maybe not realizing like the importance of these STEM careers that are making these phones even possible or even exist. And I think the more that we can expose these careers and all these possibilities, I think it will just be just more beneficial just for humanity in general. I mean, as we know, nothing in this world can exist without math. >>Nothing. So the more that we can sort of encourage young people to see what an incredible career this is in all the possibilities that go into it, I just think we'll be better off as a nation and as a, you know, just globally as a world. Jeanette, I mean, do you have any thoughts about how, what you would advise someone? I mean you started at NASA nine years ago. So I mean, as an engineer I feel like, I mean I am making some contribution, but really the way I feel like I have more impact is through mentoring and you know, participating in those outreach type of activities for, uh, younger students like K through 12. And then also, um, you know, undergraduate like where they're really like trying to figure out what are the career options and STEM. And so that's how I feel I can have an impact there. >>And these movies help because there's a surge of like, like it's inspirational for young students to see this and be like, Oh, I never knew that that was an option. And so we get outreached to NASA, um, our request to, you know, interact with, uh, local schools and communities and kind of, um, you know, do all my lessons or just teaching with them, just talking about kind of like what the career is like. So, um, I mean I hoping that I can contribute in that way for younger, younger people. Janette are, you are an impressive astronaut, but you are also known as a black woman astronaut. Yeah. D do you do, do you bristle at that or do you embrace it? What, what do you, how, what's the responsibility? >>Oh, I totally embrace it. You know, I'm young ladies always ask me, did you have a problem being a black woman and engineering? And I always tell them that, um, I don't have a problem with being a black woman. And if other people do, then that's their problem. I totally embrace it because I'm, one of the things that I didn't realize was that, um, there's still a need to have positive role models and images of yourself. You know, growing up, my mom never taught my twin sister and I that you couldn't do something because you are a female or Brown. But there are a lot of young ladies that actually do experience that. And so having a positive roam out of it, show them that, Hey look, if I can do this, you can do this too. There's no reason you shouldn't be doing this right now yourself. >>So you are a role model. And how do you then also make sure that it's active role modeling and not just sort of standing on a pedestal of. >>One of the things I like to do is like Catherine Johnson and these great ladies that, you know, without them I, you know, I wouldn't be here is you have to do well and you have to perform well. You have to do the same work that your colleagues are doing and don't do less and don't accept less either. And when it comes to the hard work, put in the time, do the work, complete the tasks and make sure you're, you're representing yourself and your group well and you don't want to be accounted as well. You know, she's the one that we've got to help and we've got to do this, but you want to be a contributing member to every group that you're a part of and completing the tasks, doing the same work if not better. I like to say do better work, but you know, you want to be a part of the. >>Yeah. But that puts so much pressure too because it is, it's, it's be a contributor, but also don't mess up because you are under a microscope to some degree because those are, >>you know, messing up isn't, isn't. Um, failure is never, um, should never be. If it's unintentional, that's okay because you always learn from your mistakes and you have to forgive yourself and keep moving forward. If you stop right there because of a failure, um, you wouldn't go anywhere. We all fell. And it's how you respond to it. That matters. >>Yeah. Every failure is an opportunity to learn. And I think, um, you know, yeah. You can't be scared. I mean, the first and foremost is just doing a good job that, cause once, if you're just dedicated and focused on that, then I think great things can happen. And then failure is really a, a buzzword in Silicon Valley too. Right now. It's a fail fast. Um, and this idea, as you were talking about that it's your response to failure that makes a difference. Yeah. And NASA, I became familiar with this famous phrase of failing forward, meaning that yes, you're going to encounter problems, but if you are learning from the, if you're making improvements, you can design something better. So we call it failing forward. And that concept has, I've embraced that comset and it's, you know, I've encountered many failures. I mean, designing new hardware. It's not gonna, you know, work right off the box. And I'm kind of embracing that idea that it's a learning experience. As long as you don't give up as if you're applying what you learned, then that is not a failure. Christina, this is great. Christina DOJ, Mimi Valdez, Jeanette Epps. Thank you so much for joining us today. This has been such a having to be here. I'm not worthy. Thank you. This has been Rebecca Knight live coverage of the Grace Hopper conference here in Houston, Texas. We'll be back after this break.

>>Mhm. >>Hello, Welcome to the Cubes presentation of women in Tech Global events Celebrating International Women's Day. I'm John for a host of the Cube. Got a great guest here. Isabella, who is the vice president of worldwide Public Sector EMEA Sales for AWS Amazon Web service Europe, Middle East and Africa Isabella Thanks for spending the time and coming on this, uh, this programme for International Women's Day. Appreciate it. >>Thank you very much for having me on that one. It's an exciting topic, John. >>A lot of things going on. A lot of themes. Um, we'll get into that. But first tell us about your career and how you got to be working at a W s. >>Yeah, that that's that's really interesting. Storey, I would say I give you first of all the headline. I am a dental technician by training. I am business administration economics by study, and I spent my really whole life intact. So my first message here is that you can have a great career press intact, having a diverse background. Um, what you need really is to be curious and to be eager to learn. And you see that I've slightly tweaked our leadership principles saying learn and be curious on that one. But when you agree on that one saying, I am curious, I want to learn this is really a great place in technology and in a W s to be in and to progress a career. It's really, really cool. And when I look ahead, I see that because the industry lines are blurring more and more, they are more and more diverse skill sets that were reverse roles coming in, and that is really opening an exciting opportunity also for women, but also in a broader sense of diversity to go and and have a career in technology. It is quite exciting. Back to my career. I started in a in a company. I think when I look back at that and reflect, it was a startup these days very, very early in parallel computing moved on than into management consulting into into international consulting project and managing those ones. And when I look at that piece, I have built out at that point exactly my industry skills and that was beginning in the oil and gas industry when I then transitioned in a bigger cooperation into the e R P space that also continues on a global scale. And then eventually I switched over and, um, and started to go deeper into another industry segment, which was the public sector. And when you come from oil and gas, that is a transition that comes to national oil companies. So that just a sort of naturally came but gave me absolutely different scope. So 16 years in oil and gas and then processed into public sector. Now, in my last global role, I really get across the whole discussion about Cloud. And this is why I got also in touch with aws, um, talking about Wow, this is the future. This is really the way of how computing is gonna be consumed in future and how agile those types of a of a model is. And that was really super intrigued, also having a sort of a really startup mentality. And this is and here I am, as this is responsible for for a mayor in public sector. >>But I love the throwback to parallel computing. I remember those days exciting Storey and I love the point about a lot of opportunities with tech. There's so the aperture of technology has really widened the surface area for things you can do and bring a diverse background to is really amazing. Great point. Great insight. I have to ask you, um what first Got you interested in working in the tech sector? How did you get attracted to the parallel computing? Um, what was the gravitational pole? Was there a moment of of luck? Serendipity. What happened? Tell us, uh, how you got interested in the tech sector, >>John, I wish I would tell you now, a storey that this was the wow moment, right where I came across something and that sparked the idea. Can I tell you a secret? So when I started my study, the the thing that I said or the statement I made was it just I want to work in everything, but not in, >>uh >>this is And and maybe maybe that is how the brain process. So the brain process I want to work in i t. And this is how I got into it. No, but seriously, I think the first part was I got my business degree, but I got it from a technical in your university. This is why I come First time came across that in a broader sense. What I say is it later or is it early? I don't think so. That was for me at the right time. That was mechanical engineering engineering and I t. I've also built a couple of seasons around that part. That was the first one. And certainly when I get into this company that was on parallel computing at that time and under talk, being responsible for optimisation models for refineries as sort of transition into that one. So coming really from a technical university background being on a daily basis was that and being in in this in those topics all the time and also thinking about how could I progress that way and also having my first engagement with the company, Um, in that space that got me intrigued and stuck into the startup space. Um, not calling as a startup those days, but also in the technology side. And I think the farms have been so cool if I look back on that one, >>you know, what's the thing about that Storey is that you were in an environment that was technical and nerdy, and we're seeing that now people are. We had a leader on a W s that I interviewed. She said we're nerd native. The younger generation is natively nerdy. And there they got tech. They're touching it everywhere there in things owns there in think tanks and build a building things. So this is this is the new situation. So, you know, this is kind of where we're going. So the next question I have for you is, um how do we encourage young women and girls to get a career in tech? Are there initiatives that you guys have? I know get I t initiative that 80 bucks runs is one. How do we get this? This word out that it's all in front of us that the environment is rich to >>bring careers >>in together. >>Yeah, and I think to your point, you can't start early enough on that one, right? So I can say it has been a different touch points, but I think I also had an inspiration earlier where I really thought about here. I can do everything right. So from that perspective that paves the way into a looking at, I can equally proceed different career passes, but you touched on the get I t side And I really, really love that initiative that that we as a W s have put together. And I've been a judge on that one. And it's amazing results that have been driving that. So the initiative has and and and and defined frame it is encouraging girls in the age of 12 13 and also that but but potentially also then later going and considering and career in tack. Um, with that one, it brings these challenges that that teams are solving for specifically. For example, schools are taking problems on that they're gonna frame and set up into a in a sort of a mini startup mode, thinking about what is the business case, How do I go from a detailed plan but also still keep a big picture in mind and then bring it forward into a pitch? This is a very, very round of and defined programme that we have set up, and it really very it sparks very, very great. Not very, but but great ideas in the sense of it sparks the ideas for for really how those problems can be can be solved in those communities and potentially be beyond what I really love about it. It forces diversity. You think about it. It's not only just for for girls or it's not for younger women, but it is diverse team. So they are from a diversity perspective. It brings different perspectives into it, and it's in and is solving those problems for communities or challenges for communities. So since we started that one we have, we have had a very, very strong participation in the UK, for example, from 136 schools and I think over 30,000 students. We are now rolling this initiative also out to other countries in Europe, and I had the pleasure to participate in the one in Germany. So I think that that was really an outstanding experience and it really brings that top of mind again and again. Think thinking about no matter what your background is, just go and solve problems for your school, for your community, get people together, get diverse perspective and get things going. >>I love that example, is a great storey because it also allows people to get their hands on some technology experiment breaks to fix it get building at the young age. But also the theme this year is breaking the bias. Right. So when you get to the younger ages, the bias can be worked on there. This is a great example of that. Is that have an impact there as well? >>Yeah, I think so. Very much it is. You have You have those teams that are naturally then working around the problem, and they are really absolutely focused on the topic. They are absolutely focused on solving a challenge. And I think that really brings this the diversity of perspective together. And in that context, the teams are also looking at what we what we have in in in our organisation, what makes really that strong culture, which are the leadership principles. Right? So we are this this is a invent and simplify. This is a built trust very much. Just just deal respectfully with other people, but also be able to discuss, had you a strong opinion but then also agree on the direction. So I think it really brings that to the topic. And by that broadens the base of the collaboration great >>organic diversity from day one as they say Amazon phrase. But let's speaking of Amazon phrases and leadership principles. One of the things that we hear Amy Jackie talked about this all the time. But now Adam Sadowsky talks about as well as the new CEO of AWS. Um is to be the world's best employer, right? So you know, one of the things is the diversity, inclusion and equity part of the equation. And and, of course, they're they're putting storeys out like this is a great, great service, and we're happy to be working with them on this. So why is diversity, inclusion and equity such an important part of this leadership principle? Uh, for Amazon and the world? Can you share your thoughts and and share the the urgency and imperative of why this is a big deal? >>Look, I think now, first of all, we need to acknowledge that we are all diverse, right, and we can, by default, say that So we are bringing all these diverse views. We are bringing a lot of diverse perspective when we are joining a company. When we are talking to other people in each and every interaction, we are expressing our diversity and and we we we as a W s believe that when technology is delivered, it should be in a way that it should be built in a way that is first of all, diverse. It is equitable, and it is inclusive. Um, and we have the responsibility to make that happen. And we also have, as an organisation, the responsibility to take the way, way on to understand what does it take to get there and to get the commitment out to make sure that we bring more diverse perspective, we bring more diverse perspective. We force those ones, and we build on that we never stop on looking at bringing more and more diversity. And that's one, I think, Um, we are as a W s committed to a diverse workforce for one reason, and that is our customers are diverse. The challenges are diverse, so delivering the best solution needs a diverse perspective. This is where the best of innovation comes together when you have people that can discuss. But those people also feel safe to express themselves and to have their voice heard. So that's the second part where it is. It's the customer focus, and we are extremely customer obsessed. But on the other hand, it is also the question about we do it for our people because we want and that comes then back to your point on also on the on the leadership principle. We want our people to feel the belonging into the organisation. This is what they are in their safe point. This is what they deliver at the best, also for our customers and what they feel that they are part of the organisation. When you take diversity equity and inclusion together, the outcome of of all of three is is belonging. So we want to to really drive that to make sure that we we dr more aspects of that diversity into the organisation. So we bring a broad basis of our colleagues, um, into into the organisation and make the work voice heard. Now that that's one hang on and then we we we we want actively recruit women into to drive this gender diversity specifically as well. When we look, for example, at a media and we are going to colleges, we're going to two events were going to conferences when we want to really offer the benefits for for our industry leading, for example, parent leave, mentorships and sponsorship programmes which are women to develop their careers to to really focus on that one. So I think it is striving for being the Earth were best employer by bringing those top industry programmes to live, to make sure that each and every diverse personality can find a space at AWS and run at the best for the best of our customers, >>that's a great point. The world's divers, the customers are diverse and if you put the three words together, they're all equally important. It got to include everyone got to be diverse. Everyone has to have equity. That is a community that's about what community is about. And and we are now doing seeing more community focus than ever before. In today's world, this is super important. Quick follow up on that the role of community. What's your vision on community? Because >>people want to belong >>to something, they want to be part of a tribe. This community, >>Yeah, and that's why I'm saying I think when you to, to your point again to reinforce that when you bring the three words together, you get this community feeling you get the belonging. I think it's also the question of a strong culture. You, you, you the ability to offer a cultural framework that people can identify with where they see that the breaths and depths of their skills and all the people around the globe can be folded in. I think this is massive, and this is extremely powerful to bring that to life and to be able to offer this to to our colleagues that are working at a W S. But also beyond that is a universal, universal message that we can spread. >>Yeah, I gotta say, uh, props to Amazon AWS and we're investing in the queue. We're doing more of these interviews. This is a force multiplier. I think, uh, diversity, inclusion and equity is a force multiplier. Competitive advantage. The product gets better, the people are happier. It's just a wonderful thing. So I really appreciate the the insight and points on that. That's a great, great segment. Lastly, though we're speaking of the number of inspiring women, you're one of them. Thanks for joining us as part of Celebration International Women's Day. I'd like to ask you, um, who inspires you? Yeah, >>Look, there are there are so many just I I think we are. We are living in a world where you get the inspiration from very, very many sources. But if I drive that back to what has shaped my career, what has shaped my past? I would say that there are There are two main data points. The first one is I'm really going back to my dad. When I went back to him and says that what eventually can I do? He just looked at me and said, Do whatever you want And this is how I really went into life rolling up the sleeves, saying Okay, yeah, well, let's go there, Right So it inspired me to to to look at the positive side and to always take it from an opportunity perspective to go and do whatever I wanted to do. What I thought is interesting for me and where I have been really curious and wanted to learn more about that is one and the other one. Besides the all the framework that we, for example, have had a W s, the leadership principles, our culture of diversity, but also our culture of of, um of of discussion, high debate, and those types are super, super inspirational when it also comes for me to drive in the next level of getting getting everybody on the same page. Um, I had a discussion, was one of my former escape managers as capable managers, and the the sentence that he has formed that is still sticks with me is I was looking at the next career point, and we have been discussing that back and forth, and he he was always asking the same questions. What do you want to do next? And I gave him an answer. He never answered. He just walked away and I did that two times, and I eventually figured out that it's probably not what he really wanted to hear. And when we started to go into a discussion, he he pointed me to a to A to A to to affect or to a direction that he said, Do you want to wait for dead man's slippers? And this is a sentence just you don't really under need to understand that in price and deaths. But if you think about the picture just like this, there is the old chair and then you have the slippers. Is that something? This is something we always think myself back and forth. I'm thinking. What? What? Which point I am I at. And is that eventually also a point where I would say this is a dead man slippers transition point. And this is what inspired me of thinking about the next three points staying agile and also staying, staying always curious and learning. >>So go on to the next level is about pushing yourself and really rethinking and going after things that maybe aspirational but attainable at the same time. Understanding that role sounds like that was growth opportunity. >>Yes, it was a growth opportunity. Then it never comes to the to the point where you're gonna say, I'm gonna now that's it, right? I've learned everything. It is a I'm gonna step out. It's gonna be outside my comfort zone. Am I ready to do that? And it's at the right point for me and I think it's the answer to that. One is always Yes, this is how you stay, Stay, keep up with technology. But you keep up also with all the fantastic opportunities that that that the life and also the environment. Like, for example, a W s offer. >>Isabella, thank you for coming on and sharing this storey. One last question I'll ask you, is what's next for you. What do you want to do next? Your worldwide public sector executive leader for Europe, Middle East and Africa for AWS Hot company? The regions are everywhere. There's more regions as locals owns. Everything is happening. It's expanding. You're in the middle of it. What's next for you? >>I want to see cloud being the driver of innovation and and business dynamics. Business model change. And I want to be part of this business model change that is based on cloud in future, for the benefit of public sector and all the other entities, and also very much for the for the benefit of all citizens around the globe. That's my next >>Well, it sounds like it's been a very diverse, inclusive and highly equitable, and I want to be part of that. Want to belong to that? Thank you for sharing and looking forward to more conversations and thank you for spending the time to come on the cubes presentation here. Thank you so much. >>Thank you. so much I >>appreciate. Okay. The representation of women in tech global events celebrating International Women's Day. This is the first episode will be more. We're going to get more and more storeys out. But March 8th is a big day. We're celebrating today. International. I'm John Ferry, the host of the Cube. Thanks for watching.

(cheerful music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome once again to a Cube Conversation from our beautiful Studios here in Palo Alto, California. Today we've got a great guest. Ed Bugnion is a Professor of Computer Science at EPFL, one of the leading Swiss technology institutes or engineering institutes, a country known for engineering. Ed B, thanks very much for being here. >> Thanks for having me. >> So a lot going on this week but you're here for a particular reason here in Silicon Valley. Long journey, what are you here for? What's going on? >> Yeah, so I'm back to my old neighborhood in Palo Alto because VMware had its 20th birthday celebration this week and they were kind enough to invite me, invite all the founders and so it was a great event. Happy to be here. >> So what was your role in the early VMware? >> I had many, many different roles. I had many different lives. At one point I was the CTO of the company from the beginning until 2005. >> So this week a lot of catching up with folks, talking about a 20 year history, anything particular, interesting? >> I mean I think the nice thing was that VMware's actually doing great. It's got a great future ahead for itself but it was actually nice to to be able to communicate to the existing, the current employees what VMware was 20 years ago. >> And where it's meant so they can see a perspective. So I actually have an interesting thought, at least I think it's an interesting thought, and that is I've been doing this for a long time and if I look back over the last 20 years I think there were two really consequential technology changes. One was virtualization which obviously VMware popularized in kind of a open way. Because without it, first of all it created great as you said a great company, but also without it it would not have been possible to have the cloud because the cloud is effectively a whole bunch of virtualized resources. But the second one is flash. And the reason why I think flash is important is because for the first 50 years of computing we were focused on how do we reliably persist data onto these things called disks? And with flash now we're thinking about how we quickly deliver data out to applications. I don't see how AI and some of these new types of applications we're talking about, businesses we're talking about, are possible without flash. What do you think? >> Obviously these are two of the big pillars right? There are few other pillars, networking being one of them, both within the data center and delivery of content otherwise we would not have the network effect and all the applications that are pairing us mobile as well. But yes from a data center infrastructure perspective, virtualization which is you know started as a relatively point technology right? How to run two operating systems on a computer at the time, it wasn't even a laptop, it was a desktop into being what it is today has had a profound effect. It forced us to separate the logical from the physical and manage them separately and think about capacity differently. And then create the flexibility in the provisioning of these new resources applied to computing and networking and storage. >> And flash is also had a similar kind of effect, I mean would you agree with that as well? >> Yeah, I mean it's totally changed expectations right? Before flash and before in memory, the expectation was that anything that involved data warehousing and analytics was something that was a batch process. You have to wait for it and the notion that data is available on demand is something that is now taken for granted by users but it wouldn't have been possible without those new technologies. >> And it's had an enormous impact on system design and system architecture. Another thing we believe at Wikibon is that digital transformation is real. And by that we mean that the emergence of data as an asset is having a profound consequence on how business thinks because at the end of the day you institutionalize your work, your value propositions, how you get things done around the assets which you consider your assets and as you do that for data you're going to rebuild your business around data as an asset. But it also suggests that data is going to take a more central role in describing how future architectures are laid out. Now at EPFL you're doing a lot of research specifically on how data center infrastructure is going to be organized. What do you think? Is the data going to move to the cloud? Is the cloud going to come to the data? What does that mean? >> Well it's actually, my research is actually squarely on what's happening within the data center. And in particular whether you can actually take make efficient use of the resources in a given data center while meeting service level objectives. How do you make sure that you can respond to user facing requests fast enough and have and at the same time be able to deploy that with the right amount of capacity? >> When you say user you mean not only human being but also other system resources right? (crosstalk) >> The interactive behavior makes things different right? Because then you actually have an actual time constraint. And it's actually difficult to be able to solve the problem of delivering latency critical, human real-time responses reliably and at the same time being able to do that without consuming an exorbitant amount of resources. You know energy is a big issue. If you can deliver the same amount of capacity of actual traffic with less underlying hardware capacity then it's a win. >> So as as we think about data centers going forward, I presume that you believe that data centers are going to change and evolve but still in some capacity be very much in force as a design center for how an enterprise thinks about its resources. Is that accurate? >> Yeah, I mean the notion that everything is going to concentrate into a few mega data centers is obviously a little bit of a stretch right? There will always be a balance. There are economies of scale in these very large mega data centers. The Suites point and the minimal operating point at which it makes sense to actually build on our data center and to deploy infrastructure has actually changed right? A few years ago it actually made sense to put three servers in a basement. That doesn't make any sense today. But for many enterprises it does still make sense to have some amount of capacity on-premise because it's an economic balance right? You get to own the assets but you need to have a certain scale. >> So as you're driving your research about the future of the data center and how it's going to be organized, what role does automation play in conceptualizing what the future of the data center looks like? >> There's an old friend of mine who once said screwdrivers don't scale. (laughter) If you want to be able to operate anything at any scale, you need to have automation. And virtualization is a one of the mechanism for automation, it's one of the foundational elements right? You want to make absolutely clearly separate the act of operating screwdrivers which you need to do once in a while. You need to add capacity physically in a data center but you want to make sure that that is completely decoupled from the operations. >> So how do you think or where do you think some of the next set of advances are going to come as we think about the data center? You know given virtualization, given flash, given improvements in networking. Where do you see some of that next round of technological advances coming? >> Well if there were no new applications, if there were no digital transformation the answer would be easy right? It's not a hard problem. You just keep doing and it's going to get better over time. >> Just faster. Faster, cheaper. >> The reality is we have a digital transformation. It is, if anything, accelerating and so the question is how do you keep up with the growth complexity? And the reality of virtualization is whenever you apply to a particular domain, right, you allow that domain to scale by reducing operational complexity but part of that operational complexity actually gets shifted elsewhere. The early days of virtualization at VMware we virtualized servers, we virtualized clusters of servers. That was really nice right? You could actually move VMs around across you know transparently. We obviously push a lot of that complexity into storage area networks. And that was fine at small scale. At larger scale it creates again an operational issue with storage because we move some of that complexity into another subsystem. So it is about chasing where which subsystem actually has the pain point and has the complexity at any point in time. >> So as we start chasing these new opportunities, we're also seeing the business start to react as they try to exploit data differently. So that the whole concept of technology, not at the infrastructure level per se, but rather as an enabler or as a strategic capability within a business starts again elevating it up into the organization. We start worrying about security. We start worrying about customer experience and the rate at which we transition. When we substitute labor, technology for labor, in a customer experience kind of way. As we think about those types of things that suggests that the technology professional has to start becoming a little bit more mindful of their responsibilities, what do you envision will be the role of where that interplay between a sense of responsibility and engineering as we start to conceive of some of these more complex rich systems? >> So that's actually is the one of the big, big transitions because when I started in tech what we did effectively had a relatively moderate implication on people's lives right? It was basically business process that was being digitized and we were enabling a more efficient digitization of business processes but it was sort of left at that. Today tech is at a stage where we can actually directly impact people's lives for the better or for worse. And it's very important that as an industry we actually have the appropriate introspection so that we know we're doing things in a sensible way. It might involve actually slowing down at some times the pace of innovation. Trying to do things in a more deliberate, careful way. Other segments and industries had to do that. You can't you know come up with a new drug and simply put it on the market. There's a process. Obviously this is an extreme example but tech has always been on the other extreme. And the big trend is to find the appropriate level balance. I live in Switzerland now and GDPR is all over Europe. It's actually a big change in the mindset because now you not only have to make sure that you can manage data for yourself as an enterprise but also that you actually abide to your responsibilities as an uprise as a data processor for your customers and your users. >> For other peoples data. Yeah and it's interesting because in many respects medicine has itself been at the vanguard of ethics for a long time and what we're suggesting is that eventually technology is going to have to start thinking about what do the new ethics mean. Now at EPFL are, I'm putting you on the spot, at EPFL are you starting to introduce these concepts of ethics directly into the curriculum? Are you teaching the next generation to think in these terms? >> Yeah, well actually the first thing we're doing is we're adding into the curriculum for all engineers not just computer science crowd but all engineering students the notion of computational thinking as a freshman class, mandatory core freshman class. >> Peter Denning. >> And computational thinking is really about sort of we're positioning that sort of a third pillar of the engineering foundation along with math and physics right? You need math to learn rigor and you need physics to sort of understand how to model the world. And we're adding computational thinking as a way to you know reason about how you can use computational methods to solve engineering problems because as an engineer all of us will actually use computers all the time. And yet we never really know what it actually means to apply computational methods and to think about it in those terms. >> So coming back to this notion of the world of flash is playing in the industry, we also believe here at Wikibon that we are seeing a significant transformation in the computational model. The basic way that you approach a problem. And so taking the notion of computational thinking and I mentioned Peter Denning, who's a guide known for a long time, now down at the Naval Postgraduate School to Cebrowski Institute. When you start asking that fundamental question, how do you approach a problem? How are people going to approach the problems going forward as a consequence of a new orientation of delivering data? >> Well Peter Denning obviously is known for the locality principle. And the locality principle says that you affect. >> Great segway by the way. >> I mean you need to have, you need to know what your working set of data is and you need to have it close to you know to operate because you cannot have uniform equal cost access to all data at at all times. It's particularly interesting when you combine flash technologies from a latency and throughput perspective with networking technologies and computational technologies. It's about knowing where do you actually actuate the points, at what point do you go from an aggregate model to disaggregate model? What are the pros and cons of each? But fundamentally you know recognizing that locality that does exist and locality matters is fundamental to the scaling of the infrastructure. Obviously these are the problems that we infrastructure people worry about so that from an application perspective and from a policy and reflection perspective we don't have to worry about those. >> And so the application people don't but especially the business people can focus more on customer experience and those types of things. Coming back to this notion of locality and tying it back into GDPR for example, it seems as though the constraints of locality are not just latency and cost but they also are increasingly in human terms, in ethical terms, including regulatory principles but also intellectual property principles. When you start to think about how again this notion of the data center gets organized where we probably increasingly start organizing data centers around the natural location of data, I don't mean geographic, I mean the natural location of data, do you foresee a new set of constraints starting to influence not just latency, not just cost but some of these other more human concerns starting to impact how we conceive of where we put data centers and what we put in those data centers? >> Well there are two different aspects to the answer. One is data centers consume energy. And so the location of the data center from an energy perspective will matter and will keep mattering and because we need to be very conscious about the overall global footprint of these data centers. And then the other consideration which is completely orthogonal is natural boundaries also matter and the notion of sovereignty and obviously I'm not a lawyer, I don't know if you're a lawyer. >> Nope. >> But the notion of sovereignty is rooted in the notion of of national boundaries right? It applies to land. It applies to water. It applies to airspace. >> Laws, culture. >> And so the question of how it applies to data is a really important one right? Does it matter where the data is actually stored? Can I reach into some other country's data? These questions are completely open at this point. They must be resolved. I think there is a global reflection among the industry right now that the time has come for both the govern entities and the industrial players to sort of take a position that this problem must be addressed. How it will be addressed? That I don't know. >> Well so I have a perspective on related I'm not going to answer how it's going to be addressed but security is a crucially important feature of how we think about computing going forward specifically data security. And it seems to me as though if we think about these data assets and how we institutionalize work around these assets, security is a significant feature of how we actually conceive of and create data assets because effectively it is through security that we privatize data. What laws and whatnot that we put on things turns into policy turns into technology for privatizing things. So talk a little bit about how you foresee the future of security, the data security, technology security and data coming together as people think about the role of data is going to play in our lives? >> So security is in a way a very technical way of looking at the problem right? Not everybody you know outside of tech actually appreciates what we all mean by security and within tech sometimes we mean different things when we talk about security. One of the themes we're trying to talk about is the notion that we need trust as a society irrespective of how it's done technologically. You need trust. We know how to establish trust in the physical world. We've been doing this for a few centuries or millennia. We need to learn how to establish trust in the digital world. So that's actually one of the initiatives we have right now at EPFL is actually establishing a center for digital trust. Whose goal is to basically try to ask the question of how do you actually have the same level of trust between players in the digital world that we can actually establish through known means, that we've learned to experience over centuries in the physical world? It's not an easy problem. >> No, it's not. So I got one more question for you. As you, so imagine you're writing a book in 2035 and you're writing a history of computing. You're looking back and you're saying, "Wow, look at all these things that happened." And we've already discussed some of the salient inflection points within the industry but if we think about an inflection point between 2018 and 2035, what do you think in a future purchase sense looking back what was the inflection point? When did it occur in the next 17 years? >> Well if you're an optimist then the path between today and 2035 was a positive one, free of any hardship or complications or unintended consequences. If you're a realist, we have to anticipate that there are some unanticipated consequences of tech and emergent properties of tech and where those evolution will take us. I mean I'm not a futurist right? I try to, my fellow could, my sort of my own research agenda, I try to look five years out as where things might go at a particular layer. If we look at the emergent properties, the emergent behavior I think they're very hard to anticipate. We're just trying to learn right now as collectively the side effects of social networking on how we interact as a society, as a democracy. It's very difficult to imagine where we'll go between now and 2035. There are a few things that are obvious and I'm going to just state what is obvious is the digital transformation is accelerating. The importance of data is growing. The existential threat associated with the misuse of data is going to be greater and greater especially as we digitize you know our human lives, our biological lives get digitized for example. That's going to have a huge impact. And then the drill transformation is also going to change jobs and change entire industries. Automation, AI, is going to have a profound effect. How fast that effect will be, I think is the open question. The history has always been an evolution of technology. I think what may be different this time is that its operating on a global scale faster than before. >> That affects a lot more people. So in certain respects it's especially crucial over the next few years to as you said the word, the key word is emergent. That there's going to be a lot of emergent properties that come out of technologies. Accelerating technology programs itself for example. Those types of things and so you kind of summarize, it's that fine line between too much control and too much freedom and staying right there so we get the innovation while at the same time we can have some degree of say over how it actually behaves. Is that kind of where we're going to be thinking? >> Yeah, I mean that's one way to look at this. Obviously regulation is not the answer. The other way to solve these problems is to actually have the appropriate products. I'll just give an example. Database management systems were not designed with data privacy in mind. They were designed to process data. Now GDPR comes along and what does it mean if I have a sequel database and I also need to be GDPR compliant? That's, if you think about it, there's somewhat of a mismatch between the two if you look at it purely from a technical perspective. Five years from now, does it make sense to have a GDPR by design database, whatever that means right? Maybe, I haven't thought about it too deeply but it's one of those examples where you have a new set of constraints and I think as an industry we need to take them as parameters. And what we've been consistently very good at in the tech industry is to actually take these constraints and actually turn them into products that people know how to operate and deploy. >> Excellent. Ed Bugnion, Computer Science Professor at EPFL. Thank you very much for being on The Cube. >> Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure. >> Once again, Peter Burris, Cube Conversation. Thanks for watching. See you again. (cheerful music)

>> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at The Hotel Nikko. It's International Women's Day, March 8th. A lot of stuff happening all over the world. We came here today 'cause Accenture's got a great program, put together about 400 people, a number of panels on a number of topics. We're excited that they invited us to cover it and we've got some really exciting guests. And our next guest is Sabeen Ali, she's the founder and CEO of AngelHack. Sabeen welcome. >> Thank you so much. >> And she's joined by Ellen McGirt, the senior editor of Fortune, welcome. >> Thank you. >> So I think we all know what Fortune is. >> Ellen: We do. >> But we don't probably all know what AngelHack is. So Sabeen, what is AngelHack? Give us kind of the overview. >> Yeah, I'll give you the eight second elevator pitch. We are an international hackathon organizing company. We travel the world and organize hackathons all over the world. And we basically create a bridge between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world to bring entrepreneurs here and give them the same opportunities that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have. >> So do you do independent hackathons or do you like contract it? 'Cause every conference we go to, we do like 100 conferences a year, always has some hackathon component. Do you help other people put on hackathons or you just do your own kind of independent? >> We do both, actually. So we organize a 50 city global hackathon series which is our own, and then we also work with corporate partners such as Accenture and HPE and others to organize hackathons for their brand. >> And is it thematic? Is there a special thing about the hackathons that you guys do and why you think that that's a interesting way to either develop talent, deliver a message, deliver solutions, what's special about hackathons? >> Yeah, well, what I can tell you is, what's special about hackathons is that it's a community space where people feel comfortable exploring themselves and exploring their talents, working with new individuals, and really giving them an opportunity to learn new things and try new things. What's very different about AngelHack is we're actually the world's largest and most diverse in developer ecosystem, so we actually have a wide range of diverse backgrounds and genders that come to our events, and we personally think that that's really where innovation happens, when you bring a variety of different backgrounds and minds together to get together and solve problems using technology. >> Can I just brag on you for a second? Because we just got off stage together where she just wowed the crowd with stories of these hackathons from around the world, and it's not just that there's diversity, and it's not just that they've given them the tools to succeed. She's going to Kabul, she's going to San Diego, she's bringing people who ordinarily never get the attention although plenty of people in San Diego get attention, I didn't name all the right cities, and she's bringing them together and then she's helping them fine tune, and then she's bringing them to the attention of people in power, it is extraordinary. >> Thank you. >> This is the sign of the times. The innovation, like things are starting to happen and markets are opening up, and Sabeen is one of the people who is absolutely making it happen. And that's what Fortune does best, we brag on the people that we write about. (laughing) >> That's great. And why do you think, Ellen, why are things changing now? It definitely feels like they are. >> Ellen: It does. >> But, you know, the cynic would say, yeah we've heard all this before, and, you know, pick your favorite time, you know, it's not really different, you know, this too will pass. Why is it different now? >> You know, and we were talking about this and I actually wish I knew, and I'm a cynic too depending on where I am in my deadline cycle, so sometimes I'm super optimistic and sometimes I think it's just crazy, but I think it's the confluence of many, many things. We've had a lot of stories about injustice and lack of access from every possible sphere, and race, and age, and country, and religion, all of it. And we have the very same tools, social media tools that are spreading things that are false, are spreading things that are true. And people are legitimately finding each other, and people are legitimately finding a tribe, for lack of a better term, and it's kind of exciting. So when you hear about things like AngelHack, which I always am looking for these in my daily column, it can resonate with people who are not part of the ecosystem and they can absorb the lessons of inclusion and optimism and bring it to the rest of their lives. And plus everything's crazy right now, in the world. >> Yeah, I think it's really important to also point out that in America our political climate and certain personalities that are in power right now, there's certain topics and subject matters that are becoming everyday topics. People are becoming a lot more comfortable talking about sexual harassment and talking about women in the workplace and it's not like a lot of the stories that women are telling are things that just happened yesterday, this is stuff that's from, that's happened in the past that now unlocked in their memories or they're feeling a lot more comfortable talking about it because we're actually creating an environment where people can talk about it and we're actually creating a language that people can use to express their experiences and their emotions about it. >> You're absolutely right. >> So many places we could go. But it was interesting that we're in kind of this rough middle ground where we haven't really kind of made this transition to where we're hoping to go, and it was an interesting comment at one of the other panels, you probably weren't in it, you were in your panel, about the Me Too has actually scared some men away from being mentors, and somebody said, you know, there's less. We cover the Grace Hopper Celebration and the sum of the numbers of women coming out of engineering programs, computer science specifically, are actually not going in the direction that you would think. So we're still kind of in these choppy waters, but I'm just wondering, when you set up your hackathon have you ever set up just not diverse teams to show that the output with the diverse team of opinions, points of view, backgrounds, race, sex, pick your favorite variable, actually deliver better results? >> Well, there's a ton of scientific research that actually shows that diverse groups and a diverse set of backgrounds delivers better results. So groupthink, it's been proven to be very detrimental. At our events we don't form the teams, we let the community self-organize, and we've seen time and time again that we can actually never predict who the winning team is going to be and what the make up of that team is going to look like. >> Yeah, you have to try that sometime. Put 'em in little, I don't even know, it doesn't even matter which single group you chose, you just know, as you said, the evidence is pretty clear, they're not going to perform as well as difference of opinions. Ellen, you're shaking your head. >> I know, I just sort of thought about like the sad little homogenous group who is sort of like set up to fail. (laughing) And that maybe there's a kinder way to make the case. >> Give them gummy bears or something. (laughing) So, with all you've done at AngelHack, where are you going next? What do you see as you look down the road? I still can't believe it's 2018 and we're almost a quarter of the way through this calendar year. What are some of your priorities if we come together a year form now, what will you have worked on? >> Yeah, hopefully a year from now we would have expanded into more than 92 cities, into more remote regions than we have now, and also we're doubling down on our accelerator. We want to make sure that our winning teams have an opportunity to really come to Silicon Valley or get access to funding that's available in Silicon Valley so that they can have funding and they can be successful for many years to come. >> And do you see within some of the groups that don't have access, obviously, to the money and the location in Silicon Valley, that people realize kind of what a powerful world changer technology can be, that you can actually write some code and deliver it to the entire world, that people actually use your code to do something different? >> Yeah, absolutely, that's what we're advocating for, that's really, honestly, what a lot of out topics discuss, that technology doesn't discriminate. It's really when people take a look at it, and in fact, GitHub did some research that they put code that was written by men versus code that was written by women and then they had people rate it, and immediately people were rating the code that was written by men higher, and then they didn't put what gender wrote it and then the code that was written by women was higher. So I think the research is starting and people are starting to realize to put technology first and gender maybe doesn't even belong in the judging criteria here. >> And do you think, Ellen, part of it's maybe just because we need more people? I mean there's, you know, on one hand autonomous everything is going to knock out all the jobs, on the other hand check the job listings 'cause we need a lot more people. >> We do, we do. And you're right, we're losing, what, 25% of jobs with new technology coming in, but we're also going to bring all kinds of people online who do not have access to even modern services. We're going to need some very basic things and they're going to need access to markets, and then they're going to become more responsible consumers and they, in turn, will then propose ideas that will make everybody's lives better because one of things that we talked about is that innovation tends to happen in a bubble and people are solving problems that they themselves are happening, but there's a whole world that would be improved by new levels of thinking and that would also create more jobs. >> And they're new jobs, right? There wasn't such a thing as a software developer, you know, 20 years ago, and if you're a buggy whip guy it's probably not a great time to be in business today. So while there are many jobs that are going to get wiped out, there's new jobs. You know, social media manager, I mean, that didn't exist, what, five years ago at most companies, now it's a huge part of a lot of corporations. So it's this constant evolution and yin and yang. >> Constant evolution. >> So what are you looking forward to in 2018 as you kind of, you've got kind of a broad view of the landscape. >> I do, and I write a daily column about race and culture, so that is how we got a chance to meet. You know, diversity and inclusion has been sort of the thing I've been studying for the last two years and as difficult as the world is and as crazy as it is, I really do see an opening that's happening where people are becoming more open to the idea of thinking different ways and embracing people who are different from themselves and not feeling threatened. We're still in choppy waters though, you're absolutely right. >> Well, and the other thing too, right? I was thinking if you're a 100 miles from a coast in the United States, I won't speak for other countries 'cause I don't know it as well, you know, there's a point of view and if you're more than 100 miles from the coast, maybe with Chicago as an island or Denver, there's a little bit of a difference, are you seeing, kind of, it getting beyond those kind of short borders, 'cause obviously, as you said, a lot of social stuff going on right now, there's a lot of diametrically opposed views, and I blame actually technology for a lot of it because thanks to the recommendation engines we tend to get served up things that we've read in the past, so unlike where you had kind of one newspaper in town, everybody had to read it so it had to be kind of down the middle. Now, the silly algorithms will keep delivering stuff that supports my point of view and other people will get delivered with their point of view, and I think the surprise after the election illustrated it more than anything that people didn't know anything about the other side, the shock, so are we getting past that? Do you see, kind of, what's your take on that? >> I'll start and then you jump in. I think that when we invest in communities that are under invested in, wherever they are, I live in St. Louis, you will see innovations. And maybe you won't always see the innovations that you're hoping for that will knit society together, but investment will flow and new product ideas will flow, and most importantly to your point, an understanding of how the world actually works will flow. The reason why to study software and code engineering is maybe that you don't want to be that, maybe you want to be an opera singer, but it will make you a better, more informed citizen. It will make you understand what's real and what's not real. I'm a big fan of liberal arts education in technology because it helps you understand how people actually behave and what markets actually need. >> Right. >> So I think that as people have the tools and use the tools, investments will follow, lifestyle will follow. So I guess I'm just outing myself as an optimist here. >> Jeff: Good, that's good. >> Sabeen, what do you think? >> I have to be optimistic, as well. Again, being at the forefront of emerging technology, I know that there's people looking to solve that very problem, and they're coming form a diverse group of engineers, and I really feel like that we're going to come up with a lot of tech solutions that are going to make a lot more diversity, inclusion, easier to facilitate, and easier to implement in corporations as well. >> Well, keep up your good work. I mean, at the end of the day it's about democratization. It's giving more people more access to the tools and you're going to get better solutions, more solutions, more diverse solutions. So, great job, and thanks for taking a few minutes. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> Alright, I'm Jeff Frick, we're at the Accenture International Women's Day Celebration. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the Cube. Covering, Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Jarvis Sam, he is the manager of global diversity issues at Snap Inc. Welcome. >> Thank you so much for having me. I'm really happy to be here. >> So, I've gotta--first of all, you're wearing a Rosie the Riveter shirt, we've got these tchotchkes here, can you explain to our viewers a little bit about them? We got to, we got to talk about these first. >> Of course, so, the shirt was actually inspired by our Lady Chilla, that's our local women employee resource group at Snap. The idea was take the ghost, a representative mascot of Snap Inc. and parlay that with the idea of Rosie the Riveter, of course powerful in her own right. >> Rebecca: Alright, I love it, and then these spectacles are...? >> Yeah, so spectacles are Snap Inc.'s first ever hardware product released earlier this year. They allow for you to take an in-the-moment Snap, to be featured on your phone, using Bluetooth technology for iPhones and then WiFi technology for Android. They allow individual users to record Snaps on their phone, while of course not distorting the experience of being able to use their hands in the moment. >> Rebecca: So, I love it, these are the recruiting tactics: your own products. >> Exactly >> Want to play with these toys? Come work for us? >> Yes! >> So, tell us a little bit about what you do, Jarvis. Before you were at Snap, you were at Google. You were interested in really engaging in these diversity issues. So what do you at Snap? >> Yeah, so, at Snap, I manage our global diversity effort. What that includes is analyzing the diversity framework across three key verticals; first on the pipeline layer. So, what are we doing by way of K-12 education to ensure communities of color as well as women-- >> Rebecca: K-12? Wow. >> Exactly. >> Have specific opportunities in the space to be impactful. We often create this framework or archetype for what we think is ineffective software engineer for example or account manager. Reframing that by providing access and opportunity is showcase to people that the image that we have is not always the image that we want to portray, is critical. Next then we focus heavily on the idea of the candidate, so candidate experience. Deep diving into understanding key talent acquisition measures as well as key HR practices that will allow for us to create the best experience, moves us forward in that regard. But then finally, and this is where we get to the whole global perspective. Is the idea of the employee. Creating a nurturing community where the idea of psychological safety is not only bolstered but ensuring that your community feels empowered to the idea of inclusion. Making sure inclusion is not just a seat at the table but rather a voice in the conversation that can be actioned upon. >> So I want to dig into that a little bit, this voice in the conversation. Before the cameras were rolling you were talking about these very difficult candid conversations that employees at same have. Tell our viewers a little bit more about that. >> Yeah, so I think one of the greatest challenges across the tech industry and at Snap as well is the idea of referral networks. The tech industry on its own right has grown so greatly out of referral networks. People that you have worked with perviously, people that have the same academic or pedagogical experience as you. The problem with that is, the traditional network analysis would seem to let us know that you often refer people who look like you, or come from a similar internal dimension background as yourself. In a community that's largely rooted in a dominated discourse by white or Asian males. That means that we're continuing to perpetuate that exact same type of rhetoric. >> Rebecca: That's who you're recruiting. >> Exactly. And so then idea of getting more women or communities of color involved in that space can often be distorted. So that remains a challenge that we as a company as well as the tech industry need to overcome is understanding; one, how do we encourage more diverse referrals over time. But then two, creating an ecosystem where this seems natural and not like an artificial standard. >> Okay, so how do you do it? I mean that we've pinpointed the problem and it absolutely is a problem, but what are the kinds of things that Snap is doing to improve the referral process? >> So it's the idea of being innovative by design. One thing that's unique about Snap in particular is that we are an LA-based company. >> So based out of Venice Beach and Santa Monica, California. We don't face a lot of the core challenges that we see in Silicon Valley. And as a result have the opportunity to be more innovative in our approach. As a result when we look to referral networks in particular. One thing that Snap has focused on is the idea of diversity recruiting as a core pillar or tenant of all of our employee research groups. Not only do they join us to attend conferences like Grace Hopper, like the National Society of Black Engineers. But we actually do sourcing jams. Where we sit down with them and mine their networks. Either on LinkedIn-- >> Rebecca: Sourcing jams? >> Yes >> Rebecca: I love it. >> Yes Either on LinkedIn or GitHub or any of the various professional networking sites that they work on. Or technical networking sites to find out who are great talents that they've worked with before. >> Who do you know? Who can join us? >> Exactly. And what's more significant than that, is creating a sense of empowerment where we actually having them reach out to their network as opposed to a recruiter. This creates more of a warm and welcoming environment for the candidate. Where the idea of being a simple passive candidate is further explored by activating them to showcase how your experience has been great. >> And how are you also ensuring that the experience at Snap is great, particularly for women and people of color? >> Yes, so one area is our employee resource group. So we have a couple, so Lady Chilla is of course what I am wearing today. But Snap Noir for the black community. Snap Pride for the LGTBQ plus community and Low Snaps for the Latin X community. >> Rebecca: How big is Snap, we should just-- >> Yeah, about 3,000 people globally. >> Okay, 3,000. Okay, wow. >> And so one of the exciting things that we do is ERG that. So it's where we bring all of our employee resource groups together and they hold massive events every single quarter. To encourage other communities that are either allies or individuals of the sociological out group to understand what they do. But this deploys in so many different ways. In June, for Pride for example, we held drag bingo. Where our LGTBQ plus community participated. In March, we did a whole series of events celebrating women in engineering, women in sales, and women in media that resulted in a large expanse of events allowing for people to come in and learn about, not only the female experience more broadly, but particularly at Snap and some of the great endeavors that they're working on. >> And I know you are also working with other organizations like Girls Who Code, Women Who Code, Made with Code. Can you tell the viewers a little bit more about Snap's involvement. >> 100% Made with Code is one of the most exciting projects that I've had the opportunity to work on. It was for me personally this great combination of working with my previous employer Google, and Snap. So Google's Made with Code project is an idea that started to empower teen girls to code, ages 13 to 18 primarily. What they found is was that's exactly the same demographic that primarily uses our product. And so about three months ago, we decided to come together to launch an imitative where we'd have teen girls make geofilters, one of Snap's core products. The project actually launched one week ago, and teen girls are using Blocky technology to actually go about creating their own geofilters. And then writing a 100 word personal statement defining what their vision for the future of technology is. I'm personally exciting to say after checking the numbers this morning, more than 22,000 girls have already submitted responses to participate. And they will culminate in an event, November 1 through 3. Where we will take the top five finalists to TED Women in New Orleans. To not only showcase women who have done incredible things in the past and present. But also showcase their work at participating in this competition, as the women of technology for the future. >> Rebecca: And the next generation. >> Exactly. >> So we're running out of time here, but I want to just talk finally about the headlines. It's very depressing, you know the Google Manifesto, the sexism that we've seen against women. The racism in the industry. These are are-- we don't want to talk about it at this celebration of computing because we want to focus on the positives. And yet, where do you feel, particularly because you have worked at large tech companies, on these issues for a while now? >> Not facing challenges head on is going to be the greatest threat to the tech industry. The idea of avoiding conversation and avoiding sheer communication of these challenging issues will continue to raise-- >> Rebecca: And ignoring the bad behavior. >> Exactly, and it results in negative rhetoric that inherently put these communities out of wanting to work in this specific industry. But arguably given that technology not only represents the face of the future but how every single product and entity is made for the future, we have to include individuals. Everyone often wants to highlight the McKinsey study from Diversity Matters. Highlighting all of these great ways of diversity impacting business, but we need to look at it in addition from an ethic standpoint. The idea that technology represents how we are building our future. Leaving entire communities out of that primarily focusing on people of color and women, will result in a space where these communities will never have access, opportunity and thus employment to exist in this space. Being able to attack these issues head on, address the bad behavior, highlight what the potential implication is step one. Step two though is being proactive in everything that we're doing, to attempt to ameliorate that from the beginning. You'll notice one thing that's very different about Snap's diversity strategy is we seek to build infrastructure first, then focus on talent acquisition. Once we can ensure that communities of color and women are entering a space that is psychologically safe, open, and inviting. Then we can focus on how we're bringing in talent effectively so that the idea of retention and advancement is not an afterthought but rather top of mind. >> Right, because you can't recruit them if they haven't had the opportunities to begin with. >> Exactly, and that's what Snap often upholds the value of the idea that diversity is our determination, while inclusion is our imperative. >> Jarvis, I love it. >> Thank you so much. >> This has been really fun talking to you. >> Thank you. >> We will have more from Orlando, Florida at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing just after this. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCube, covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE media. >> Welcome back to theCube's coverage of Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Vicki Mealer-Burke, she is the Vice-President and Chief Diversity Officer at Qualcomm. Thanks so much for joining us, Vicki. >> Thank you, Rebecca, it's great to be here. >> So, before we the camera's were rolling, you were describing how you've been at Qualcomm for 20 years, but you've been in this job for one year. And you're the first person to ever hold the position. >> That's right. >> So, tell our viewers how it came about. >> Yeah, I have been at Qualcomm almost 21 years now, and mostly in product development, product management, and then, my last role was as a general manager of one of our wholly-owned subsidiaries and I really thought that my run at Qualcomm was done, because we're consolidating a lot of our businesses. I started working on some women's programs while I was shutting down our last business, and it just so happened, it was the same time the company decided to create a chief diversity officer. My initial reaction was, "That's so great, we're going to "get one of those people, and we really need them." I wanted to be a champion for that person, and then I started getting myself interested and thinking that I could really be a change agent and a leader for the company. And kind of leave a legacy back to the company, a company that's actually been really, really good to me. >> So, when you were thinking about this job, you described it as a business problem that needed to be solved. And as someone who'd been at Qualcomm for two decades, how did you define the business problem? >> The way that my brain works is, I'm a problem solver and that's why I got into product management. And so, I really thought that if the company saw this as compliance or some sort of regulatory issue, I would really have no real interest, but I really knew that we could solve the probably by likely re-engineering some of the processes that had been in place. And, Qualcomm has had a tremendous growth over the years, and we've ramped from, I was employee 5,000 to now well over 30,000, so many of our processes really just had to be re-engineered. And I knew that I could speak that language to our leaders, we understand re-engineering problems. So, I really tried to get down to root cause and focus on a couple of the areas that would really make a big difference, and discuss the business value of why we were doing this. >> So, what are the areas that you are focusing on? Just give our viewers of a sense of the the top two or three areas where you think you can have the most impact? >> There's really two levers that I'm focused on. One is talent acquisition, so continuing to bring the best and brightest minds, the most innovative people in the world now to help us move our wireless technology into the 5G world. The possibilities are endless so we need all kinds of bright minds looking at this from all different kinds of directions. That's the diversity piece of it. The second big lever is, once we get them in, we have to keep 'em. I mean, this show shows how talented women engineers are really at premium, and so the more we're hiring, the more we're losing people on the other side. People call that the leaky pipeline or the leaky bucket. So, I'm working on retention programs to make sure that once we get our diverse talent in the door that we can keep them by really supporting, promoting, progressing them, making sure that they have wide variety of opportunities and that they see a bright future for themselves at Qualcomm. >> So, are you starting new programs? Is this about mentorship, is this about making sure there is flexible work? I mean, what are some of the nitty-gritty things that Qualcomm is doing? >> Yeah, we have started a series of sessions with our senior-most leaders, what we call, like, our directors and above. We have terrific support at the C-level at Qualcomm, terrific support. But at a 30,000 person company, you really need to get into that next couple-down layers. And so, we're doing training about, basically, how to run an inclusive team, how to empower. One of the big things that we're training on is the process of, how do you pick people for that next big project? And, like many managers, they go back to the people that have been successful year after year. What we're trying to do is disrupt that and either create, like, a apprenticeship, product leader positions where someone can tag along and lead and understand how those projects were run so well. But that's what we need to do is really try to expand the project opportunities, that's when people get a lot of visibility, a lot of experience, and that's where their own talents will just then accelerate them through our levels. >> You were talking about the need to make sure that a couple rungs down from the senior brass, really understand that there is a real business case for diverse teams that are collaborative. How receptive are these managers in your experience, and what do you say that really tips them over? >> So, Qualcomm is full of extremely bright people. There's an awareness and the benefit of the doubt that we're giving all of our employees is, "Let's give you the "facts, let's make you aware, let's let you drive the "solution, so that we're all working together." We don't have any kind of quotas, we just want to make managers, give them all the data and have them make good decisions, and empower them to be part of the solution. That empowerment need is where we're building trust with those managers. We're not saying, "Oh, you've been doing it wrong for "a million years." We're saying, "Here's what you can do to get better. "Here's what you can do to have a more engaged team. "Here's what you can do to have a more empowered team." That leads to productivity, productivity goes straight to the bottom line, and it makes sense. So, we're trying to do it more in a partnership, giving them the respect that they've earned with the positions that they're in, and empowering them to be the change. >> So, earlier in your career, you worked on some really exciting projects in terms of wearables, in terms of smart-cities, in terms of home-base technology. Do you miss the tech, I mean, do you see yourself going back and working in that? >> Yeah, it's a great question. When you're in the business, there are daily, weekly, incremental successes. We fixed that bug, we got that contract, this is really more, I call it kind of like forming jello, it's hard to get those feelings everyday like you're making progress on something. I do miss the technology, this is the biggest problem I think I've ever been tasked to solve, so that is extremely inspiring, and luckily, I get to work side-by-side with a lot of our best technology leaders. But, I do miss the technology, for sure. >> And working in the business? >> Sure. >> So, you talked about the, sort of, difficulty with measuring incremental progress, and then really we're at a point in time where the Google manifesto and Travis Kalanick's antics are front-page news. Is this discouraging, or is does it make you more excited by the cause and what you're doing? >> There are aspects to it that are discouraging, but I am really a glass half-full type of person, I think shining the light, really shining this big, bright light on the issue makes 99% of the people in our business really say, "Wow, I can't believe that's really going on." So, I actually think it's good, it's allowing us to have these conversations which are uncomfortable and a lot of leaders want to have the conversations but they don't know what to say. So, all of these things coming out in the press just give us that entry to be able to say, "Let's talk about it." And we've been doing that at Qualcomm, we do it with our employees, I want people to feel free to ask questions and not think that they should know it all. This is actually a fairly new area, so we've got to allow all of our leaders to have a level of comfort, but also know they don't have to be perfect in every single thing they say, just be inquisitive and really start the discussions. >> When you are pitching Qualcomm as a potential employer to young women, what is your value proposition? We heard Fei-Fei Li during the keynote talk about there is a real crisis if women are not actively involved in creating the next generation of artificial intelligence, and we're half of the end users, that there is going to be this real disconnect between the technology and how it's used. >> And as a product leader, I have always been fascinated by these public stories of product failures that no one was trying to make them fail but it was very clear that they didn't have a diverse team, because they just had some really big misses. So, one of the things we talk about at Qualcomm, you know, we're a wireless technology company, we started with 3G and now 4GLTE, that whole wireless technology, that backbone of it, is all Qualcomm tech, and it allows us to go into 5G. 5G is where the thing gets exponentially more interesting, more exciting, a much lighter set of problems to solve can be solved through 5G. So, if we don't have a diverse set of people thinking about all the different use-cases, variables, that we can use 5G technology, we'll miss something big. And I know that our CEO believes that, we've talked about it, we are inventors, we are innovators, and we have to have a wider variety of people that are being inventors of the future. >> So, I just want to wrap up here but finally ask you about this conference, this is not your first Grace Hopper, and it's a very young conference and you're really looked at as a veteran, I mean, me, too. We're the old bags about this place. (laughing) Can you just describe a little bit, I know you said that you were introducing one of the keynote speakers and you got to meet a personal hero of yours, just what it's like to be here? >> It's really amazing, last year was my first year. I was not the Chief Diversity Officer a year ago, yet, and I came here and people like, Telle Whitney, who you read about, I've gotten to meet here, I can hug her. >> Rebecca: You'll never was your hand again. >> I know, it's amazing. The women that have been leading this for years and years and years, and now what this has turned out to be, I was talking to one of my colleagues, and I go to a lot of technical conferences and business conferences like CES, CES is almost where we should be here meeting in the middle, a lot more men here, in years to come, and a lot more women at CES. And I think that's when we'll know that we're actually making progress. >> Well, Vicki, thank you so much for joining us. >> Yes, thank you, thanks for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we'll have more from theCube's coverage of the Grace Hopper just after this. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here at the Orange County Convention Center, I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We are joined today by Emilia Sherifova, she is the VP of Architecture and Engineering at Northwestern Mutual, thanks so much for joining us Emilia. >> Thank you for having me. >> So I want to start off by talking about how you got to Northwestern Mutual. You came via an acquisition, you were CTO of LearnVest. What is LearnVest? >> LearnVest is a financial planning start up, it's a company that is bringing financial planning to the masses, it's a very mission driven organization. When Northwestern Mutual came as an interest to acquire us, we saw an incredible opportunity to partner with a Fortune 100 company, and tap into its client base of five million people, and bring sort of best in class digital experience and innovation, with best in class financial services products. >> Talk about that problem a little bit, in terms of bringing financial planning to the masses. Why don't the masses have financial planning? What's the disconnect? >> I think it's not easy, often it's a human driven problem. Often humans do not want to deal with their finances, as I know personally for myself, historically when I met with my financial advisor in the past I would get a plan and I wouldn't follow up on that. So building delightful experiences that engage our clients, with the combination of a financial planner that's prodding you, and giving you guidance. >> So there is a human there? >> Absolutely, there's no way to avoid a human. So it was that regional model of LearnVest to have the human help the robot part of it, and we are doing the same thing with Northwestern Mutual, where we're leveraging Northwestern Mutual best in class distribution work force and providing them tools to help them do their work best. >> I love the idea of a delightful experience when dealing with your finances, it seems antithetical. Give me some examples of what you mean by this. >> I think ability to give you a 360 view of your life, and give you a financial wellness score, for instance, after we've gotten a couple of data points about you, but also gathered some of the predictive data points that we know are probably true about you, and give you a score, one score, that gives you an idea what's the probability of you reaching your financial goal, or you retiring, or you going broke. So there is a way to do that in an easy, digestible and kind of delightful way where we're able to leverage technology and predictive capabilities to really push for financial security of our clients. >> And what is the customer response here? >> Customer response, it's been great. Now that we've rolled out a lot of these experiences for the customer base of Northwestern Mutual we have massive engagement with our customers, our traffic has gone dramatically up. >> So people are hungering for this? >> Absolutely, it's a much needed thing, and we're here to help them. >> So you've now been with Northwestern Mutual for a few years now, dividing your time between New York and Milwaukee, you're in both technology and financial services, both male dominated fields, can you describe a little bit about your career path, and how you got into it, and what you've learned along the way. >> Oh, absolutely. I'm originally from Russia, and I come from a family of engineers, so it was a somewhat natural path for me. I got into software engineering in the late 90s. My go to language initially was C programming, and I participated in the Y2K Challenge on Wall Street. >> Which seems so quaint! (laughs) >> And I've spent over a decade on Wall Street, building electronic trading systems, market data feeds. So I feel honored to have been able to pursue and have these possibilities, but I know how not easy it is, given what a male dominated world this is. >> Is it as bad as the headlines make it out to be? I mean, it really does, when you read it, it's sickening. The sexism, the biases, what's your experience been? >> I think I've been lucky enough to work in very supportive places, but I can tell you majority of teams that I've been part of are majority male, and whether my team mates want to be inclusive and engaging, when the majority is someone else that doesn't look like you, act like you, lean on similar defaults as you, it does not make for a very welcome environment. So I recognize that, and a big part of that, I feel, is having proper on boarding practices. Because on boarding often can happen, if you don't have a formal on boarding process, on boarding can happen in informal ways, and when it happens in informal ways, you tend to be attracted to the people who are like you, and you hang out with. So if you look at the technology world, it's dominated by mostly male. If you are in a start up world, it's mostly young males. And so I am determined to bring operational excellence and sustainability and diversity through strong operational practices, like ensuring that there is proper on boarding. Where for instance, a young mother who has a child has the potential to go home at 4 p.m., and cannot hang out with the guys and drink coke or beer at 7 p.m., to really understand the culture of the group that she joined. We want to make sure that she has sustainable, thoughtful on boarding practices, feeling like she's part of the organization. This is just one way of doing it. >> In terms of the on boarding, and I think you're absolutely right in a sense, that we do gravitate towards people who are just like us, look like us, talk like us, think like us, so are you pairing the new people with people who are not like them? >> Absolutely, but also actually I am pairing them with people who also recently just went through on boarding, that just join also fairly recently. That way they can explain the pitfalls that they gone through, and so we're definitely making sure we have these co pilots, but also rigorous processes to get people comfortable, whatever their background is. >> Now how many Grace Hoppers have you been to, Emilia? >> I have to say this is my first one. >> Your first one, you're a newbie! So what is your experience been so far. >> I am incredibly moved by the experience, actually. I have to say I've never seen so much energy before. I am moved by the stories that I have heard, incredibly inspired. I am inspired to keep pushing. I felt I could relate to a lot of presenters' backgrounds, I also came from a small town, that actually is not on the map, because it was a military town in the former Soviet Union, and a lot of stories of overcoming, and persisting, and ending up here, is what I can relate to. So I'm very excited, and very grateful, and I want to be here every year. >> So you'll be back? >> Totally! >> Great! Well, Emilia, thanks so much for joining us, it's been really fun talking to you. >> Thanks for having me. >> We'll be back with more from Grace Hopper just after this.

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida it's the Cube covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here at the Orange County Convention Center. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined by Aysegul Gunduz, she is a professor at the University of Florida-College of Engineering. Thanks so much for joining us. >> No, thank you for having me. >> So, congratulations are in order, because you are a ABIE Award winner, which is awards given out by the Anita Borg Institute, and you have been given the Denice Denton Emerging Leader Award. So, tell us a little about, about your award. >> Well, thank you for asking. We've heard a lot about Grace Hopper and Anita Borg throughout the conference, but Denice Denton, she was actually very close friends with Anita. And she was a leader in her field, her field was development of polymers, and she worked on the first development of RAM. But she was actually the first ever dean of a college of engineering at a major university... >> Rebecca: First ever woman. >> First woman dean, yes, so she became dean at the University of Washington, and then she actually became chancellor at University of California, but just beyond her research she really promoted and lifted the people around her, so she was a big proponent of minority issues. So, she supported females, she supported international students, and she was openly gay, so she really had a big influence on the LGBTQ community, so I just wanted to, you know, just recognize her and say that how honored I am to have my name mentioned alongside hers. This award is given to a junior faculty member that has done significant research and also has had an impact on diversity as well. >> So, let's start talking... >> Denice is a great inspiration. >> Yes! The award given an homage to Denice, so your research is about detecting neurological disorders. So, tell our viewers a little bit more about what you're doing. >> Sure, I'm an electrical engineer by training, who does brain research for a living, so this confuses a lot of people, but I basically tell them that our brains have bioelectric fields that generate biopotential signals that we can record and we're really trying to decipher what these signals are trying to tell us. So, we are really trying to understand and treat neurological disorders as well as psychiatric disorders, so I work with a lot of neurosurgical patient populations that receive electrode implants as part of their therapy, and we are trying to now improve these technologies so that we can record these brain signals and decode them in real time, so that we can adapt things like deep brain stimulation for the current pathology that these patients are having. So, deep brain stimulation, currently, is working like, think of an AC and it's working on fan mode so its current, you know, constantly blowing cold air into the room, even though the room might be just the perfect temperature, so we are basically trying to listen to the brain signals and only deliver electricity when the patient is having a pathology, so this way we are basically turning the AC onto the auto mode, so that once they are actually not having symptoms, unnecessary electrical, it is not delivered into their brains, so pace makers, when they invented were functioning that way, so people realized they could stimulate the heart, and the person would not have a cardiac arrest, but now we know that we can detect the heart pulse very easily, so someone thought about 'OK, so when we don't detect the pulse, heartbeat, let's only stimulate the pace maker then,' so that's what we're trying to adapt to the neuro-technologies. >> And what is the patient response? I mean I imagine that's incredible. So, these are people who suffer from things like Parkinson's disease, Tourette's syndrome, I mean, it's a small patient population that you're working with now, but what are you finding? >> So, first of all, our patients are very gracious to volunteer for our studies, we find that, for instance, in Tourette's syndrome we can actually detect when people are having tics, involuntary tics, that is characteristic of Tourette's syndrome. We find that we can differentiate that from voluntary movements, so we can really deliver the stimulation when they are having these symptoms, so this is a paroxysmal disorder, they really don't need continuous stimulation. So, that's one thing that we're developing. We find that in essential tremor, again, when people aren't having tremor we can detect that and stop the stimulation and only deliver it when necessary. We're working on a symptom called freezing of gaits in Parkinson's disease so people define this as the, having the will to walk, but they feel like their feet are glued to the floor so this can cause a lot of falls, and at that, really, age this can be very, very dangerous. So, we can actually tell from the brain when people are walking and then we turn the stimulation in this particular area only during that time so as to prevent any falls that might happen. >> So, it's really changing their life and how they are coping with this disease. >> Yes, true, and it really makes going to work in the morning (laughs) very, very exciting for us. >> So, another element of the ABIE Award is that you are helping improve diversity in your field and in Denice Denton, in the spirit of Denice Denton, helping young women and minorities rise in engineering. >> Yes, so, I'm going to talk about this in my keynote session tomorrow, but I really just realized that all my confidence throughout engineering school was due to the fact that I actually had a female undergraduate advisor, and once I came to that realization, I joined Association for Academic Women at the University of Florida, which was established in 1974, because these pioneering women fought for equal pay for male and female faculty on campus, and this is still honored today, so I'm very honored to be serving the Association as its president today. All of our membership dues go to dissertation awards for female doctoral students that are, you know, emerging scholars in their fields, and I also approached the National Science Foundation and they supported the funding for me to generate a new emerging STEM award for female students in the STEM fields. So, you know, that is my contribution. >> So, you're passing it on... >> I hope so. >> the help and the mentoring that you received as young faculty member. >> I truly hope so. >> I mean, (stammers) right now we're so focused on the technology companies but on campuses, on the undergraduate and graduate school campuses, how big a problem is this, would you say? >> So, I'm a faculty in biomedical engineering, so, in our field we actually have some of the highest female to male ratios compared to other engineering fields. People attribute this to the fact that females like to contribute to the society, so, they like to work on problems, they like to work on problems that have a societal impact and I think working with, basically, you know, disorders in any branch of medicine, it really fires, fires up female students, but yes, when we go to other departments such as electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, the ratio is really, really small. And it still is a problem and therefore we are really trying to mobilize, you know, all female faculty, just to be present, just the fact that you're there, that you're a successful female in this field... >> Rebecca: The role models. >> Yeah, really makes an impact, you know, I think, the most repeated quote at this meeting is that 'You can't be what you can't see." So, we're really trying to support female faculty. So, we're tying to retain female faculty, so that, you know, the younger generation of females can see that they can and the will do it as well. >> You can't be what you can see, I love that. Those are words to live by. >> Right. >> Yeah. Well, thank you so much Aysegul, this is a pleasure, pleasure meeting you, pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you so much, pleasure's mine. >> We'll be back with more from Grace Hopper just after this.

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Grace Hopper's Celebration of women in computing. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here at theCUBE. We're at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, the best name in tech conferences. 18,000 women here in Orlando, filling up the Orange County Conference Center. We're excited to be here for our fourth year, and part of the whole program is getting some of the leadership from AnitaB.org on to give us an update and we're really excited to have Elizabeth Ames. She's the SVP of Marketing and Alliances and Programs but we just think of her as Elizabeth at AnitaB.org. So, Elizabeth, great to see you. >> Great to be here. >> Absolutely >> We're thrilled to have you here at the Celebration. >> I can't believe it's been four years. I've been telling so many people. There are still so many people that have never been here. I was amazed at the keynote, the first day, there was the call, the houselights went up, how many people it's their first time, and as big as this conference is, as much the people that know it love it, there's still a lot of people that have not been exposed to this show. >> It's absolutely the case. We have every year it seems like more and more sort of first timers. Which is great because we love to have them come but we'd love to have them come back. I think it's really an expression of how this issue has become a big issue and that the women are really engaged and excited and they want to be a part of it, so it's great. >> The other thing I don't think a lot of people know is there's obviously a lot of recruiting going on, there's a lot of young people here which is really what I think gives it its flavor, but we had Workday on. They said they had 140 people here from Workday. I talked to a guy last night at dinner from Google, I think they had 180 people and I said to her, "Do you have any show "that you bring that many people to "that's not your own show, so the amount of investment" And then I said, it's all young, fresh out of school No, it's all ranges, all ages. So again, I think there's a lot going on here that people are just not that exposed to. >> Yeah, that's absolutely true. So, if you look at our attendance overall, about 70% are industry and a lot of those are companies that are bringing their women and some of them are their younger women who have maybe been in the firm, in the company for a year or two or three or something like that, but the place where a lot of women drop out of the industry is more mid-career and so I think more and more companies are seeing this as a way to help their mid-career women recommit to the field and make those connections with the community at large and get a little bit more reinvigorated so we definitely see companies bringing all kinds of women out of their organization, and they like to bring a mix, so that they have some of their senior women that are sort of mentoring women who are mid-career or women who are more junior and it just gives them a really good mix. And then about 30% of our attendees are academic, we call it academic, but it's primarily students, so undergraduate, graduate, post doc, and research type people, and then some amount of professors and teaching assistants, those types of people. >> Yeah, and I really think it's the youth that give this show its special vibe. I mean there's a lot of great keynotes and some fantastic stories and really great global representation, a ton of African representation. But I do think it's the youth, it's the youngsters that bring a really unique and positive energy that you don't really see at many other conferences. >> Yeah, and I think part of that is that the community at large, you know women that are in the field they care about the women coming up and they want them to succeed and they want them to have every single opportunity so everybody's kind of invested in them and interested in nurturing and helping them along. So it does create this really, I don't know, positive environment, right. We always jokingly say there's a reason we call it a celebration. We don't call it a conference, we call it a celebration. >> Everyone's a delegate too. I like that too. It's not attendees. And that's come up on a number of interviews too where when people have reflected back on people that have helped them along the way the payback, it's almost like it's been scripted is, OK, now you need to do this to the next person to really pay it forward and that again is a consistent theme that we have also heard from the keynotes earlier today, that it is about paying it forward, which is funny because sometimes you'll hear kind of a catty women reputation that they're trying to keep each other down, you know that that was kind of a classic, another hurdle that women had to face in the professional world that they weren't necessarily supporting each other, and that is not the case here, at all. It's very much a supportive environment. >> We may have a self selection bias going on here >> Well that's okay >> But I think there's nothing but support for one another in the community and everybody recognizes that we all have to pull together. >> Right. So interesting times at AnitaB.org, the organization that puts on Grace Hopper, change of leadership, we had Brenda on, so kind of a fresh face, fresh energy. Telle. I'm going to see if I can get her a horse tomorrow to ride off into the sunset if the sun breaks out here in Orlando, so it's exciting times. It's a time of transition, always a little kind of mixed feelings, but also tremendous excitement and kind of new chapter, if you will. So tell us a little bit about what's going on at AnitaB.org >> It's an incredibly exciting time. First of all, a nod to Telle. She's been at the helm for 15 years. She's seen an incredible amount of growth. She took this on really as a favor to her dear dear friend and then took on the mantle upon Anita's death. She's done an amazing job. She's certainly an icon within the community overall I'm sure you'll hear more from her in the future. It's been great. Brenda is new fresh face. She has accomplished some pretty amazing things with the Chicago Public Schools. She's really invigorated to step into this space and it's great having her. I think the thing that you really, hopefully you got from her when she was here is that she is just this incredibly genuine person. She's lived the experience. She can relate to what all of these women have gone through. She has this profound commitment to make things different. And just the biggest heart that you could possibly imagine. >> Right, and a little chip on her shoulder. Which she talked about and it's come up time and time again where when people are told they can't do things for a lot of people, there's no greater motivator than being told you can't do this, you shouldn't do this, you're not qualified. She said "I've been in positions "where I've been told I can't be there." So to have that little chip on her shoulder I think is a real driver for many folks. >> It is. We recently did a little written piece it hasn't actually gotten published yet where we kind of went back and looked at a lot of the language that we're hearing today about women are not biologically suited to be programmers or women aren't this or women aren't that. And we did this little let's look back historically, and when did women get certain rights, and one of the things that really stood out for us in looking at that was women weren't admitted to all of the premier colleges, Harvard, Yale, whatever, until the 1960s. Which is kind of shocking when you think about it. >> Yeah, it's like yesterday practically. >> The language that was used at the time was almost identical to the language that we're hearing today. Women weren't biologically suited for this, it's really not in the right makeup for them. And yet today, half the students at those schools are women. And women have earned their way there. I just kind of laughingly say it's like deja vu all over again. We've heard all of that. we've heard people tell us you can't do that, you shouldn't do that, no you're not welcome and I think women they're not going to back down. >> It's interesting times too, because the classic gates, the distribution gate, the financing gate, the investment gate, to build companies, to create companies, they've all been broken down and kudos or serendipitously computing is the vehicle that's broken down a lot of those traditional barriers. You used to be, you couldn't start a new company because you had to get into distribution. You couldn't be a writer, there was only a few newspaper editors that controlled everything. That's all completely changed and now ubiquitous distribution, democratization of software, open source, you don't have to raise a bunch of money and buy a bunch of servers. It's so much easier to go out and affect the world and there's no easier way to affect the world than writing a great piece of software. >> Yeah, I think you're spot on on that. There's so much more leverage out there for people that want to start something. I believe that will accrue to the advantage of women. I always end up saying women are going to do great things and then I have to stop myself and say they are doing great things today. I think we've seen that already with some of the keynotes. Fei-Fei Li, and yet you hear her story as an immigrant and as a mother, as an Asian woman. She's had her challenges and she told her personal story not like with a woe is me but with a clear eye towards the things that she had to overcome to get where she was. >> And a lot of hard work, just a flat out a lot of hard work including working at the dry cleaners while she was going to school. >> Yeah, exactly. And yet there she is, one of the leaders in that space and doing incredible things. So I think you're starting to hear more and more about those women. I think they've always been there. I think that we just don't hear as much about them. So, this venue is such a great opportunity for us to hear more of their stories. >> Right, and we learned a lot about that last year with the whole Hidden Figures thing that we had on here as well as the movie and that was again, in the 60's. So we're in October, it's kind of the end the year. As you look forward to 2018, what are some of your priorities for AnitaB.org? I won't put you on the hook to tell us where Grace Hopper will be next year. You can tell us if you want. >> I saw it posted at Pride someplace. >> Is it posted already? >> I saw that and it was like whoa, I didn't know that was in the wild yet. >> But give us kind of a look. What are your priorities for next year? I know AVI Local has been a thing that's been growing over time. What are you kind of looking at as you're doing your 2018 planning? >> As amazing as it is to have 18,000 people here, which just blows our mind, we hope it continues to grow. We also know that no matter how big this conference gets that not everyone will be able to come here for a variety of reasons and so building out the local communities and making it so that, empowering those local communities to have smaller versions of this type of thing and growing this movement to a bigger scale that really encompasses all the women that are out there because even though people here say "Oh, 18,000 women, holy cow" it's a tip of the iceberg. There are thousands and thousands more women out there, we know there are. We really want to find a way to reach every single one of them and bring support and connection and inspiration to every single one of them so that they stay in the field, can achieve their dreams and their highest potential. That will have an impact on them and on the communities they live in. That's really what our focus is. >> Well, Elizabeth, again. Always great to see you. Congratulations on a phenomenal conference. And thank for inviting us to be here. It's really, honestly, one of our favorite places to be. >> We love having you here. I would just end by saying all you people out there, come join us next year. >> There you go. Are you going to tell them where? >> Houston, Texas. >> In Houston. - Back in Houston. >> Good barbecue. Ask me, I'll tell you where to go. Alright, she's Elizabeth Ames. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2017. Thanks for watching. [Upbeat Techno Music]