live from Stanford University it's the cube covering global women and data science conference brought to you by Silicon angle media good morning and welcome to the cube I'm Lisa Martin and we are live at the global fourth annual women in data science conference at the Arriaga Alumni Center at Stanford I'm very pleased to be joined by one of the Wits ambassadors this year Regina cut of our math data science senior manager Accenture at Google and as I mentioned you are an ambassador for wits in Bangla Road the event is Saturday so Janelle welcome to the cube thank you pleasure it is - this is the fourth annual women in data science conference this year over 150 regional events of which you are hosting Bengaluru on Saturday March 9th 50-plus countries they're expecting a hundred thousand people to engage tell us a little bit about how you got to be involved in wins yeah so I care about data science but also what accurate representation of women in gender minority in the space and I think it's global initiative is doing amazing job in creating a significant impact globally and that kind of excited me to get involved with its initiative so you have which I can't believe you're an SME with ten plus years experience and data analytics focusing on marketing and customer analytics you've had senior analytics leadership positions at Accenture Hewlett Packard now Google tell me a little bit about before we get into some of the things that you're doing specifically the data--the on your experience as a female in technology the last ten plus years it's been exciting I started my career as an engineer I wanted to be a doctor fortunately unfortunately it couldn't happen and I ended up being an engineer and it has been an exciting ride since then I felt that had a passion for doing personal management and I posted management and specialization of operational research and project management and I started my career as a data scientist worked my way up through different leadership positions and currently leading a portfolio for Accenture at Google yeah in the read of science domain yeah it's exciting absolutely so one of the things that is happening this year wins 2019 the second annual data thon that's right really looking at predictive analytics challenge for social impact tell us a little bit about why Woods is doing this data thon and what you're doing in not respectively in Bengaluru okay so well you see data science in itself is a highly interdisciplinary domain and it requires people from different disciplines to come together look at the problem from different perspectives to be able to come up with the most amicable and optimal solution at any given point of time and Gareth on is one such avenue that fosters this collaboration and data thon is also an interesting Avenue because it helps young data science enthusiasts whom the require design skill sets and also helps the data science practitioners enhance and sustain their skill sets and that's the reason which Bangalore was keen on supporting what's global data thon initiative so this skill set so I'd like to kind of dig into that a bit because we're very familiar with those required data analytics skill sets from a subject matter expertise perspective but there's other skill sets that we talk about more and more with respect to data science and analytics and that's empathy it's communication negotiation can you talk to us a little bit about how some of those other skills help these data thon participants not just in the actual event but to further their careers absolutely so really into the real world so there are a lot of these challenges wherein you would require a domain expert you require someone who has a coding experience someone who has experience to handle multiple data sites programmatically and also you need someone who has a background of statistics and mathematics so you would need different people to come together I look at the problem and then be able to solve the challenges right so collaboration is extremely pivotal it's extremely important for us to put ourselves in other shoes and see a look at the problem and look at the problem from different perspective and collaboration or the key to be able to be successful in data science domain as such okay so let's get into the specifics about this year's data sets and the teams that were involved in the data thon all right so this year's marathon was focused on using satellite imagery to analyze the scenario of deforestation cost of oil palm plantations so what we did at which Bangalore is we conducted a community workshop because our research indicated that men dominated the Kegel leaderboard not just in Bangla but for India in general despite that region having amazing female leader scientists who are innovators in their space with multiple patents publications and innovations to the credit so we asked few questions to certain female data scientists to understand what could be the potential reason for their lower participation and the Kegel as a platform and their responses led us to these three reasons firstly they may not have the awareness about Kegel as a platform may be a little bit more about that platform so reviewers can understand that right so Kegel is a platform where in a lot of these data sets have been posted if anybody is interested to hold the required a design skill says they can definitely try explore build some codes and submit those schools and the teams that are submitting the codes which are very effective having greater accuracy he would get scored and the jiggle-ator build and you know that which is the most effective solution that can be implemented in the real world so we connected this data Sun workshop and one of the challenges that most of the female leader scientists face is having an environment to network collaborate and come up with a team to be able to attempt a specific data on challenge that is in hand so we connected data from workshop to help participants overcome this challenge and to encourage them to participate into its global hit a fun challenge so what we did as a part of this workshop was we give them on how to navigate Kegel as a platform and we connected an event specifically focused on networking so that participants could network form teams we also conducted a deep in-depth technical session focusing on deep neural nets and specifically on convolutional neural nets the understanding of which was pivotal to be able to solve this year's marathon challenge and the most interesting part of this telethon workshop was a mentorship guidance we were able to line up some amazing mentors and assign these minders to the concern or the interested participating teams and these matters work with respective teams for the next three weeks and for them terms with the required guidance coaching and mentorship held them for the VidCon showed me that's fantastic so over a three-week period how many participants did you have there 110 plus people for the key right yeah for the event and there are multiple teams that have formed and we assigned those mentors we identified seven different mentors and assigned these mentors to the interested participating teams we got a great response in terms of amazing turnout for the event new teams got formed new relationships got initiated new relationships new collaborations all right tell us about those achievements so they were there was one team from engineering branch or engineering division who were really near to the killer's platform they have their engineering exams coming up but despite that they learned a lot of these new concepts they form the team they work together as a team and we were able to submit the code on the Kegel leader board they were not the top scoring team but this entire experience of being able to collaborate look at the problem from different perspective and be able to submit the code despite one of these challenges and also navigate the platforming itself was a decent achievement from my perspective a huge achievement yeah so who you are at Stanford today you're gonna be flying back to go host the event there tell us about from your perspective if we look at the future line of sight for data science let's just take a peek at the momentum this that this Woods movement is generating this is our fourth year covering this fourth annual event fourth year on the cube and we see tremendous tremendous momentum mm-hmm with not just females participating and the woods leaders providing this sustained education throughout the year the podcast for example that they released a few months ago on Google Play on iTunes but also the number of participants worldwide as you look where we are today what in your perspective is the future for data science all right so data science is a domain is evolving at a lightning speed and may possibly hold the solution to almost all the challenges faced by humanity in the near future but to be able to come up with the most amicable and sustainable solution that's more relevant to the domain achieving diversity in this field is most and initiatives like wits help achieve that diversity and foster a real impact absolutely what's original thank you so much for joining me on the cube this morning live from wins 2019 we appreciate that wish you the best of luck kids a local event in Bengaluru over the weekend thank you it was a pleasure likewise thank you we want to thank you you're watching the cube live from Stanford University at the fourth annual woods conference I'm Lisa Martin stick around my next guest will join me in just a moment