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Mes: octubre 2016

#GHC16 Daily Download: Friday, October 21

#GHC16 Daily Download: Friday, October 21

Read about all the highlights from Day 3 of #GHC16!

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Doing Good with Data – Human-Centered Data Science For Social Good GHC16

Measuring civic life is critical to improving it. This was the core message I got from an enlightening panel of five women in the field of data science, who introduced themselves by their favorite data sets, and Civic Data to the audience – what it is, who owns it and how citizens could leverage it. … Continue reading Doing Good with Data – Human-Centered Data Science For Social Good GHC16

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GHC16: Wednesday Opening Keynotes – Dr Latanya Sweeney

GHC16 got off to a great start early Wednesday morning, with an impressive line-up of speakers for the opening keynote session. First off the bat was Telle Whitney, President of ABI. She remembered organizing the very first GHC in 1994 with Anita Borg. Back then, there were 500 attendees. GHC has grown by leaps and bounds in the intervening years, with nearly 15.000 women in tech attending the conference this year!

Next up was Dr. Latanya Sweeney, the founder and director of Harvard’s Data Privacy Lab, and former Chief Technologist of the Federal Trade Commission. She was also the very first African-American woman to graduate with a PhD in Computer Science from MIT.

Dr. Sweeney’s talk focused on how technology impacts humans and dictates our civic future. The environment in which computers operate has changed radically over the past few decades, so much so that it now encompasses the governance of daily life around the world. When the Sony camcorder was first introduced in 1983, American laws decreed that conversations couldn’t be recorded without the person’s consent. So while one now had the ability to record audio using the camcorder, it was against the grain of the law to do so. Fast forward to today, and the ability to record photos, video and audio is present in virtually every device.

We now live in a technocracy – tech design determines how we live our lives. Mattress sensors are capable of measuring our sleep patterns, and that data is sent to a third party to show us how well we slept at night. The Apple Watch captures and provides all kinds of data – how much you walked, when you need to exercise, and so on. All of this data is shared with your phone.

Dr. Sweeney explained how she first got into the field of data privacy. In grad school, she discovered that matching a person’s medical records to their voter ID records was relatively easy. This was the beginning of work that led to the HIPAA regulations. Several years later, she found that Googling «Latanya» showed her more images of African-American women, while googling «Tanya» gave her images of Caucasian women. Given that Google’s algorithm is supposed to be impartial, this just didn’t seem right.

After her stint at the FTC, Dr. Sweeney started a course called «Data Science to Save the World» at Harvard. With the first batch of students on the course, she also started publication of the «Journal of Technology Science».  There were several interesting papers written by the students – for example, one student was able to come up with a method of detecting fraudulent websites using Twitter. Another was able to establish price discrimination in the Princeton Review’s online SAT tutoring service – areas with high concentration of Asian families were likely to be charged higher.  A third student found that Facebook Messenger dropped a user’s geo-location by default every time a message was sent, and this information was available to everyone. Eventually, Facebook released a patch to ensure that this information is shared only with user consent.

This year, Dr, Sweeney’s group is looking into voting data – at the moment, its surprisingly hard to find out where one needs to go to vote. They’ve even been able to find erroneous data given out on some NY and NC voting locations.

Dr. Sweeney firmly believes that given the vast amount of data available to us today, each of us can save the world.

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Three Takeaways from Microsoft Designers

Think about the things you do everyday. Biking down a curb cut. Pouring a teapot. Flipping on a light switch. These tasks seem seamless.

Continue reading on True Colors »

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#GHC16 Daily Download: Thursday, October 20

#GHC16 Daily Download: Thursday, October 20

Read about all the highlights from Day 2 of #GHC16!

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Step 72.3: Help Non-CS Students Start Technical Careers

One of the most promising sessions – which I found myself, but also which several students caught and recommended I attend, is titled Pursuing a Technical Career without a Computer Science Degree. Clearly it was relevant for Occidental College, where students can’t get a CS degree even if they wanted to! Victoria Wobber (People Analyst […]

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Friday Livestream Keynote

GHC 16 closes with a session on women in leadership roles and how male allies can help create workplaces where women thrive. You can see all of the details on the Friday Livestream page. Schedule 3 p.m. – 4 p.m. CDT Megan Smith, Chief Technology Officer, United States of America Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO, Salesforce

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Retaining High Tech Women Once They’re in the Door

Karen Holtzblatt began the lecture by gathering some biodata on the attendees: how many students are in the room how many folks with 1 or 2 years of work experience how many managers (the majority of hands went up.  “We … Continue reading

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Grace Hopper 2016: Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Ever felt stuck in your career? In this panel, executives from a variety of tech companies — from tiny startups to giants — will share…

Continue reading on It’s Not Rocket Science »

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Responsible Information Sharing Talk: Takeaway

I attended Elaine Sedenberg’s talk Responsible and Privacy-Preserving Cybersecurity Information Sharing Using Public Health as a Model.  This talk was part of the Security/Privacy Track at the 2016 Grace Hopper Celebration.  Elaine is a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley. At Jefferson I work with PHI and was interested to see how that experience might help … Continue reading «Responsible Information Sharing Talk: Takeaway»

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