Andrea Guendelman

A background in engineering and computer science can help individuals solve massive and complex questions.  But what about the most important questions of all: What is my purpose?  How do I find fulfillment in my work and my life?  How do I stay centered and find peace and even joy amidst the turbulence of career and day-to-day crises? This talk or workshop aims to help engineers and technologists step out of immediate problem-solving mode to ask and find answers to these larger questions. It aims both to take participants out of their comfort zone but, at the same time, create a roadmap to find their purpose zone. The seminar will provide participants with tools to cultivate their spiritual side.

Companies looking to turbocharge their diversity hiring don’t need to get more “soft focus” – they need to get more rigorous. By spending more time defining the skill sets they need and articulating how a diverse workforce helps them serve the needs of an increasingly global marketplace for customers, companies cannot only eliminate implicit bias. They can also make their hiring processes more efficient, saving valuable employee time, minimizing the talent that leaks out of their hiring pipeline, and maximizing their probability of recruiting and retaining candidates who can contribute to teams on day one.

Leaders building a social movement and founders of startups face a common set of challenges. How can they sustain the initial burst of energy?  How do their ideas translate into institutions without losing either their values or their entrepreneurial spark?

Historically, companies have tended to blame their lack of diversity on a lack of minorities and women in the talent pipeline. With the advent of AI-driven hiring processes, bias has crept into the filtering process, creating a huge disparity in the opportunities available to candidates - especially affecting candidates of diverse and underrepresented groups. Companies are now paying more attention and some are trying to address that problem. Apple recently pledged $100 million to President Obama's ConnectED initiative to bring cutting-edge technologies to economically disadvantaged schools. But a lack of resources, while troubling, is not the root cause of the lack of diversity in the pipeline. Janice Cuny, who directs the Computer Education program at the National Science Foundation, says African-American and Latinx computer science graduates are invisible to these companies - "There are these subtle biases that make you think that some person is not what you're looking for, even when they are." In this talk, Andrea dives deep into the problems with current AI and goes further with the solutions and ways tech employers can use smart tech to eliminate unconscious bias.