Tag Archives: SFU President’s Dream Colloquium

Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada) and its president’s (Andrew Petter) dream colloquium: women in technology

I’m a little late with this event news (sadly,. I only received the information yesterday, Sept. 20, 2017) but even with two event dates already past (happily, videos for the two events have been posted), there are still several “Women in Technology” events to attend or view live according to the Simon Fraser University (SFU) President’s Dream Colloquium: Women in Technology; Attaining, Retaining, and Promoting Diverse Talent’s webpage text by Wan Yee Lok,

Women in Technology: Attracting, Retaining and Promoting Diverse Talent is a seven-part public [emphasis mine] lecture series beginning on Sept. 13. Key experts from around the world will identify challenges to gender equity and discover solutions for improving recruitment, retention and leadership options for women.

Diversity and inclusion are critical to high-tech corporate success. Yet statistics reveal that less than 25 per cent of those working in the science, technology, engineering and math sectors (STEM) are women, and that they earn seven-and-a-half per cent less than men.

“There is a crucial need to achieve gender equality in the tech sector, especially at a time when it is growing faster than ever,” says colloquium organizer Lesley Shannon, an SFU engineering science professor. She holds the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Chair for Women in Science and Engineering for the B.C. and Yukon region.

“We hope the colloquium will help people engage in a multidisciplinary dialogue about the value of creating more space in technology for women and other under-represented groups.”

Six of the lectures are free, except for Cathy O’Neil’s lecture on Oct. 26.

The President’s Dream Colloquium schedule is as follows:

Sept. 13: SFU KEY presents: We the Data
Juliette Powell, founder, Turing AI and WeTheData.org, author of 33 Million People in the Room

Sept. 14: Diversity 101: The Case for Diversity in Technology
Maria Klawe, president, Harvey Mudd College

Sept. 21: Women in Media and Advertising
Shari Graydon, catalyst, Informed Opinions

Oct. 12: Social Psychological Phenomena
Steven Spencer, the Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Chair in Social Psychology, Ohio State University

Oct. 26: Gender and Bias in Algorithmic Design
Cathy O’Neil, author, Weapons of Math Destruction [tickets are $5 for students; $15 for the rest of us; go here to buy tickets, click on green button in the upper right, below the banner; the event will be held at SFU’s Harbour Centre Vancouver location]

Nov 9: Gendered Language
Danielle Gaucher, associate professor, Department of Psychology, University of Winnipeg

Nov. 23: Women as Leaders and Innovators
Jo Miller, founder, Be Leaderly

Lectures will be webcast live and available on the President’s Dream Colloquium website, www.sfu.ca/womenintech.

SFU engineering science professor Lesley Shannon is the colloquium organizer as well as the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Chair for Women in Science and Engineering for the B.C. and Yukon region.

 

As a part of the colloquium, students can enroll in a graduate course covering a broad range of topics related to diversity in the technology sector. Shannon says the course will focus on women and their role in technology as well as issues that affect other under‐represented groups.

“I hope the course will establish a foundation for future managers, supervisors, sponsors, mentors and others wanting to pursue leadership roles to work towards creating a level playing field in technology and other industries,” says Shannon.

The colloquium course (SAR 897) is still accepting students. Visit go.sfu.ca to enroll.

A reminder after the last few paragraphs of the event text, you don’t actually have to be a student to attend the lectures although for anyone who doesn’t want to make the trek up the hill (SFU is located on a hill in Burnaby, BC) for the majority of the events, there is the livestream video. For those who can’t make the scheduled times, given that both the Sept. 13 and Sept. 14, 2017 event videos have been posted, they are being pretty quick about uploading the videos afterwards.

I have mentioned Cathy O’Neil here a couple of times, more substantively in a Feb. 28, 2017 posting about a major’ big data’ collaboration between the province of BC and the state of Washington (for Cathy O’Neil, scroll down to the subsection titled: Algorithms and big data) and briefly at the end in a May 24, 2017 posting that was chiefly concerned with bias in algorithms.

Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada) and its president’s (Andrew Petter) dream colloquium: big data

They have a ‘big data’ start to 2016 planned for the President’s (Andrew Petter at Simon Fraser University [SFU] in Vancouver, Canada) Dream Colloquium according to a Jan. 5, 2016 news release,

Big data explained: SFU launches spring 2016 President’s Dream Colloquium

Speaker series tackles history, use and implications of collecting data

 

Canadians experience and interact with big data on a daily basis. Some interactions are as simple as buying coffee or as complex as filling out the Canadian government’s mandatory long-form census. But while big data may be one of the most important technological and social shifts in the past five years, many experts are still grappling with what to do with the massive amounts of information being gathered every day.

 

To help understand the implications of collecting, analyzing and using big data, Simon Fraser University is launching the President’s Dream Colloquium on Engaging Big Data on Tuesday, January 5.

 

“Big data affects all sectors of society from governments to businesses to institutions to everyday people,” says Peter Chow-White, SFU Associate Professor of Communication. “This colloquium brings together people from industry and scholars in computing and social sciences in a dialogue around one of the most important innovations of our time next to the Internet.”

 

This spring marks the first President’s Dream Colloquium where all faculty and guest lectures will be available to the public. The speaker series will give a historical overview of big data, specific case studies in how big data is used today and discuss what the implications are for this information’s usage in business, health and government in the future.

 

The series includes notable guest speakers such as managing director of Microsoft Research, Surajit Chaudhuri, and Tableau co-founder Pat Hanrahan.  

 

“Pat Hanrahan is a leader in a number of sectors and Tableau is a leader in accessing big data through visual analytics,” says Chow-White. “Rather than big data being available to only a small amount of professionals, Tableau makes it easier for everyday people to access and understand it in a visual way.”

 

The speaker series is free to attend with registration. Lectures will be webcast live and available on the President’s Dream Colloquium website.

 

FAST FACTS:

  • By 2020, over 1/3 of all data will live in or pass through the cloud.
  • Data production will be 44 times greater in 2020 than it was in 2009.
  • More than 70 percent of the digital universe is generated by individuals. But enterprises have responsibility for the storage, protection and management of 80 percent of that.

(Statistics provided by CSC)

 

WHO’S SPEAKING AT THE COLLOQUIUM:

 

The course features lectures from notable guest speakers including:

  • Sasha Issenberg, Author and Journalist
    Tuesday, January 12, 2016
  • Surajit ChaudhuriScientist and Managing Director of XCG (Microsoft Research)
    Tuesday, January 19, 2016
  • Pat Hanrahan, Professor at the Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory, Cofounder and Chief Scientist of Tableau, Founding member of Pixar
    Wednesday, February 3, 2016
  • Sheelagh Carpendale, Professor of Computing Science University of Calgary, Canada Research Chair in Information Visualization
    Tuesday, February 23, 2016, 3:30pm
  • Colin HillCEO of GNS Healthcare
    Tuesday, March 8, 2016
  • Chad Skelton, Award-winning Data Journalist and Consultant
    Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Not to worry, even though the first talk with Sasha Issenberg and Mark Pickup (strangely, he’s [Pickup is an SFU professor of political science] not mentioned in the news release or on the event page) has taken place, a webcast is being posted to the event page here.

I watched the first event live (via a livestream webcast which I accessed by clicking on the link found on the Event’s Speaker’s page) and found it quite interesting although I’m not sure about asking Issenberg to speak extemporaneously. He rambled and offered more detail about things that don’t matter much to a Canadian audience. I couldn’t tell if part of the problem might lie with the fact that his ‘big data’ book (The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns) was published a while back and he’s since published one on medical tourism and is about to publish one on same sex marriages and the LGBTQ communities in the US. As someone else who moves from topic to topic, I know it’s an effort to ‘go back in time’ and to remember the details and to recapture the enthusiasm that made the piece interesting.  Also, he has yet to get the latest scoop on big data and politics in the US as embarking on the 2016 campaign trail won’t take place until sometime later in January.

So, thanks to Issenberg for managing to dredge up as much as he did. Happily, he did recognize that there are differences between Canada and the US and the type of election data that is gathered and other data that can accessed. He provided a capsule version of the data situation in the US where they can identify individuals and predict how they might vote, while Pickup focused on the Canadian scene. As one expects from Canadian political parties and Canadian agencies in general, no one really wants to share how much information they can actually access (yes, that’s true of the Liberals and the NDP [New Democrats] too). By contrast, political parties and strategists in the US quite openly shared information with Issenberg about where and how they get data.

Pickup made some interesting points about data and how more data does not lead to better predictions. There was one study done on psychologists which Pickup replicated with undergraduate political science students. The psychologists and the political science students in the two separate studies were given data and asked to predict behaviour. They were then given more data about the same individuals and asked again to predict behaviour. In all. there were four sessions where the subjects were given successively more data and asked to predict behaviour based on that data. You may have already guessed but prediction accuracy decreased each time more information was added. Conversely, the people making the predictions became more confident as their predictive accuracy declined. A little disconcerting, non?

Pickup made another point noting that it may be easier to use big data to predict voting behaviour in a two-party system such as they have in the US but a multi-party system such as we have in Canada offers more challenges.

So, it was a good beginning and I look forward to more in the coming weeks (President’s Dream Colloquium on Engaging Big Data). Remember if you can’t listen to the live session, just click through to the event’s speaker’s page where they have hopefully posted the webcast.

The next dream colloquium takes place Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2016,

Big Data since 1854

Dr. Surajit Chaudhuri, Scientist and Managing Director of XCG (Microsoft Research)
Standford University, PhD
Tuesday, January 19, 2016, 3:30–5 pm
IRMACS Theatre, ASB 10900, Burnaby campus [or by webcast[

Enjoy!