First Timer’s Guide to Grace Hopper #GHC19 A Non-Brief Interjection #LatinxInAI

Welcome back! Continuing with my First Timer’s Guide to Grace Hopper series. Make sure you read Part 1 of the series.

Celebrating #LatinxInAI News:

You know how when things go wrong we blame ourselves and when things go right we tend to minimize it and say things like, “no problem!”, “it was nothing!”, etc.?

This type of minimizing language tends to sneak up and in the spirit of being self-aware and unlearning this behavior I wanted to share my exciting news I received on Tuesday night.

How did this all come about?

For some context, I attended the Write/Speak/Code annual conference this summer as a scholarship recipient from the Kapor Center. This conference was life altering for me and I will write up a blog post(s) about my experience! I tweeted up a storm under #WSC2019Conf feel free to follow me at @susanabenavidez. This all happened as a consequence of my #networking at a Techqueria event hosted by Slack.

After the Write/Speak/Code Write Day Session with Angie Jones 🔥 I was inspired to start applying to conferences and other activities around branding and representing as a Latina in tech 👩🏻‍💻.

This past Spring I took CS 224U taught by incredible Professor of Linguistics and, by courtesy, of Computer Science, and Director of CSLI and Stanford NLP Group Christopher Potts and equally impressive Director of Proactive Intelligence at Apple and Consulting Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford Bill MacCartney.

With mentorship from incredibly supportive Cindy Wang I co-authored (with my awesome fellow transfer and also CS major Andy Lapastora) a research paper “Improving Hate Speech Classification on Twitter” detailing existing natural language processing and understanding and machine learning work in this space as well as explaining the motivation of our hand built features, transfer learning, and AI models. We applied to present our paper and our paper got accepted by:

LatinX in AI Research at NeurIPS 2019
The Official LXAI Research Workshop is co-located with NeurIPS in Vancouver CANADA

Major shout out to Latinx In AI Chair and Founder of AccelAI Laura Montoya and Visiting Researcher en Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA) Pablo Fonseca who announced the opportunity on Techqueria’s slack and guided me in the submission process. This is what being an advocate and mentor is all about! #LatinxInAI 

During the conference I emailed Cindy Wang, now at Sentropy.io and professor Chris Potts to thank them for their guidance, opportunity, and support. I also emailed Professor Potts for a faculty letter so I can apply to Stanford’s grant program for undergrads to attend conferences in which they present their research. His letter made me cry. Talk about being an advocate and ally to inclusion for Latinx In AI. I have never felt so believed in and sure of the decisions, ethics, and values I hold when working in the exciting field of Artificial Intelligence. I will link the paper after the conference!

I’m going to be a published researcher in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing / Understanding…well let’s let the Reyna explain my feelings 🎉💃🏻

Takeaways

I hope you didn’t mind my veering off the #GraceHopper flow but I wanted to share my win because Si No Yo, ¿quién? Roughly: ‘If we don’t Pump Ourselves Up, then Who?’

Never lean away from celebrating your accomplishments and if you struggle with tooting your own horn, ask yourself, how would I respond if my friend shared this news about themselves? You would totally pump them up right? Then there you go, your friend here is you.

By the Way This is Totally Related to Grace Hopper #Networking

A MAJOR component and benefit of attending conferences is the incredible networking opportunities. Don’t shy away from them.

We all feel nervous 😩 about networking but I will share how I approach networking. Networking is one of the reasons I was able to pivot from my accounting clerk job (I hit a ceiling due to not having a degree) to the much more profitable and portable field of business development. Shout out to Anne Marie for connecting me not once, but twice to opportunities that led to promotions and major life moves! 💕 If I had not made that move, I would not have been able to support myself and my two kiddos when I was a single mom in LA and would not have met my partner.

In the next post as I talk about Day 3, technically the first full day of Grace Hopper, I’ll share how this introvert weaved in #networking and being a #socialConnector into the conference many sessions, sponsor events, and career fair. I highly recommend reading Minda Harts The Memo. You’re welcome 😉 and thank you for reading!