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Happy International Womens Day! March 8 is a day to celebrate the global achievements of women and work toward a more gender-equitable future. So if you want to learn more about female empowerment or contribute to the cause but arent sure where to start, check out the resources we have listed below.

The Womens Network: Columbia

Check out its Instagram.

The Womens Network is a nationwide club that connects undergraduates with professional leaders. Unlike other pre-professional clubs, it encompasses a variety of interests, including business, engineering, and the sciences. By joining the Womens Network, you will be able to meet other hard-working people from diverse backgrounds. The club organizes many workshops, speakers, and networking opportunities with top titans of industry and pioneers. At these events, you will have many opportunities to deepen your knowledge as well as expand your social connections. Recent events include a Women of Color in Law Zoom call with four lawyers as panelists, a discussion on mental wellness and politics with advocate Miyume McKinley, and a talk by author Meredith Fineman.

Superposition

Check out its Instagram.

The Superposition chapter at Columbia is one of 25 chapters in the country. Superposition is an international organization that aims to achieve gender equality in various science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields and create more opportunities for women in STEM. Some of its activities include a large-scale hackathon in partnership with VSCO and Uber and an Uber mentorship program and chapter program.

Women in Computer Science

Check out its Instagram.

Computer science is a rapidly growing field, but it is also a field that is heavily dominated by men. Women in Computer Science is a great club to break the ice and test members love for computer science or continue this passion of yours. Its primary purpose is to bring people of all genders together to support the advancement of women in the computer science field, especially by helping prospective majors. The community is made up of undergraduates, graduate students, faculty members, and more. This club also hosts many workshops and bonding events; some examples include teaching assistant workshops, internship panels with Columbia alumni working at Google, and mock interview sessions. Women in Computer Science might be a good fit for you if you are interested in learning more about computer science, majoring in the field, or making friends with like-minded people.

Society of Women Engineers

Check out its Instagram.

The Columbia chapter of the Society of Women Engineers club strives to establish more opportunities for women in the engineering field, especially in positions of power. Some of its past events include a Johnson & Johnson Industry panel that focused on the female experience in engineering and a Citibank Technology panel that focused on Tech at Citi. This club is great for anyone who wants extra support in the engineering field.

Campus opportunities are great for getting involved with other students and making new friends and connections, but for people who are looking for a more global perspective, check out these resources below.

Audiopedia

Audiopedia is an international nonprofit organization that aims to provide free audible health education to illiterate girls and women and close education-associated gender gaps. Specifically, the bulk of the companys activity focuses on sub-Saharan Africa, where it works with local NGOs to help raise the worlds lowest adult female literacy rate. Audiopedia has already launched successful pilot projects in Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Nicaragua, and the Congo, providing women and girls with vital information ranging from sex education and gender identity to simple medical facts of immediate use in the household.

The organization restructures the definition of empowerment to address community-specific needs, putting women at the forefront of change and adapting to the social conditions of its female participants. Audiopedias instruction is in the local language, the lessons are curated for specific rural populations, and the education is readily available anywhere women would like and through many supported devices. You can help support the cause by joining Audiopedias Crowdimpact project and becoming one of the thousands of allies!

Solar Sister

The mission of this organization is to fight energy poverty by empowering marginalized women in rural Africa. Solar Sister focuses on fostering a network of female entrepreneurs who resell Solar Sister clean energy technology, in the form of lights and cookstoves, to people in their communities. The companys efforts are directed toward the region of sub-Saharan Africa where 600 million people have no access to electricity and 700 million people rely on harmful fuels. As of today, the organization has successfully provided 400,000 clean energy products, reaching approximately 2 million people and supporting over 5,000 female entrepreneurs.

Solar Sister finds the link between sustainable development and gender equality by noticing that climate change widens the gender gap in Africa and that women play a key role in the process of implementing green solutions. External pressure in the form of climate-associated natural cataclysms or disease forces governments and households to adapt. These changes are often in distribution of resources, prioritizing male members of the society over their female counterparts. Organizations like Solar Sister are needed to compensate for the gender disparity.

Girls Write Now

If you are looking to support a cause that can directly impact the Columbia community, consider Girls Write Now. This New York City-based organization strives to empower young girls to tell their stories and express themselves through writing. GWN inspires its mentees to develop their natural talents and acquire the much-needed confidence for future success in any field. The initiative effectively fills in gaps in the public school system by providing girls with the necessary resources, guidance, and care to explore critical writing, participate in college preparation programs, and publish their pieces.

The organization primarily focuses on supporting underserved girls and gender-nonconforming youth. In fact, the GWN community currently includes 750 mentors and mentees, of whom 90 percent are girls of color, 90 percent are high need, 75 percent are immigrants or first-generation, and 25 percent are LGBTQ. If you want to get involved or recommend one of GWN programs to someone you know, explore the initiatives website and start making a difference today from the comfort of your dorm room.

We hope these resources will help you deepen your understanding about the cause and connect with new people along the way.

Staff writer Charlotte Wu can be contacted at charlotte.wu@columbiaspectator.com.

Staff writer Victoria Tereshchenko can be contacted at victoria.tereshchenko@columbiaspectator.com. Follow Spectator on Twitter @ColumbiaSpec.

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How to get involved with female empowerment initiatives on campus and beyond - CU Columbia Spectator

In late February, students from around the world participated in the annual Pearl Hacks, a beginner-friendly hackathon for women and non-binary students interested in technology.

The Carolina student-run hackathon, which is supported by the College of Arts & Sciences computer science department and part of Major League Hacking, provides college students across the U.S. with a weekend-long opportunity to compete in a demo fair for prizes, learn and network through tech workshops and meet other students through social events.

Its a really fun way to explore tech in different ways, said Bea Manaligod, Pearl Hacks marketing chair and a senior studying computer science and communications. People can meet each other and feel safe in a field thats completely dominated by men.

Pearl Hacks started in 2014 when Carolina alumna Maegan Clawges saw the gender gap in college hackathons and wanted to start an event that gave women and non-binary students a space to participate. It was one of the first beginner-friendly hackathons targeted toward women at the time.

The directors of Pearl Hacks.

Manaligod said Pearl Hacks helped her feel more comfortable as a computer science major her first year at Carolina. Large computer science lectures felt intimidating, but Pearl Hacks was an opportunity for women and non-binary students to find their place in tech.

Its such a unique atmosphere and a welcoming environment, said Tylar Watson, Pearl Hacks executive chair and a senior studying computer science and women and gender studies.

Our event provides a steppingstone into the major and career opportunities, and it enhances those skills so theyll feel more comfortable in the content and other people around them, Manaligod said.

But students do not have to be a computer science major or have any experience in coding to participate. I attended Pearl Hacks as a participant my first year, said Watson. One of my friends who I went with wasnt a computer science major, but she felt inspired, really loved her experience and ended up declaring her major a week after the event.

This year, the event was hosted virtually due to COVID-19 restrictions, but that only broadened the possibilities. In previous years, the event was limited to students who could travel to Chapel Hill. The new online format offered students from all over the world, including India and the United Kingdom, a chance to participate, increasing project submissions by 25%.

For a virtual event, I was very impressed and excited with the amount of people who enjoyed it, said Manaligod. We had over 500 attendees, 31 countries represented and 69 projects submitted. Though there were tons of hoops to jump through when navigating this new and unfamiliar format, I felt that we were able to recreate the feeling of growth and community as we did when we were in person. We all hope everyone got to grow with Pearl Hacks, and we cant wait for Pearl Hacks 2022.

Not only could participants network with more than 20 sponsors like Amazon and Bandwidth, but they got to meet with students from all over the world and form new tech communities.

The networking was invaluable, the workshops were super informative and well-organized, and of course, the project experience itself opened my eyes to new skills that I hadnt previously had the opportunity to explore, said Melody Griesen, a junior studying computer science at North Carolina State University who was part of Februarys event. I absolutely loved my experience at Pearl Hacks my only frustration is that I have to wait a full year to participate again.

See this years Pearl Hacks projects

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Finding their place in tech - The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - UNC Chapell Hill

March 4, 2021 When you think about your carbon footprint, what comes to mind? Driving and flying, probably. Perhaps home energy consumption or those daily Amazon deliveries. But what about watching Netflix or having Zoom meetings? Ever thought about the carbon footprint of the silicon chips inside your phone, smartwatch or the countless other devices inside your home?

Every aspect of modern computing, from the smallest chip to the largest data center comes with a carbon price tag. For the better part of a century, the tech industry and the field of computation as a whole have focused on building smaller, faster, more powerful devices but few have considered their overall environmental impact.

Researchers at theHarvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences(SEAS) are trying to change that.

Over the next decade, the demand, number and types of devices is only going to grow, said Udit Gupta, a PhD candidate in Computer Science at SEAS. We want to know what impact that will have on the environment and how we, as a field, should be thinking about how we adopt more sustainable practices.

Gupta, along withGu-Yeon Wei, the Robert and Suzanne Case Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, andDavid Brooks, the Haley Family Professor of Computer Science, will presenta paper on the environmental footprint of computingat theIEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture.

The SEAS research is part of a collaboration with Facebook, where Gupta is an intern, and Arizona State University.

The team not only explored every aspect of computing, from chip architecture to data center design, but also mapped the entire lifetime of a device, from manufacturing to recycling, to identify the stages where the most emissions occur.

The team found that most emissions related to modern mobile and data-center equipment come from hardware manufacturing and infrastructure.

A lot of the focus has been on how we reduce the amount of energy used by computers, but we found that its also really important to think about the emissions from just building these processors, said Brooks. If manufacturing is really important to emissions, can we design better processors? Can we reduce the complexity of our devices so that manufacturing emissions are lower?

Take chip design, for example.

Todays chips are optimized for size, performance and battery life. The typical chip is about 100 square millimeters of silicon and houses billions of transistors. But at any given time, only a portion of that silicon is being used. In fact, if all the transistors were fired up at the same time, the device would exhaust its battery life and overheat. This so-called dark silicon improves a devices performance and battery life but its wildly inefficient if you consider the carbon footprint that goes into manufacturing the chip.

You have to ask yourself, what is the carbon impact of that added performance, said Wei. Dark silicon offers a boost in energy efficiency but whats the cost in terms of manufacturing? Is there a way to design a smaller and smarter chip that uses all of the silicon available? That is a really intricate, interesting, and exciting problem.

The same issues face data centers. Today, data centers, some of which span many millions of square feet, account for 1 percent of global energy consumption, a number that is expected to grow.

As cloud computing continues to grow, decisions about where to run applications on a device or in a data center are being made based on performance and battery life, not carbon footprint.

We need to be asking whats greener, running applications on the device or in a data center, said Gupta. These decisions must optimize for global carbon emissions by taking into account application characteristics, efficiency of each hardware device, and varying power grids over the day.

The researchers are also challenging industry to look at the chemicals used in manufacturing.

Adding environmental impact to the parameters of computational design requires a massive cultural shift in every level of the field, from undergraduate CS students to CEOs.

To that end, Brooks has partnered withEmbedded EthiCS, a Harvard program that embeds philosophers directly into computer science courses to teach students how to think through the ethical and social implications of their work. Brooks is including an Embedded EthiCS module on computational sustainability in COMPSCI 146: Computer Architecture this spring.

The researchers also hope to partner with faculty from Environmental Science and Engineering at SEAS and the Harvard University Center for the Environment to explore how to enact change at the policy level.

The goal of this paper is to raise awareness of the carbon footprint associated with computing and to challenge the field to add carbon footprint to the list of metrics we consider when designing new processes, new computing systems, new hardware, and new ways to use devices. We need this to be a primary objective in the development of computing overall, said Wei.

The paper was co-authored by Sylvia Lee, Jordan Tse, Hsien-Hsin S. Lee and Carole-Jean Wu from Facebook and Young Geun Kim from Arizona State University.

Source: Leah Burrows, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

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Examining the Environmental Impact of Computation and Future of Green Computing - HPCwire

The USC AI Futures Symposium took place January 2021

We all interact with AI systems, but they dont interact with people in the same way that we interact with one another. They know very little, do very little, and learn very little compared to humans.

Imagine a future where AI systems are much more knowledgeable about the world, quickly learn to adapt to our preferences, and can be trusted with critical tasks that go beyond just entertainment or shopping. When will we be able to communicate with AI systems in the same ways that we do with other people?

On January 12-13, 2021, researchers gathered at a virtual USC AI Futures Symposium to share their insights on these topics.

Yolanda Gil, Chair of the 2021 USC AI Futures Symposium

We were very excited that over 300 people from all around the world joined us to learn about USC research in human-AI interaction, which is quite a remarkable number of participants for a virtual meeting and attests to the stature of USC in AI research, said Yolanda Gil, Director for Major Strategic AI and Data Science Initiatives at USCs Information Sciences Institute (ISI) and research professor of computer science, who chaired the Symposium.

L-R: Yannis Yortsos, Cyrus Shahabi, and Craig Knoblock

Yannis Yortsos, Dean of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, presented in the opening session. AI is a strategic priority for USC, endorsed by our new President Carol Folt and Provost Chip Zukoski, he emphasized. The very rich interdisciplinary environment of USC is ideally suited for its development across all disciplines and all endeavors.

This sentiment was echoed by Cyrus Shahabi, Chair of the USC Department of Computer Science, who noted that human-AI interaction is a major AI strength at USC and will be the theme of the new department home at the Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg Human-Centered Computation Building. Following that, Craig Knoblock, Keston Executive Director of the USC ISI and research professor of computer science, highlighted the innovative research directions being pursued by USC researchers in this area, including commonsense reasoning, cultural adaptation of dialogue, misinformation, knowledge-rich learning, and responsible decision making.

L-R: Ralph Weischedel, Emilio Ferrara, Craig Knoblock, Wael AbdAlmageed, Ram Nevatia, and Liz Boschee

A session in the symposium was devoted to new research on AI systems that incorporate extensive knowledge about the world. The discussion was led by Ralph Weischedel, research team leader at ISI, and the speakers were Emilio Ferrara, associate professor of communication and computer science and research team leader at ISI; Craig Knoblock; Wael AbdAlmageed, research associate professor; Ram Nevatia, professor of computer science; and Liz Boschee, director at ISI Boston.

Though humans easily acquire common sense from an early age, it has been a notoriously challenging skill for AI to fully grasp. USC is a pioneer in AI research which extracts this type of knowledge from documents, images, and special sources like Wikipedia. While there have been significant advances in extracting individual statements, integrating all those statements into a usable knowledge source and using them to improve the performance of AI systems remains a major challenge.

Furthermore, new insights on detecting and handling misinformation were presented in this session. On social media platforms, its essential to distinguish bots from humans as to alert people to misinformation. Multimedia forensics can give reassurance of the integrity and authenticity of images and videos we see online that may be impersonating others (also known as deepfakes). Sometimes, AI systems simply misunderstand information, and qualifying the origins of any given data can help determine if it can be trusted.

L-R: Sven Koenig, Kristina Lerman, Fred Morstatter, Shri Narayanan, Keith Burghardt, and Bistra Dilkina

Not long after USC computer science emeritus professor George Bekey published a pioneering book on Robot Ethics in 2011, we can already see that ethics concerns have gradually taken center stage in the world of AI research.

This discussion was led by Sven Koenig, professor of computer science, and the USC experts who spoke on this topic were Kristina Lerman, research professor of computer science and research team leader at ISI; Fred Morstatter, research assistant professor of computer science and research lead at ISI; Shri Narayanan, professor of electrical and computer engineering and research director at ISI; Keith Burghardt, computer scientist at ISI; and Bistra Dilkina, associate professor of computer science.

New techniques were presented for identifying and measuring biases in data and understanding their sources in order to mitigate them. Algorithms for ranking, which are used in product recommendations and for search, have long been known to have biases due to popularity or positioning, and new findings show that they can be addressed by reducing instability under different conditions. AI systems can also help reduce biases in media by measuring factors such as on-screen time and speaking time for various demographic groups which expose opportunities to improve equality and diversity.

Inclusiveness and equity are also central topics in AI ethics. Inclusive design of AI systems leads to more equitable experiences that take into account individual differences, particularly in children at different developmental stages. Cultural differences can be identified by observing communications among large groups, with promising results based on analyses of open online collaborative projects from different countries.

Acting responsibly often involves consideration of resource limitations and maximizing impact. Several novel AI techniques were found to be effective for large-scale optimization and machine learning, particularly when learning is informed by downstream decision processes.

L-R: Yan Liu, Pedro Szekely, Greg Van Steeg, Aram Galstyan, Xiang Ren, Jose-Luis Ambite

Though growing at an unprecedented rate, AI systems have a long way to go before they can be on par with human abilities to learning continuously and independently. This session was led by Yan Liu, professor of computer science, and the speakers who addressed this topic included Pedro Szekely, research associate professor in computer science and research director at ISI; Greg Van Steeg, research associate professor in computer science and research lead at ISI; Aram Galstyan, director of Artificial Intelligence Division at ISI and research associate professor in computer science; Xiang Ren, assistant professor of computer science and research lead at ISI; and Jose-Luis Ambite, research associate professor in computer science and research team leader at ISI.

The world is constantly changing, which means our knowledge needs to be up to speed. New research on self-supervised machine learning is opening new doors to using data that has not been augmented with labels, which is what most machine learning approaches require. Studying the effects on continuous learning shows that AI systems that can learn to automatically refresh their beliefs about the world. Another strategy that has been shown to be very effective is distributed federated learning approach, which is used when data is collected but not publicly accessible, as is the case with health and other sensitive data.

As powerful as AI can be, they still need our guidance. New approaches that combine machine learning with human predictions have led to improved forecasting of trends and events. Incorporating human explanations and rationale have also improved machine learning significantly.

L-R: Pedro Szekely, Jon May, Mayank Kejriwal, Jay Pujara, Yolanda Gil, and Marjorie Freedman

USC has a long tradition of tackling problems of societal importance through human-AI interaction. A session was devoted to highlight this work, and was chaired by Pedro Szekely. This session included speakers Jon May, research assistant professor in computer science and research lead at ISI; Mayank Kejriwal, research assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering and research lead at ISI; Jay Pujara, research assistant professor in computer science and research lead at ISI; Yolanda Gil; and Marjorie Freedman, research team leader at ISI.

In times of natural disasters, victims and local first responders communicate in their own languages, which creates barriers for aid coming NGOs and other international organizations. AI technologies that are able to quickly create automated translators for regional languages are radically changing the ability to support emergency response and humanitarian aid.

Protecting runaway children from forced prostitution is often difficult due to worldwide commercial sex trafficking through online advertising and transactions that are difficult to track. Fortunately, significant progress is being made through AI technologies which automatically identify and crawl suspicious sites to detect patterns and trends, thereby generating leads and evidence for law enforcement.

Under-resourced entrepreneurs cannot easily develop solid business plans because of the difficulties in getting comprehensive knowledge about prospective competitors, customers, and existing technologies most relevant to their idea. Statistically, over 50% of new businesses fail within the first 5 years. A special customized market intelligence can be delivered through AI systems that automatically integrates years of data for hundreds of thousands of companies collected from webpages, patent filings, spreadsheets, social media, and regulatory filings with government agencies.

Furthermore, AI scientists could accelerate research by automatically analyzing the wealth of data that is now available in the sciences. AI algorithms for systematic search lead to better solutions by quickly exposing any inconsistencies in findings. AI techniques also reduce the time to create new models for complex systems. AI systems can assist and ultimately collaborate with scientists to accelerate discoveries.

Lastly, privacy and security can be significantly enhanced with AI approaches. For example, social engineering attackers (known as spear-phishing) can be deterred if the cost of an attack is heightened when they are engaged by AI systems instead of by the intended humans. Many other AI approaches are being applied to secure financial transactions, detect and fix code vulnerabilities, and predicting and detecting attacks.

L-R: Elizabeth Churchill, Antonio Damasio, Prem Natarajan

Two keynote speakers from the industry discussed significant challenges in human-AI interaction. Elizabeth Churchill, Director of User Experience at Google and an expert in the design of interactive technologies, made the provocative statement that systems create the conditions under which humans make errors, but the nature of those errors cannot be anticipated because every person is different. Prem Natarajan, Vice President of Amazons Alexa, talked about adapting AI systems by teaching them new concepts when the need arises during interactions.

A third keynote speaker was Antonio Damasio, USC Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Philosophy, who discussed consciousness in terms of how behavior is governed by emotional states (e.g., fear) grounded in feelings which are directly linked to biological states (e.g., pain, hunger). He posed the intriguing question of whether consciousness will be relevant for the design of artificial intelligence systems grounded in physical sensors.

Maja Mataric

The closing session of the symposium featured Maja Mataric, USC Interim Vice President of Research and professor of computer science. She encouraged the AI community to consider the use of AI for major societal challenges. She said that AI must be embraced by major institutions and their operations all the way down: how were distributing vaccines, how were communicating about mask-wearing, and how were approaching equity.

As Mataric succinctly stated, AI is not for the futureAI is now.

For more information about the event, including videos of the sessions, click here.

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Symposium on the Future of AI: Will AIs Ever Be One of Us? - USC Viterbi | School of Engineering - USC Viterbi School of Engineering