Welcome to WiDS Texas 2021

WiDS Texas is an independent event that is organized as part of the annual WiDS Worldwide conference organized by Stanford University and an estimated 150+ locations worldwide, which features outstanding women doing outstanding work in the field of data science. All genders are invited to attend all WiDS Worldwide conference events. We aim to inspire and educate data scientists worldwide, regardless of gender, and to support women in the field.

WiDS Texas will take place over a period of 12 weeks from start of April to end of June, 2021 and will consist of a series of events including a datathon, technical talks, a panel discussion & a networking session.

Series Schedule (April 7 - June 30, 2021)

Follow us on EventBrite and join us on LinkedIn to get updates on event registration. Check it out below!

• April 7, 2021, 12pm-1pm CT: WiDS Tech Talks
  • Rebecca Brooks, Joan Zaldivar, Data Analytics Internal Audit, McKesson, “Employee Opinion Survey Sentiment Analysis”
  • Sunna Quazi, Data Scientist, CyrusOne, “Leveraging the Lake: Cloud Infrastructure to Enable Data Science Saturation”
  • Moderator: Liliana Torres, Senior Data Analyst, McKesson
• May 6, 2021, 12pm-1pm CT: Panel Discussion on “Bias in Data Science: How to Detect, Diagnose & Mitigate”
  • Jennifer Aue, Distinguished Designer & Director for AI Transformation, IBM
  • Lydia Brothers, Decision Science Analyst, USAA
  • Shirin Samani, Data Scientist / Chief Engineer, NeuDax
  • Alejandra Zertuche, M.B.A., Chief Executive Officer, Enflux
  • Moderator: Linda Brewster Meffert, Business Consultant
• May 17, 2021: WiDS Texas Datathon Kick-off (link) - co-organized by:
  • Gaby Arellano Bello, Customer Success Engineer, MathWorks
  • Pushkar Kumar Jain, Senior Data Scientist, Arundo Analytics
  • Samaya Madhavan, Advisory Software Engineer, IBM
  • Tailai Wen, Lead Data Scientist, Crayon
• June 2, 2021, 12pm-1pm CT: WiDS Tech Talks
  • Annamaria Balazs, Manager / Data Scientist, IBM, “Journey to AI: A Forecasting and Optimization Use Case”
  • Meltem Ballan, Ph.D., Professional Fellow - Data Science, General Motors, “What makes AI intelligent and how intelligent is AI?”
  • Moderator: Linda Brewster Meffert, Business Consultant
• June 17, 2021, 12pm-1pm CT: WiDS Tech Talks
  • Emma Zohner, Statistics, Rice University, “A Graphical Tool for Assessing Losslessness of Latent Feature Representations”
  • Melissa Kazemi-Rad, Data Scientist, Crayon, “Automating CI/CD for Data Science Projects using Cloud Services”
  • Moderator: Jo-Anne Ting, VP of Data Science, DataSeer

• June 30, 2021, 12pm-1pm CT: Networking Event

• June 30, 2021, 6pm-7pm CT: Datathon Winning Teams: Solution Presentations & Awards (link)

Sponsors

A big thank you to our sponsors for making WiDS Texas possible.

Organizers

This WiDS event series is brought to you by the following WiDS 2021 Texas ambassadors:

• Gaby Arellano Bello, WiDS Dallas
• Pushkar Kumar Jain, WiDS Houston
• Samaya Madhavan, WiDS Dallas
• Linda Brewster Meffert, WiDS San Antonio
• Jo-Anne Ting, WiDS Houston
• Liliana Torres, WiDS Dallas
• Tailai Wen, WiDS Dallas