A visit to 10th Grace Hooper Celebration India(GHCI) 2019

Looking to know more about what is GHCI?Or something like why GHCI is a big deal? GHCI is one of the biggest celebrations of women in industries. What's so exciting about GHCI?  For starters let's say that they have a career fair in which there are booths from companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Goldman Sachs, etc. They have men and women senior-level leaders like VP/CVP etc of big companies like Linkedin, BNY Mellon, etc as well as the new companies that are growing fast. And if that doesn't interest you, some cool goodies are given too by these companies for a simple registration, quiz, etc and the list goes on. Let's get to the main course before we are already full :P.


What is GHCI (Grace Hopper Celebration India)?

GHC is one of the largest technical women conferences in Asia and the US. It was co-founded by Dr. Anita Borg and Dr. Telle Whitney. in 1994. The India chapter of GHC i.e. GHCI is organized by Anita B.org India since 2010. This year, GHCI got 10 years old. There are talks from a keynote, experts, and leaders in their fields, poster presentations, and career fairs.

How to attend?
Register at their website for attending and pay the fees. The fee in 2019 was around 20k. You can ask your company/school to sponsor you.

A glimpse of GHCI 2019:
Day 1:

The venue was Bangalore International Convention Center this year. On the entrance, everybody who was registered was getting GHCI I-card for the next three days along with some goodies. Then we had an awesome lunch and sat for the keynote talks.
The first keynote talk was given by Mrs. Padamshree Warrior. The other keynote talk was given by Debjani Ghosh. One of my personal favorite takeaways from the second talk was "No Guilt". One of the women's biggest setback is that they have guilt about everything they do. If they are taking care of the kid, they are guilty of not being at the office and vice-versa. Just be wherever you think is needed more at that moment and don't be guilty about it. The two situations are like a metal ball and a crystal ball and one will be dropped. You have to decide which one is the crystal ball every day.
There were cultural programs in the middle like singing and dancing performances. Here is the link to GHCI 19 Anthem:

Day 2 and Day 3:

On this day, there were a lot of talks scheduled in parallel and career fair and tech expo going on for the full day. I will be talking about the talks I attended and my career fair and tech expo experience.


Talks: 

• Exploring Dark data - The speakers were Lavanya Tekumalla(Aifonc), Meenal Pravin Bhosale(Sr VP, BNY Mellon), Urvi Adatia(VP, Amex), Smita Ojha(Google) and Shobha Warrior(Wells Fargo). Every day, each industry produces lots of data like output logs that are being generated and never processed. So, this unexplored/untapped data is known as dark data. One of the main problems in exploiting this data is the readiness of tools and resources. The panel talked about scalability, compliance issues and the future of dark data.

• Experts Meetups - There were round tables of speakers of every talk. You can go ahead and have a talk with any of them to clear your doubts or just to have a casual talk. I went to meet the panel of dark data. All the ladies were a pioneer in their fields. All were at senior positions in their companies in the data science domain. We started talking about dark data first and then went into other discussions also. They were telling about what is the big hype about making connections in the industry and how to do that. To sum up, it was a really interesting chat. This part was one of the highlights of GHCI 19 for me.

• Real-time Text-Search on Encrypted Data - The speakers were Anush Kumar Jawahar(VP, Goldman Sachs) and Swarnashree MS(Goldman Sachs). The data stored on the cloud is mostly encrypted these days due to data and privacy regulations. To perform a search on encrypted data, a plugin is used by them on ElasticSearch type search engines and key-value stores like Cassandra with reducing reliability on encrypted disks.

•  Self Driving Cars: The speakers were Saranya Das(Analog), Sudeshna Gupta(Nvidia) and Reecha Jajodia(Nvidia). The first speaker explained about state estimation of the surroundings. LIDAR and RADAR are used for identifying static and moving objects respectively. Semantic segmentation of the scene is done to identify roads. The second speaker talked about real-time optimization in these cars by keeping bounded latency instead of focussing on no latency. Throughput has a similar case. Optimization is only achieved after determinism.

Career Fair:

A lot of companies had their career booths, where you can go, register your details into their database and talk about career opportunities in their company. To attract attendees, these booths had exciting prizes for either registration or playing a game or for something else. There were some lottery prizes too like Google Home, OnePlus 7T phone, etc. You can get pictures clicked on some booths and get a copy of that. Overall, It was fun and exciting to be in this hall.

Tech Expo: 

A few companies were showcasing new experiments/technical work going on in their companies. Like when I went to IBM's stall, they showed me a robot dancing.

In Microsoft's Tech Expo stall, there were experiments related to a humanoid robot, tapping on quantum computing power for doing fast processing and smart wearables like controls in shirt buttons, mouse trackpad in jeans, etc. There was one other company that was working on an interesting problem. The problem was to read the text and decide if it's not claiming any false information or statistics that can affect the reputation of the institution with which the text is related. It was really interesting to see such good applications and research happening in industries.

Closing Ceremony: At the end of Day 3, there was a closing ceremony with a keynote talk with Beena Ammanath, Founder, Humans of AI. After that, there was an awesome band performance by the Aathma band with singer Soundarya Jayachandran. Here is a glimpse of that:

Conclusion:

Summarizing, it's worth going at least once to attend GHCI. There is so much to learn here. I didn't just learn in talks but a lot when I met senior people in meetup sessions or while having lunch. A very good place to do networking, I must say. Yo get a chance to learn a lot about what research/experiments are going inside the industry. Most important of all, it was fun to be there. :)
Thanks to Microsoft, that I got a chance to be a part of such an amazing event.


Tips:

1. Register in technical workshops asap, some of them have limited seats
2. Plan your day very carefully. You can't attend all the talks, but whichever talk you attend reach 5 mins before to avoid missing the start.
3. Network in Expert Meetups. Get mentoring, if you feel like, in Speed Mentoring sessions. Talk to unknown people around you. Everyone has an interesting story to share.
4. Go to the career fair and tech expo stalls, you might come across some really interesting experiments.
5. Enjoy ;P 

Note: In no way, this is an official post from GHCI, neither I am writing on their behalf nor they are paying me to do so. This is no more than experience as a GHCI Attendee.