Grace Hopper Celebration

For the past 3 days, I had the honor to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration for women in computing in Orlando, FL as an Anita Borg GHC Scholar. I attended everything from the career fair to speaker sessions and even fun parties.

One of my favorite talks was given at the closing keynote by Ayanna Howard, a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology. She spoke on the phenomenon of humans listening to robots even if they felt the robot was wrong. Most people's reasoning was that they didn't think the robots could be wrong because the developer that helped make the robot couldn't have been wrong. At the end of it all her point was that robots are coming, in many forms, whether we like it or not. And there will be developers who make these robots. And hopefully the group of people who get to decide what a robot decides are diverse and inclusive of women.

Besides the speakers, getting to meet with many different companies and hearing what they do was very interesting. On top of the companies I visited, I also spoke with universities that had opportunities in research.