Women in Data Science Maastricht 2021
On Tuesday 9 March 2021, the Institute of Data Science organised the second edition of Women in Data Science (WiDS) Maastricht. The virtual conference was attended by over 85 students, academics and professionals. The online conference featured four outstanding women who are contributing to data science knowledge in academia and industry.
Speakers
- Dr. Anne Fleur van Veenstra, Senior Scientist and Director of Science at TNO. "AI in public policy: opportunities and challenges".
- Dr. Rachel Cavill, Data Science and Knowledge Engineering, Maastricht University. "Reporting robust research results – perspectives from data science in the biomedical field".
- Prof. Dr. Anna Wilbik, Data Science and Knowledge Engineering, Maastricht University. "Does explainability imply shifted responsibility?"
- Prof. Dr. Anda Iamnitchi, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Florida. "Modeling Multi-Platform Information Diffusion in Social Media: Data-Driven Observations".
Through their work, participants reflected on responsible data science as a topic from different points of views: how data science impacts society and the importance of accountability, transparency as well as privacy as an important component of data science. We hope that the speakers inspired them in their future endeavors!
Datathon and Amrapali Zaveri Awards
We also held a Datathon associated with WiDS 2021 and we awarded two Amrapali Zaveri Awards: The Early Career Data Scientist Award and the Amrapali Zaveri Data Science Award.
The video of the Amrapali Zaveri Awards can be viewed here.
A summary of the Datathon event and the presentation from the winning team can be found here.
Discussion Panels
Conference participants were able to join one of two discussion panels, one about responsible data science by design, the other about data science careers.
In the responsible data science session, moderated by Dr. Visara Urovi and Dr. Linda Rieswijk, panel members discussed the state of responsibility in their domains and organisations. They each related that responsibility was still evolving in those domains and needed more attention. The video for the responsible data science session can be viewed here; the slides from the responsible data science session can be found here.
The career in data science panel discussion was moderated by Dr. Rianne Fijten and Dr. Constance Sommerey. Dr. Rachel Cavill and Dr. Anda Iamnitchi described their career paths into data science and gave some advice. Dr. Cavill underscored the importance of acquiring programming skills to build self-reliance and better understanding of methods and data. She also emphasized building critical thinking skills to be able to ask, “why do my results look like this?” Dr. Iamnitchi related some important moments in her career, such as choosing people to work with over the institution or money and the importance of good collaborations. Another mentor gave her important advice: "in research, do what you love--hopefully success will follow, or at least you’ll have fun". You can view the video of the career panel session here.
The conference closed with a career networking session organised by BISS. Several companies, Medtronic, CBS, CaptainVR and Cadchain provided parallel sessions where they interacted with the audience. Some key take-aways from the career networking session can be found here.