2018 was my first time attending the Grace Hopper Conference (GHC), as well as my first time as a Delegate!
What is GHC?
GHC is the world’s biggest celebration for women in computing, honoring Grace Hopper, an American computer scientist, and a pioneer in computer
programming (she invented one of the first compiler related tools).
I strongly recommend all men-women alike in Technology to experience it for the inspiration, energy and enthusiasm shown by the flourishing women
technologists’ community. It’s amazing to see so many bright young women technologists on one platform who are inspired to change the world with their
ideas and skills.
About Expedia’s Presence at GHCI
Expedia India attended GHCI for the very first time as a Sponsor. It was apparent that Expedia was making its presence felt! On Day One itself we got a
whopping 2.4K footfall! Candidates were registering themselves to get to know about Expedia and the career opportunities it offers. Registered candidates
were given swags to candidates which included an Expedia Passport holder, Homeaway Stickers and Expedia group QR code cards. We had setup a
small survey asking the candidates about their dream destinations and projected the same on a live map
with the count of people choosing a particular destination to make the registration more interactive.
My Key Takeaways
I just came back from GHCI ’18. It was an amazing experience and I want to share with you my key takeaways from the conference: -
- Being an Expedia Representative — Flaunting unique Expedia t-shirts on all the three days, I felt so fulfilled sharing my journey with people
coming to Expedia Group booth to register with us. I connected with more than 500 people and engaged them in the survey going on in our
booth, encouraging them to visit our Careers page and joining us in future.
- Building network — as a delegate, I was provided many events to engage with other women, and made connections, talked to women in
different levels of their education and careers; the following sessions were specially designed to build networks among the technology enthusiast
present in the conference:
- Google’s Networking session held at Taj hotel - Google hosted a workshop — I’m Remarkable — where I found many other women
that feel the same way as I felt—I saw that I am not alone, and I found out that my fears are nothing if compared with my strengths.
- Microsoft’s Networking session held at Taj hotel - Microsoft hosted this session specifically to showcase the way they are progressing
in the field of AI and Deep learning. They hosted speed Mentoring session where there was round table discussion on questions relating
to careers in Microsoft.
- Empowerment — I felt empowered, and my sense of belonging in technology was increased. I felt the need to help and encourage other girls
and women to grow in their careers in technology. that’s one of the reasons why I’m sharing my takeaways.
- Learn about different technology fields —the conference provides many talks, presentations, and workshops. Before the conference, one could
arrange their own schedule via the App specially designed for GHCI, and attend the ones they are more interested in. I learned a lot of different
technology stacks, tips about growing in career, and how can I make my space in work environment via the following talks and sessions:
- Pattern Based Authentication System - the presenter showed how during registration of user credentials, the user will be prompted to select a matrix size and a shape of his
choice. The matrix of selected size will then be displayed, with random symbols filled, and the selected shape will be over-layed within
the matrix. He may move the shape over the matrix and as the shape is moved, the symbols are re-arranged, such that symbols
arranged inside the boundary of the shape are not repeated. The order of symbols selected by the end user inside the boundary of the
shape will be used to determine a pattern-based password. A 2-way authentication system with an agent, requiring a single password, is
suggested in this approach. A first computing device (tablet) for providing user credentials and an obfuscated password to an application
server for authentication, and a second computing device different from the first (mobile) for generating the password constitute the
system. more information here. As the customer identity team is planning to work in MFA in Q2. this session provided a detailed approach as to how MFA could be
implemented in a single step.
- Keynote Speeches
-
Lori Beer, Global CIO of JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Lori made the talk very candid. She talked about her career where she experimented with different roles and how she took that
leap of faith at each and every step. each and every woman in the room could relate to her experiences and took away
learnings from the same.
-
Vaishali Kasture, Founder of Sonder Connect
Vaishali shared her experiences from the industry where she experienced a skewed gender ratio and yet she rose from the situation by being sure of herself.
she stated some fun facts related to how women are hesitant to speak up about their achievements even when they have 100% achieved it while men tend to boast about their achievements even when they have achieved only 60% of the goal.
Vaishali very well inspired the audience to be more forthcoming and speak-up in both professional and personal life.
-
How the Brain Interprets Content - Latest Advancement in Natural Language Understanding
the session was about Categorizing and inferring from nested co-referenced content are some of the key challenges faced by a majority
of document repositories – something that our brain is excellent at doing. For e.g.: Understanding sentiments from a research report or
interpreting the tone in email conversations, answering questions from annual reports on the summary of investments made by the firm
and so on.
- Fake Article Detection from Multilingual Documents - A Deep Learning Approach
In this paper, they addressed the negative social impact caused by fake news by proposing a model that is able to detect fake news in
multilingual documents. The model works in two segments first it converts multilingual documents to English by the use of a modified
neural machine translator that uses a bidirectional recurrent neural network.
- Engineering Against the Hacker’s Mind
the session was to Understand the mind of a hacker and what are the known threat vectors. What does a kill chain involve and how does
detection of an attack happen? Can the damage be contained? How does AI help in improving the cyber security posture of an
organization? What are the solutions being created and how effective are they?
- Meeting peers and making new friends—I met some people that I was talking to before the conference—from Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc.—
meeting in person and sharing experiences was one of the conference’s highlights for me;
- New city to explore — I enjoyed the city of Bangalore. yes! I worked hard, I stayed a day after the conference, wandered around and explored
the city hosting GHCI—Bangalore. I had the pleasure of experiencing my first ever journey in an airplane.
Improvements for the upcoming representations at GHCI
As Expedia attended the conference for the first time, we can improve on a few fronts in the next GHCI representation:
- We can have higher number of representatives. As we call it the more the merrier!! similarly the more representation we have, the more people
we’ll be able to engage. Companies like Google, Microsoft, American Express, SAP, Adobe etc. had higher participation because of the same
reason.
- Customer Identity team could have even showcased in-house technologies and solutions that we have invented for various problems faced
at Expedia. There are numerous platforms provided by GHCI: like tech talks, hands-on sessions, iConnect sessions where we can have our
representation.
- We can also gather Resumes and even host on-the-spot interviews to hire potential candidates for our company. GHCI provides special areas
to companies for conducting interviews and it seemed very convenient as well. For the same purpose, we can include HR in the event as well.
- We can have more activities like quizzes, lucky draws, coding challenges, flash mobs etc. This makes the booth more interactive and keeps
audience involved for longer durations.
Regardless of my goal at GHC (represent Expedia, learn new tech tools, expand networking, and watch talks/presentations), I definitely enjoyed my time
and made the most of it. Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity