Moving On From Wimlds

Moving from: WiMLDS

When I joined WiMLDS in 2015, the NYC chapter was just a few months old, and there were only 2 chapters. Now at the end of 2019, there are 80+ chapters, and it’s been wonderful to contribute to and observe the growth of WiMLDS.

After 5 years as a WiMLDS organizer, global team and board member, I will be moving on in January 2020 to pursue other projects. My last day will be January 15, 2020.

Moving on to: Data Umbrella

My next endeavor is exploring intersectional diversity (meaning considering dimensions of diversity outside of gender), beginning with Data Umbrella, which is a community for underrepresented persons in data science:

• Meetup: Data Umbrella
• Twitter: @DataUmbrella
• LinkedIn: Data Umbrella

Lessons Learned

Being an organizer for the past 5 years has shaped my perspective on a number of aspects:

• Thinking globally is important and imperative.
• Intersectional diversity (also referred to as covariance diversity) is worth considering and focusing on multiple dimensions of diversity could accordingly move all diversity initiatives forward.
• Welcoming and including allies is crucial in moving the needle on diversity outcomes.

Contacting Me

I am easy to find on social media and my contact information is available on my website.

Thank you to everyone for all your support over the years, and I look forward to crossing paths with you in the data science community.

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APPENDIX: My WiMLDS Contributions

These are contributions I have made to WiMLDS over the past 5 years.

New York Chapter of WiMLDS

• NYC chapter organizer
  • organized dozens of meetup events and workshops over the course of 5 years: past NYC WiMLDS events
• Mentored new organizers in 2018 and 2019
• Advisor to NYC WiMLDS from January 2015 to spring 2015, prior to joining as an organizer in spring 2015
• Co-organized 2018 WiMLDS/WiDS/SAP conference

Scikit-learn Open Source Sprints

• Organized 5 scikit-learn sprints
  • NYC 2017
  • NYC 2018
  • NYC 2019
  • Nairobi 2019
  • Bay Area 2019
• Wrote Sprint Impact Reports (goal: communicate our events, accomplishments and impact to community)
  • Nairobi 2019 Sprint Impact Report
  • NYC 2017-2018 Sprint Impact Report

I also wrote a comprehensive article documenting the process: How to Organize a Scikit-learn Sprint so other chapters can continue to organize. I provided these resources to the Berlin WiMLDS chapter to organize their Berlin 2020 sprint.

Sponsorship

• Built relationship with sponsors over the course of 5 years which accounted for significant funding for WiMLDS
• Created and distributed Global Newsletter to increase resources and communication WiMLDS chapter organizers globally in 2019
• Was a guest on DataFramed podcast
  • recorded in November 2018 and released in February 2019
  • resulted in increasing our chapters 50%, from 39 to 63 WiMLDS Q1 report in less than 2 months

Marketing

• Initiated the summary and reporting of WiMLDS chapter data to communicate our reach publicly:
  • 2019 Q1 report
  • 2018 Annual report
  • October 2018 report: initial report
• Analyzed and wrote report on NLP Analysis Of Five Years Of WiMLDS Meetup Events
• Worked with local chapters to bring meetup chapters under WiMLDS ownership and tag the meetup groups so live statistics could easily be retrievable: Meetup WiMLDS Map
• Presented at O’Reilly AI NYC 2019 Better Together Diversity Luncheon
• Implemented consistent “Welome Messages” for all meetup chapters so links to social media forums were directly accessible to increase followers on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and more.

Global Chapters Support

• Recruited two new members to join global team from Europe and Kenya to increase global representation
• Created a “zap” on Zapier: a system to manage new organizers (now over 150) to the meetup group and process their applications so they can be added to the wimlds website. This improved efficiency, saved time and ensure more organizers were added to our website.
• Recruited and guided a volunteer to create and design our website. This project was initiated and overseen by me in 2016.
• Initiated project to create WiMLDS Overview Slides so organizers worldwide would be able to share history and statistics about WiMLDS
• Created 5 Years (birthday) video
• Created Conferences List for community
• Supported global chapters by responding to inquiries, processing payments, etc.

New York Chapter Events Organized

• Intro to PyTorch Workshop, Nov 2019
• 2019 Scikit-learn Sprint, Aug 2019 (Saturday workshop)
• Facebook Artificial Intelligence (FB AI) , Apr 2019
• Women in Data Science Conference at SAP, Mar 2019 (full day event)
• Understanding Probability Theory With Exercises in R and Python , Jan 2019 (Saturday workshop)
• Tips for Better Predictive Models (@Foursquare) , Dec 2018
• Intro To Neo4j Graph Database (@NY Times) , Oct 2018
• Kristen Sosulski of NYU + Exploring Public Data with Enigma, Oct 2018
• 2018 Scikit-learn Sprint, Sep 2018 (Saturday workshop)
• GraphHack 2018: Neo4j Buzzword Bingo Hackathon , Sep 2018
• Deep Learning: CNNs, Jan 2018
• Investigating Complex Data Relationships through Graphs , Oct 2017
• Engima and the Big Data Picture, Aug 2017
• Scikit-learn Sprint, Mar 2017 (Saturday workshop)
• Neural Networks Workshop, Jan 2017 (Saturday workshop)
• Recommendation Engines Workshop, Nov 2016 (Saturday workshop)
• Faster Python Computing with Pyfora, Aug 2016
• Scalable Machine Learning with H2O, Jul 2016
• Big Data Applications at AT&T Labs (featuring hands-on RCloud demo), Jun 2016
• Image Recognition Through Deep Learning & Neural Networks , Mar 2016
• Advanced Machine Learning Tutorial, Feb 2016
• Intermediate Python Hands-on Workshop, Dec 2015 (Saturday workshop)
• Hands-on Intro to Django, Oct 2015 (Saturday workshop)
• A Hands-on Introduction to D3, Jun 2015 (Saturday workshop)