Doina Precup is applying Romanian wisdom to the gender gap in the fields of AI and computer science.
The associate professor at McGill University and research team lead at AI startup DeepMind spoke with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about her personal experiences, along with the AI4Good Lab she co-founded to give women more access to machine learning training.
Growing up in Romania, Precup attended a high school that specialized in computer science and a technical university. She didn’t experience gender disparity in these learning environments.
“If anything, programming was considered a very good job for women, because you did not need to be working in the fields,” she explained.
It made the gap in Canadian universities and companies even more noticeable. At McGill, Precup saw that female students were hesitant to speak up or pursue graduate studies.
Together with Angelique Mannella, CEO of AM Consulting and an Amazon employee, Precup was inspired to start the AI4Good Lab in 2017.
“Emphasizing the creativity and the fun in computer science and algorithms is really important, for everybody” — Doina Precup [04:30]
“I also noticed that people were sometimes afraid to speak up in classes, even if they were really good at based on their exams and their assignments and their projects” — Doina Precup [05:43]
Robots can do amazing things. Compare even the most advanced robots to a three-year-old, however, and they can come up short. UC Berkeley Professor Pieter Abbeel has pioneered the idea that deep learning could be the key to bridging that gap: creating robots that can learn how to move through the world more fluidly and naturally.
Tara Chklovski is founder and CEO of Iridescent, a nonprofit that provides access to hands-on learning opportunities to prepare underrepresented children and adults for the future of work. We spoke with her about the UN’s AI for Good Global Summit last May in Geneva and the AI World Championship, part of the AI Family Challenge, also in May in Silicon Valley.
With “fake news” embedding itself into, well, our news, it’s become more important than ever to distinguish between content that is fake or authentic. That’s why Vagelis Papalexakis, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Riverside, developed an algorithm that detects fake news with 75 percent accuracy.
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The post AI4Good: Canadian Lab Empowers Women in Computer Science appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.