We just wrapped the final week of the WITS 2020 Virtual Summit. Thank you to all of the attendees, speakers, sponsors, partners, and to the amazing TechGirlz team who helped produce the event. 

Read below to see a recap of Week Three of the virtual summit. As well as some information about WITS in 2021. 

Check out what happened in week one in this recap. Learn about week two in this recap.

Week Three of the WITS Virtual Summit opened with Corgibytes CEO, Andrea Goulet, discussing empathy in tech. Although Andrea was not able to join us in person, she demonstrated why she is a world-class speaker by obtaining permission from the Domain Driven Design Europe conference, where she had given this talk earlier in the year, for WITS to show the video of that session. Thank you Andrea and Domain Driven Design for giving our attendees the opportunity to hear that important presentation!

We went Walking Through an Exploding Star and learned how NASA uses data to visualize the galaxy with Kim Arcand, Visualization & Emerging Tech Lead at NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory

Subhasree Chatterjee, Senior Data Analyst at LexisNexis shared a case study on How to Drive Data Driven Change in a Legacy Organization. 

Denise Wong, Principal Robotics Engineer at Exyn Technologies took us Journeying Into Uncharted Territory with Flying Robots: An Intersectional Perspective on the Drone Industry. 

Attendees learned about Aligning Your Cloud Strategy with DevSecOps from Dominique West, Cloud Security Engineer at Cloudreach

Maureen McElaney, Developer Advocate at IBM, shared insights into Digital Discrimination: Cognitive Bias in Machine Learning. 

We learned about the tech that will let you Design Your Space with a Little Help from AR and Computer Vision from Rachana Sreedhar, Software Engineer at Wayfair.

Afreen Aliya, Software Developer at DRW, explained Differential Privacy – What is it and why should I care?

We explored the Evolution of Commerce with Shyna Hegde , Sr. Principal Architect – Commerce at Accenture.

DevOps Engineer at Britecore, Heather Luna, demonstrated building an Alexa skill.

Empathy for the User: Why Research Matters was explained by Amy Gawronski Zuccaro, Head of Design Operations at SAP.io

Attendees learned What’s the deal with Containerisation? from Ritika Nevatia, Software Engineer at Apple

Week Three wrapped up with some insightful and fun discussions about tech trends and career advice during the networking session in Slack. We know that not everyone likes to network in the same way so throughout the summit we provided three different types of networking on different platforms. Thank you to all of our attendees for letting us experiment. Congratulations to the raffle prize winners! Thank you everyone who participated in the networking and the contests! 

We are already working on plans for WITS in 2021. Due to the global pandemic, things are still a bit up in the air, but we hope to make announcements of the 2021 WITS schedule and open the 2021 call for speaking proposals in the near future. Make sure you are on our email list to be notified of future summits and call for speaking proposals 

Thank you to the WITS 2020 Virtual Summit Sponsors and Partners. 

Platinum Sponsors 

AWS

Comcast

TEKSystems

 

Gold Sponsors 

Cloudbakers

DellBoomi

Guru

Susquehanna International Group (SIG) 

 

Silver Sponsor

Vistar Media

 

Bronze Sponsors

Cerner

Kyruus

Promptworks

 

Partners

AchieveUnite

Dineable

General Assembly – Denver

Innovation Women

North Central Wisconsin Workforce Development Board

wiseHer

All post-expenses proceeds from the Women in Tech Summit (WITS) support TechGirlz, a non-profit organization that inspires middle-school girls to explore all the possibilities in technology. 

 

WITS and TechGirlz are programs of Creating IT Futures, the non-profit division of CompTIA

Learn more about the CompTIA Tech Career Academy