Program for the 2023 IEEE International Symposium on Women in Services Computing (WISC 2023)

Sunday July 2
Soldier Field

9:25 - 10:35 CDT - WISC 1 Session Chairs: Kaoutar El Maghraoui, Principal Research Scientist, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center; Adjunct Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University Houda Chakiri, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Al Akhawayn University Ifrane Shubhi Asthana, Senior Research Software Engineer, IBM Almaden Research Center
		Opening Welcome WISC General Chair	Kaoutar El Maghraoui Principal Research Scientist, IBM TJ Watson Research Center Adjunct Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University
		WISC Award acceptance speech	Dr. Manar Abu Taleb 2023 TCSVC WISC Awardee Professor & Chair of Research Outreach Dept, University of Sharjah
		Keynote 1: Sustainable Computing: Challenges & Opportunities Dr. Tamar Eilam IBM Fellow, Chief Scientist Sustainable Computing Research It is now more important than ever for technologists to address the rapidly increasing energy and carbon cost of computing. In this talk I will cover the trends contributing to the accelerated increase of energy demand for computing, as well as the exciting research open questions and opportunities in this fast evolving space.	Dr. Tamar Eilam is an IBM Fellow and Chief Scientist for Sustainable Computing in the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, New York. Tamar is leading a technical strategy aiming at drastically reducing the carbon footprint associated with computing across infrastructure, systems, and software, data and data science.Tamar completed a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in the Technion, Israel in 2000. She joined the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York as a Research Staff Member that same year. She was recognized as an IBM Fellow in 2014.
		Keynote 2: Power of AI - Reimage Next Gen Enterprise Group Functions for Finance Dr. Sai Zeng Head of AI/ML CoE, Distinguished Engineer, UBS CDIO Group Functions Group functions in banks cover a wide range of areas including IT, Finance, Risk, Compliance, Legal, HR, Marketing and Communications, Sourcing, and etc.. Those functions are vital to successful business performance and delivery of superior customer service. The AI market is reaching critical mass. To capitalize on the potential that AI can offer, a selective set of case studies will be presented in this talk to showcase the power of AI in transforming and reimaging Group Functions in UBS.	Dr. Sai Zeng is the head of Data Science for UBS CDIO Group Functions who is embarking on the journey to digitize, automate, and optimize UBS's Group Functions. She established the AI CoE and continues to grow the data science excellency to capitalize on business potentials.  Previously, she worked at IBM Research where she held various positions as Chief Technology Strategist, Principal Research Scientist, Research Manager, and Chief Architect to bring cutting-edge innovations to life. Sai has 50+ publications and over 50+ patent disclosures.  She has been Chair and Program Committee for many international conferences.

10:50 - 12:00 CDT - WISC 2 Session Chair: Jordan Murray, Hybrid Cloud Software Engineer, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
		Workshop: Pretrain Foundation Models on AWS Emily Webber Principal Machine Learning Specialist Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services From casual to masked language modeling, diffusion and more, there are fascinating techniques for leveraging vast amounts of unsupervised data on accelerators. Come learn not just what these techniques are, but how to apply them at scale for performance gains on the cloud. In this session we’ll break down the key tasks of pretraining a foundation model, from dataset selection, to analysis, bias mitigation, transformation, pretraining, and model evaluation.	Emily Webber is a Principal Machine Learning Specialist Solutions Architect and keynote speaker at Amazon Web Services, where she has led the development of countless solutions and features on Amazon SageMaker. She has guided and mentored hundreds of teams, developers, and customers in their machine learning journey on AWS. She specializes in large-scale distributed training in vision, language, generative AI, and is active in the scientific communities in these areas. She hosts YouTube and Twitch series on the topic, regularly speaks at re:Invent, writes many blog posts, and leads workshops in this domain worldwide.
		PhD Forum Presentations

14:00 - 15:10 - WISC 3 PANEL SESSION & PHD FORUM
		Panel on Responsible & Sustainable AI Moderators	Bouchra Bouqata, Principal Machine Learning & AI Scientist, Microsoft Azure Research	Ruchi Mahindru, Senior Technical Staff Member and Master Inventor, IBM Research
		Panelists	Taghrid Samak, Meta, Data Science, Applied Machine Learning, Network Planning and Optimization, Mentoring	Tamar Eilam, IBM Fellow, Chief Scientist Sustainable Computing Research
			Sourav Mazumder, IBM Distinguished Engineer - AI Governance Solutions, Master Inventor, Technology Expert Labs, Global Sales, Expert Labs	Zhiling Lan, Professor of Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology
		PhD Forum Presentations

15:25 - 16:35 CDT - WISC 4

See also:

• WISC 2023
• Program
• PhD Forum
• Scholarships