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Career Girls Virtual Camp: AI, Machine Learning, and Robotics

Watch this short video to enjoy camp highlights.

Girls campers learned about Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Robotics from women experts thriving in those fields.

This summer camp consisted of five, one-hour sessions geared towards ages 10-14, via Zoom, to earn a Career Girls Artificial Intelligence Summer Camp Certificate of Completion.

Thank you to Toyota Research Institute and all of our individual donors and volunteers who made this a free event for all girls who attended.

Session Leaders


Jie Li
Jie Li is a research scientist interested in mobile robotics and machine learning. She got her B.S. degree in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University in Beijing. She then got her Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan in Computer Vision and Robotics. In graduate school, she was mainly working on improving localization and mapping capability of underwater robots under extreme environments. At TRI, she is working on a variety of machine learning problems for automated driving, including GAN-based domain adaptation, panoptic segmentation, and depth estimation.

 

Allison Henry Career Girls AI Camp
Allison Henry
Allison Henry recently celebrated her fifth anniversary at Toyota Research Institute, which brings her to about a decade working in robotics.  Prior to working in robotics, Allison designed, assembled and tested circuit boards for a small RF engineering company for seven years, studied Philosophy and Studio Art, taught preschool, dabbled in circus arts, and started an after school gardening program.  Allison now proudly holds the title of Senior Robotics Operations Engineer on the Prototyping Research Operations team at TRI, and lives in a 330 year old farmhouse with her spouse, dog, three cats and six ducks.

Amy Chou AI Camp Session Lead Career Girls
Amy Chou
Amy Chou is an SVP, Account Executive at Aon, a global financial services firm. Outside her work at Aon, she is a founding member of the Women in AI Ethics Council, which is committed to increasing visibility of women working in AI ethics, and an advisor to Summery, an AI-powered startup. Amy holds a B.A. in Sociology, a B.S. in Business Administration, and an M.B.A., all from the University of California — Berkeley.

 

Bernease Herman Career Girls AI Robotics Camp
Bernease Herman
Bernease Herman is a research scientist at the eScience Institute and Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science at University of Washington in Seattle. Bernease has most recently published work on synthetic data methodologies, evaluation for out-of-distribution data, and participatory methods for algorithmic bias. Her research interests span data augmentation, model evaluation, and explainability for data science and machine learning. Prior to UW, she worked for Amazon’s Supply Chain Optimization Technologies organization where she developed and deployed models to optimize inventory ordering for millions of products.

Role Model Experts

Ebitie Amugha Career Girls AI and Robotics Camp
Ebitie Amughan
Ebitie Amughan is a Technical Recruiter for Machine Learning at Pinterest and recruits industry talent from broad and diverse talent pools.

I empower and enable the Global Talent Acquisition Team to establish a more consistent, inclusive, equitable, and effective approach to hiring operations by managing and executing large-scale programmatic changes. I improve recruiting processes by addressing inconsistencies and minimizing bias at each stage of the hiring cycle to help increase the volume of underrepresented talent in our funnel. I do so by working cross-functionally with the Inclusion & Diversity team, HRBPs, Recruiting, Engineering, and other stakeholders.

Valerie Ashford Hal
Valerie Ashford-Hal

​Valerie is a business focused HR leader. She partners with public and private organizations to develop & implement strategic value-add human capital management and business solutions that drive efficiencies, alignment, innovation, and ROI.

Valerie has over 15 years of experience working with companies in various industries including Healthcare, Venture Capital, Professional and Financial Services, Technology, Non-Profit, Public Agency, Legal, Professional Sports, and Manufacturing. She holds a BS, MBA, and SPHR®, SHRM-SCP certifications.

As an active community member, she has worked with several Bay Area organizations.

 

Caroline Aronoff Career Girls AI and Robotics Camp
Caroline Aronoff
Caroline Aronoff is a Software Engineer working at Embark Veterinary. She has a BS in Computer Science and Engineering and an MEng in Computer Science with a focus on Artificial Intelligence from MIT. Her research at MIT focussed on modelling how children ages 3-5 learn cause and effect. Now at Embark, she creates new ways for people to learn about their dog’s DNA and helps Embark’s scientists to learn even more about dog DNA and health. Outside of work, Caroline enjoys playing board games and playing the harp.

 

Angela Bassa Career Girls AI Robotics Camp
Angela Bassa
Angela Bassa is an expert in building and leading data teams. An MIT-trained and Edelman-award-winning mathematician, she has over 15 years of experience across industries—spanning finance, life sciences, agriculture, marketing, energy, and software. Angela leads the Data Science & Analytics Center of Excellence at iRobot, where she helps bring intelligence to a fleet of millions of consumer robots. She is also a renowned keynote speaker and author, with credits including the Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review.

Jacquiline Beauchamp
Jacqueline Beauchamp
Jacqueline Beauchamp is a seasoned international businesswoman and entrepreneur with more than 25-years of experience within the digital media, technology, and entertainment industry. Ms. Beauchamp is currently the Co-Founder, Chairwoman and CEO of Engaged Media, LLC, a digital media and entertainment company that develops video games, VR/AR immersive experiences, mobile applications, animated and feature film productions to inform, educate, and entertain. Before co-founding Engaged Media, LLC, Ms. Beauchamp was a co-founder of Nerjyzed Entertainment, Inc., a video game studio that became the first African-American led video game studio to ship on Microsoft Xbox 360 Console, thus leading to the company being featured as the promotional showcase for CNN’s Black in America: The New Promised Land – Silicon Valley with Soledad O’Brien.

Verna Liza Caba
Verna Liza Caba
Verna Liza, as the first Executive Director of the Friends of the Commission on the Status of Women, developed the Equal Pay Initiative, which has trained over 1,000 women in salary negotiations. Before joining the nonprofit sector, Verna Liza was a commercial property manager overseeing the operations of Class A assets in San Francisco’s Financial District and the Peninsula. She worked for industry giants GE Capital, Trammel Crow, Spieker Properties, and Equity Office Properties.

Verna Liza received a BA in History and a minor in Organizational Studies from U.C. Davis. As an active alumna, she helped create the first Filipino Graduation on campus in 1989 and delivered the commencement address for the same ceremony to the class of 2000. Verna Liza played a significant role in incubating student organizations and services for Filipino students at U.C. Davis that are thriving 30 years later. Her passion for mentoring youth motivates her to organize leadership retreats for college students and facilitate art workshops for elementary kids.

Yan Ying Chen Career Girls AI Robotics Camp
Yan-Ying Chen

Yan-Ying’s experience lies at the intersection of computer vision, natural language processing and applied machine learning. She developed models to analyze unstructured content of multimodal data types (images, videos, tweets, documents, etc.) as well as context. She worked on image and video to text generation, time-series location and activity analysis, visual and text sentiment analysis and recently focuses on free-text report generation for medical images using deep learning technologies.

She was fortunate to work with talented researchers in academia and industry, published over 30 papers (AAAI, ACL, BMVC, ICRA, WWW, etc.) and patents, and developed POCs and products.

Amanda Dayton
Amanda Dayton
Amanda Dayton is a naval architect and marine engineer. She uses math and science to help design vessels, boats, and structures that operate in the marine environment. A favorite part of her job is being able to combine her engineering skills with an interest in robotics to develop new underwater inspection services. Similar to a drone, she can operate her robot remotely to take pictures and assist with underwater ship repairs. She loves her job in science and technology, and wants girls to know they are important to society and are needed and valuable in all careers.

 

Megan Fantes AI and Robotics Camp
Megan Fantes
Megan Fantes is a Data Scientist at iRobot. I am a passionate data scientist known for being exceptionally enthusiastic during meetings. I like to say that data science is the midpoint between statistics and computer science, and I arrive at the middle from the two extremes. With a background in both Statistics and Computer Science, I found my way to data science because of my love of asking questions and building tools to answer those questions. As a data scientist at iRobot, I run the production-level testing of new robot software. I design experiments, build tools to run those experiments, and visualize the results to guide high-level decision making.

 

Shabnam Hakimi
Shabnam Hakimi
Shabnam Hakimi is a Senior Research Scientist in the Machine Assisted Cognition (MAC) group at Toyota Research Institute. Shabnam studies motivated learning and decision making, leveraging neuroscience to develop behavior change interventions that help individuals meet their goals. Shabnam earned a Ph.D. in Computation and Neural Systems from Caltech and a B.A. in Psychology from Stanford University. Prior to joining TRI, Shabnam honed her multidisciplinary expertise in predicting and shaping human behavior at diverse organizations, including Duke University and the National Institute of Mental Health.

 

Jane Hung
Jane Hung
Jane Hung is a Machine Learning Engineer at Uber. Jane received her PhD from MIT working in the Imaging Platform at the Broad Institute. While applying deep learning-based computer vision models to biological problems like malaria detection, she became interested in software that bridges the gap between research and real world use cases.

At Uber AI, she has been working with AI researchers and product teams like Driver on improving earner experience.

 

Computer Scientist Ifueko Nosakhare Igbinedion Career Girls Role Model
Ifueko Nosakohare Igbinedion
Ifueko Igbinedion is a PhD Student at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to MIT, Ifueko spent six years at Stanford, receiving bachelors and masters degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, respectively. During her time at Stanford, she focused heavily on artificial intelligence and computer vision with applications to lifestyle, and spent five summers at Google working on artificial intelligence applications for virtual reality, mobile shopping, and hardware testing. Her current doctoral research focuses on leveraging multiple viewpoints to improve accuracy of deep learning applications for the operation and navigation of drone swarms.

Artificial Intelligence Marilyn Jackson Career Girls Role Model profile image - square
Marilyn Jackson
Marilyn Jackson, President and CEO of UnderGrid Networks. In her job as a digital strategist she works with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, 5G, and virtual and augmented reality. Because AI will have an extraordinary impact on our lives, she encourages girls to be creators and not just consumers of this technology. Her advice to girls is to not be afraid of technology even if you don’t understand it at first. Being able to jump in and learn anyway is going to help you in your career.

 


Lauren Keiser
Lauren Keiser is a Senior Project Manager at Operations at Toyota Research Institute. She works on a wide range of projects, facilitating events, coordinating logistics, and implementing new tools and technologies. The most rewarding part of her job is that every day brings new challenges and opportunities to learn and grow. Her advice to girls is to follow their dreams and remember that there will be hard days, but tomorrow is always a new day to start fresh.

Sarah Koehler
Sarah Koehler
Sarah Koehler is a Senior Research Scientist at the Toyota Research Institute working on semi- and fully autonomous driving. She works on designing control algorithms which can automatically steer the car, whether the car is preventing a human driver from crashing or the car is driving on its own. She has a PhD from UC Berkeley and has worked on topics from robotics to energy efficient buildings at institutions such as NASA JPL, Applied Materials, and Apple.

 

Yiting Liu
Yiting Liu
Yiting Liu is a Staff Software Engineer at the Toyota Research Institute working on vehicle software platforms. She works on developing softwares in the vehicles to ensure vehicle safety between potentially hazardous actions commanded by the automatic driving (AD) system and vehicle control. She has a PhD from The Ohio State University in Control and Signal Processing. Through her career, she has been working on different areas from system-on-a-chip (SOC) bring up to networking at various companies such as Cisco. She has also served as associate editors/reviewers for several IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conferences.

Amber Lundy
Amber Lundy
Design lead with an international backdrop. I work with teams to conceptualize and translate designs across diverse modalities, timelines, transmitters and media. Colleagues come to me for mentorship, methodology, inspiration and a glimpse into the future.

Krystal Maughan, Machine Learning Researcher Career Girls Role Model
Krystal Maughan
Krystal Maughan is a PhD candidate in Programming Languages Research at the University of Vermont with a focus on Data Privacy (specifically Differential Privacy) and Machine Learning and ways that privacy can work (is robust) and is verifiable (my lab focuses on provable privacy and security; privacy that works). She also TA-ed for Data Privacy coursework (Python), as well as a Programming for Engineers Matlab course (Matlab), and a Compilers course in Haskell and another CS course. Her precise focus can be described as Data Privacy (Differential Privacy) meets Fairness meets AI. In terms of Fairness, her focus draws from the technical aspects of computer science in Programming Languages (which has a rigid, provable method of what it means for something to work), and her critical film theory and art history (specifically, in Latin American political art), to question what it means for our data to be secure, what it means to encode trust, and what is ethical, considering margins of power that exist in the world.

Sylvian Woodson
Sylvia Woodson
Sylvia Woodson is a results-oriented professional with over 25 years of IT experience managing, developing, implementing and delivering scalable Service Solutions in large Hospital, Urgent Care and National Laboratory Systems. Sylvia takes healthcare to heart because caring for an individual’s health is as important and vital as the heart is to an individual’s good health. She’s an expert in aligning Business and Technology initiatives to gain corporate growth and expansion as well as a drive for process management seeking efficiencies. Renowned for building star performing functional and technical teams to deliver and develop products that meet and exceed customer requirements, while yielding maximum returns and innovative products at the lowest possible cost.

Shayamla Prayaga
Shyamala Prayaga
Shyamala Prayaga is the Autonomous Conversational AI Vision Lead at Ford.

As a product owner for the Autonomous Digital Assistant, I lead the company-wide Ford’s Autonomous Digital Assistant innovation for voice and chatbots by owning the roadmap and overall vision and working with cross-functional teams to bring that vision to reality.

Artificial Intelligence Research Lead Preeti Ravindra Career Girls Role Model profile image - square
Preeti Ravindra
Preeti Ravindra is a Security Data Scientist. I’m an applied researcher and technical team lead working at the intersection of cybersecurity, data science and machine learning. I am passionate about solving cybersecurity problems. I give back to the cybersecurity community by sharing my work at conferences and supporting women in cybersecurity.

Sharin Shin
Sharin Shin
Sharin Shin is the senior manager of automated driving field operations team at the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) where she is responsible for the team’s organizational growth, vehicle testing processes and procedures, operational testing policies, and driver training. Before joining TRI, Sharin was a part of the operations team at the Google X Self Driving Car Project, now known as Waymo. Previously, she worked as a financial and marketing manager in the private sector before getting involved in the future of mobility. She has a passion for diversity and inclusion in the workplace, as well as various social problems related to poverty. She received a Bachelor’s degree in Integrative Physiology at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Mia Stevens Career Girls
Mia Stevens
Mia Stevens is an Autonomy Engineer at Aurora Flight Sciences, a Boeing Company, where they design and build the future of flight. Her thesis is the development of a geofencing system for small unmanned aerial systems, which is the goal of creating 3D flight volumes for drones to safely fly near other aircraft and obstacles. Outside of research, she is a member of the Robotics Graduate Student Council where she has held the position of Secretary, Professional Networking and Development, and President. She was admitted as one of the first eight students in the Robotics program at the University of Michigan. Before that, she did her undergrad at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. She learned how to program during her sophomore year at MIT, and it shifted her entire career trajectory from traditional aerospace to drones and robotics. Outside of academics, she was a member of the varsity swimming and diving team, competing in 1m and 3m springboard diving for her first three years and as an assistant coach my senior year. She started diving in high school, because she had done gymnastics for 10 years, which was her main hobby other than violin.


Stephanie Strickland Majoulian
Stephanie Strickland Majoulian is a Technical Operations Manager at Toyota Research Institute. She and her team members provide resources and training to support the engineers’ and researchers’ ideas and inventions. The most rewarding part of her job is helping people figure out their goals and create the best career path. Stephanie says that girls should consider a career in people management if they are empathetic and can understand and listen to others. Her advice to girls is to learn to trust their instincts and make the best decisions for themselves.

 

Yifan Yu
Yifan Yu
Yifan Yu is a Data Scientist at Uber. She graduated in 2019 with a Master of Science degree in Statistics from Stanford, where she studied experimentation, prediction modeling, and deep learning.

Alyssa Wickman
Alyssa Wickman
Alyssa Wickman is a Software Engineer at Toyota Research Institute. She earned her Bachelor of Science, Engineering (BSE) from the University of Michigan College of Engineering with a Minor in Chemistry.