Join us for this year’s SAP Women in Data Science around the World event!

The fifth Women in Data Science Silicon Valley @ SAP Conference is a virtual event focusing on the integral role of Data Science in the global current reality. This year’s theme is “Data Science for the New Normal and Beyond”.

Over the past 7 years, there has been an increasing demand for data science-related tasks ranging from pure data analysis to AI-driven model design and development. The COVID-19 pandemic took us all by surprise and increased the need for data-driven tools to help in decision-making. Today, we know that actionable insights from data science projects can take different forms. They could range from being a product itself, an application, a report, etc.

Data science skills are necessary in development as well in sales, marketing, and strategic planning teams. As the workplace shifts to a hybrid approach, WiDS Silicon Valley @SAP aims to bring together practitioners in development, product design, sales, marketing, and academia to talk about transforming data into valuable insights, capitalize on competitive advantage and make our work environment fairer, ethical and sustainable.

The conference will feature sessions from the following categories:

Ethical, Responsible, and Sustainable AI

Adopting Ethical, Responsible, and Sustainable AI has helped organizations increase transparency, ensure legal compliance, ethical alignment and improve overall AI governance. Adopting AI comes with great responsibility of making sure that the system does not discriminate against its customers, employees and also maintains data privacy. Organizations are not only focused on their short-term financial goals anymore, their impact on society, sustainability, and the environment has been the priority these days. This category will focus on the challenges that come with ethical AI concerns around data usage and decision-making processes, how the adoption of ethical AI has helped organizations deal with operational performance, financial, reputational, and legal risks and will also highlight the organization’s journey of the different stages of the responsible AI.

Data-driven Customer Experience

In 2020, the pandemic changed our lives forever and now, nearly two years later, we are still trying to understand what the “New Normal” will look like. One thing is for sure, more consumers than ever before are drawn to the internet. With interactions becoming increasingly digital, there is a greater need for more personalized experiences. Every aspect of engagement can be measured and analyzed which leads to the question: How can Data Science leverage this customer data to ensure an enjoyable, engaging and personalized customer experience?

Automation and Democratization

Democratization of automation is a process by which automation and technology become more accessible to more and more people. New automation, technologies, and improved user experience have helped those outside of high tech to benefit from new high-tech products. 

Data Analytics and Intelligence on Cloud

Getting faster, more easily manageable, and more scalable data analytics has now become a need for many organizations in order to be adaptable, agile, and responsive in an increasingly competitive and fast-moving environment. High scalability by paying only for the resources you need and rapidly scaling up or down depending on your requirements also helps in reducing cost. Plus, companies do not have to invest in upfront hardware investments for on-premises servers. It offers easy maintenance through automatic updates and a more secured and governed environment in addition to providing transparency and accountability. A cloud data analytics solution brings all the data together in a centralized system to maximize insights for companies. All these benefits are highly crucial especially now during the pandemic as most IT companies have a hybrid setup and rely heavily on the cloud.

Cyber Conflict, Security, and Digital Rights

The intersection of digital rights and cybersecurity is hosting an interesting space for discourse. Digital rights are often defined as extensions of human rights in the Internet age, which effectively implies that digital literacy and access to technology and communications networks are basic human rights for the Internet Age. In reality, this raises questions from every perspective:

• Development and Innovation: ethical AI and emerging technologies.
• Implementation: intended and unintended uses of said technologies, including tech for good but also cyberbullying, misinformation, and cyberthreats.
• Mitigating the digital divide which a 2021 UN report noted that nearly half of the world’s population or 3.7 billion people lack internet access.
• The role organizations play in addressing each of these on an individual and collective basis.

Other Challenges in Data Science

Data scientists encounter challenges at each step of their process. There are much more challenges than the ones mentioned in the categories above, so we encourage you to submit your abstract even if it doesn’t fit into any of the above categories.