Speakers
 | Vivian Graubard Director of Strategy, Public Interest Technology Vivian Graubard is the director of strategy for Public Interest Technology at New America. Prior to joining New America, Graubard worked at the White House under President Obama where she was a founding member of the United States Digital Service and also served as a senior advisor and chief of staff to the United States Chief Technology Officer. There, her work focused on the intersection between technology and policy implementation, particularly on issues affecting vulnerable communities, including: improving the immigration process, criminal justice reform, combating human trafficking, and preventing sexual assault and domestic violence. Prior to her work in government, she was a fellow at Polaris Project, a leading non-profit focused on ending human trafficking domestically and abroad. Graubard has been named “Time’s 30 People Under 30 Who Are Changing the World,” “Forbes 30 under 30 in Law and Policy,” and “Business Insider’s Most Influential Women.” She is Latina—Colombian, Cuban, and Puerto Rican—and cares deeply about diversity and inclusion (in tech and beyond!) |
 | Bushra Anjum Amazon Bushra Anjum has a PhD in Computer Science from North Carolina State University and is currently serving as a Tech Lead for the Amazon Prime Program. Situated at Amazon in San Luis Obispo, her team is responsible for the timely, accurate and reliable services for millions of Amazon Prime customers across the world. |
 | Kelly Irish MINDBODY Kelly Irish is a Senior Software Engineer and Women in Tech coordinator at MINDBODY, Inc. with 20 years of technology experience. She has a B.S. in Computer Science from Virginia Tech and studied Transformational Leadership at Bethel University. After creating and overseeing a leadership development program for high school students in San Diego, she is now the Education Advisor for Kappa Alpha Theta at Cal Poly University. with the creation and testing of Prime plans. |
 | Melissa Hansen Amazon Melissa Hansen is a Software Development Engineer in Kindle Content, working with a team to deliver high-quality content to Kindle readers while ensuring a smooth and transparent ingestion process for publishers and authors around the world. |
 | Kate Carroll Pariveda Solutions Kate Carroll has worked for 20+ years advancing through progressive leadership roles in sales, marketing, product management, operations, and IT. With a passion in organizational alignment and development, she has chosen to work as a Principal with Pariveda Solutions, a technical consulting firm as dedicated to the professional growth of their associates as they are to the success of their clients. |
 | Chinasa Okolo Pomona College, Undergraduate Student Chinasa Okolo is a fourth-year, Computer Science major at Pomona College. Throughout her time there, she has conducted research in software engineering, human-computer interaction, computational biology, neuroscience, and bioimaging at various institutions around the country. She will use her knowledge to create more efficient computer vision algorithms for high-throughput medical image analysis. Chinasa is dedicated to improving educational access for underrepresented students in STEM fields. Throughout her time at Pomona, she has been involved in various mentoring and outreach programs such as QuestBridge and Pomona's BYTE program, a mentoring program for underrepresented students in Computer Science. She has also used her skills to improve the technology education curriculum for Pomona Hope, a local community center. This summer, she will be working at Microsoft Research and will be pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Cornell University in the fall. |
 | Ishani Gupta UCSB, Graduate Student Ishani Gupta is currently pursuing her second master’s in Computer Science from University of California, Santa Barbara. Her interest lies in area of distributed systems & privacy. She is currently a member of distributed system lab in UCSB. Apart from academia, she has been part of many extracurricular activities. She is also a co-founder of a student organization : “Blockchain at UCSB”. Prior to this she has worked as an developer in Oracle for 2 years. She has been a academic gold medalist in her undergraduate studies. During her undergraduate studies, she has been awarded fully funded research internships in China and Germany. She has also been an Indian delegate to Japan with the purpose of world peace. |
 | Marina Moore Cal Poly SLO, Undergraduate Student Marina Moore is a fourth year computer science major at Cal Poly SLO. Her research interests include cybersecurity and privacy. She is the Tech Team director for the Women Involved in Software and Hardware (WISH) club at Cal Poly. |
 | Maria Pantoja Cal Poly SLO, Assistant Professor Dr Maria Pantoja is an Assistant Professor at California Polytechnic State University San Luis Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering. Has a BS in engineering from Universidad Polytechnica de Valencia (Spain) and a Computer Engineering PhD from Santa Clara University. Her area of expertise is High Performance Computing, GPU programming, Video Analytics. Currently working on MPI resilience in a collaboration with Sandia National lab and in acceleration of different projects related to Machine Learning and computer vision (Earthquake reconnaissance and satellite images identification of food sources). |
 | Aru Bhat Oath The beautiful balance between art and science is what draws Aru Bhat to Product Management. Having a formal education in Computer Science and deep training in classical dance and music, she fits right into her role of a Product Manager - providing her with an opportunity everyday to seamlessly blend the nuances of these learnings to bring to life product experiences that are used by millions everyday around the world. She is currently a Senior Product Manager at Oath, building the next version of Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail. Aru holds a Master's in Computer Science from Cornell. Go Red! 🙂 |
 | Rebecca Krieger Cal Poly SLO, Undergraduate Student Rebecca Krieger is a 4th year Software Engineering and Psychology double major at Cal Poly, Slo. She has interned at Apple and Microsoft, and is heading into product management. Rebecca's technical interests are accessibility, emotion + tech, and designing apps for children. When not researching, she shares what she learns at conferences and through teaching middle schoolers how to code. Rebecca is motivated by her family and her desire keep asking questions and learning more. |
 | Kylie Taitano Intuit Kylie Taitano is a Software Engineer at Intuit’s ProConnect group. She is currently is a Software Engineer at Intuit working on ProSeries - built on the same technology as TurboTax, ProSeries is a desktop product used by accountants and tax professionals. She received her Bachelor’s of Science in Computer Science from UC San Diego in 2014. At UCSD, Kylie was on the founding board of Undergrad UCSD Women in Computing, serving as President from 2013-2014. She is a recent addition to the UCSD CSE Alumni Board, who are dedicated to developing and promoting a sense of community between alumni and our department's faculty and students, as well as supporting the education and careers of current and future students. |
 | Abha Pandey UC Davis, Undergraduate Student Abha is a senior at UC Davis studying Electrical Engineering. Her research interests include image processing using Artificial Intelligence and applications of control systems. She is an active member of the National Center for Women In Technology (NCWIT) and the UC Davis Chapter of IEEE. When she takes a break from engineering, you can probably catch her practicing her violin or catch her reading an awesome book! During the school year, Abha works with Dr. Jinyi Qi's and Dr. Ramsey Badawi's research groups at UC Davis. Through her work presented at CWIC and her research at UC Davis, she hopes to inspire a new generation of students to pursue engineering. She would like to thank her grandmother for being her biggest inspiration and would like to thank her parents, Ms. Ruthe Farmer, Dr. Elizabeth R. Jessup, Dr. Yolanda Rankin, Mr. Steve Goodgame, Dr. Zhi Ding, Dr. Hooman Rastian, Dr. Jinyi Qi, Dr. Ramsey D. Badawi, Dr. Lifeng Lai, all of her high school teachers, and all of her coworkers from her research labs. Without their help and their inspiration, she says, she would not have pursued engineering or find her passion in signal processing and control systems. |
 | Qiqi Wu UC San Diego, Undergraduate Student Qiqi Wu is a fourth year undergraduate student at UC San Diego studying computer science and design. She is currently the president of Women in Computing (WIC) at UCSD. As part of WIC, her work involves addressing the diversity and inclusion concerns of students in computer science, especially women, as well as building an inclusive community. During the school year, Qiqi has been working as a tutor in her Computer Science and Engineering Department for 3 years where she has help taught courses in Computer Organizations and Systems Programming, Intro to Java, and Compilers. Having struggled through those courses as a student, her goal has been to enrich the learning experiences of other students just like what previous tutors have done for her. In addition, over the summers, she has interned twice at Google, and was a Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) Engineering Fellow. Post graduation, she will be starting full time as a software engineer in Google NYC |
 | Erin Cole UC San Diego, Undergraduate Student Erin Cole is a transfer student studying computer science at UC San Diego. Her interests involve the intersection between data science and cyber security. Erin was diagnosed with a mental health disorder when she was eighteen years old. Last year she decided to create a solution to diminish stigma associated with mental health disorders by creating Mental Hues, an open source web application. As a Mozilla Open Leader in September 2017, Erin learned best practices for working open and received training for building her product with community support. Erin is also the Professional Development Co-Chair for Women in Computing and is involved in undergraduate cyber security research in the Systems and Networks lab at UC San Diego. This summer, she will be working at Mozilla as a Data Engineering Intern. |