Strategies to Promote Diversity and Prevent Stereotyping in Technical Organizations

Technical organizations have often found to be riddled with the lack of diversity and inclusion owing to the fast-paced and siloed nature of product development and delivery cycles. While diversity is a necessity, equity is a right to fairness and inclusion is a state of mind. Research has shown higher productivity in technical teams with diverse backgrounds as it promotes “out-of-the-box” thinking, which is crucial in technical organizations. As an academic turned to management, turned entrepreneur and educator, I will illustrate experiences from my life in this talk about some strategies to promote diversity and prevent stereotypical behaviors. The examples are meant to highlight that stereotypical biases, that may be unintentional, can deeply harm the sense of inclusion and morale of even the highest functioning teams. We will discuss methods to identify biases and strategies to mitigate them to ensure team success with changing times and situations.

SPEAKER INFORMATION

Dr. Sohini Roychowdhury is Senior Manager for Digital Strategy and AI expert at Accenture LLP, USA. Prior to this, she formed the Founding team and served as Director of Curriculum and Machine Learning at an Ed-Tech Startup called FourthBrain that provides specialized hands-on courses in the field of Machine Learning and AI. FourthBrain is incubated and funded by Dr. Andrew Ng’s AI Venture fund. Prior to her entrepreneurial venture she was the Sr. Manager of Autonomous Drive and Head of University Relations at VolvoCars USA, and prior to that a tenure track Assistant Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at a University of Washington campus. Dr. Roychowdhury’s latest research directions include computer vision applications processed using minimal training samples. She has applied machine learning and AI models on problems ranging from epidemiology, medical imaging, supply chain management, computer vision for autonomous driving modules and e-Commerce streamlining for over 12 years now. Till date she has over 55 academic research papers and 9 granted patents to her name and she continues to create educational content through blogs in Towards Data Science and her Youtube channel, AI with Sohini. Apart from all this, she is a mother of a 3 year old and enjoys running and weight training as a part of her fitness regimen.