SPEAKERS

KEYNOTES

Sylvia Acevedo is the CEO of the Girls Scouts of the USA. A talented technology executive who has held positions with some of the world’s most respected companies, Sylvia previously founded CommuniCard LLC, and served in executive roles at REBA Technologies, Dell, Apple, and IBM – and she began her career as a rocket scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Sylvia was one of the first Hispanic students, male or female, to earn a graduate engineering degree from Stanford University and holds a bachelor of science degree with honors from New Mexico State University. Over the years Sylvia has spoken across the country about the importance of helping girls discover their strengths, passions, and talents. Sylvia joined the Girl Scouts Board of Directors in 2009 and became CEO in 2017, bringing both her business career and childhood experience as a Girl Scout to the role.​

Camille Fournier is a Managing Director and Head of Platform Engineering at Two Sigma. She is the former Chief Technology Officer of Rent The Runway and a former Vice President of Technology at Goldman Sachs. Fournier earned an undergraduate degree from Carnegie Mellon University and a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is a maintainer of the Apache ZooKeeper open source project, writes the Ask The CTO column for O'Reilly Media, and is a regular public speaker and advocate for greater diversity within technology and leadership. Her book, "The Manager's Path," was published by O'Reilly in early 2017.

PANELISTS

CS + Art&Design

Sarah Meyohas is an artist working across media. For her latest project, Cloud of Petals, she staged a performance at the site of the former Bell Labs. Sixteen workers photographed 100,000 individual rose petals. The massive dataset they compiled was used to map out an artificial intelligence algorithm that learned to generate new, unique petals forever. The Cloud of Petals exhibition becomes a site for contemplation about a post-human reality and the future of labor in the face of automation. The exhibition traveled to Disjecta Contemporary in Portland, Oregon, and the film was featured at the 2018 Slamdance Film Festival.

Previously, her 2015 cryptocurrency Bitchcoin and Stock Performance at 303 Gallery have also explored networks of information, power, value, and communication. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Wired, Vice, Fortune, Nowness, The Atlantic, and she has appeared on CNBC, PBS, and CBC. She was on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.​

Meyohas holds a B.A. in international relations from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.S. in finance from the Wharton School, and in 2015 received an M.F.A. from Yale University.

An Education Technologist at The Dalton School, Ellen Nickles collaborates with administrators and faculty to create, coordinate, and teach innovative, interdisciplinary curricula for over 550 students in kindergarten through fifth grade. As a photographer, she explores how pictures are seen and read. In both her education projects and in her photography, she is driven by curiosity, passions for learning and problem solving, sharing those, and creating opportunities for others to delight in asking questions and telling their stories.​

Benedetta Piantella is a designer turned humanitarian technologist. She has been involved in international development for the past ten years, ever since her experience of surviving a tsunami in 2004. She has also been teaching for the past decade in different disciplines and to different age groups, from Lego Robotics and Electronics to K-12 students to HCI, Physical Computing and Engineering for Development to undergraduate and graduate students. She founded two R&D companies focused on producing sustainable solutions to social problems worldwide and built partnerships with organizations such as the UN, UNICEF, The Earth Institute, Universities and multiple NGOs and Community Based Organizations. Her design research and practice focus on applying systems thinking and user-centered design to insure equitable access to life-sustaining resources, often through connected devices, real-time data and distributed infrastructure. She is currently faculty at the Design for Social Innovation Program at School of the Visual Arts and a Technologist in Residence at Cornell Tech.

Barrie is a multimedia artist, experience designer, educator and activist. She collaborates with multi-disciplinary producers to bring cross-cultural stories to life using emerging technologies. She has diverse experience in research, education technology and digital storytelling. With expertise in children’s educational media, Barrie has produced and evaluated content for entertainment studios, publishers and nonprofits. Her research has received National Science Foundation funding and is published in the ACM Digital Library and Kidscreen Magazine. Barrie is currently an Associate and Interaction Designer at the Digital Storytelling Lab at Columbia University.

CS in College

​Nirupama Mallavarupu is the founder & CEO of MobileArq, which is a fundraising and communication platform for school districts, PTA Councils, and schools (moderator). 

Calla Carter is a senior computer science student at Bryn Mawr College and the president and founder of Sudo Hoot, Bryn Mawr’s computer science student organization.

Coming Soon!

Michelle Ma is a Computer Science and Philosophy major at Swarthmore College, where she serves on the board of Swarthmore Women in Computer Science. Michelle is a lifelong advocate for leveraging technology for social good, and works closely with the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, Swarthmore's social entrepreneurship hub, as an Associate for Technology & Society as well as a Social Innovation Lab Fellow, to create and mentor projects that work at the intersection of CS and social justice. ​

I am a Sophomore at Stony Brook University pursuing a Computer Science and Applied Math degree. I am currently the Webmaster of WiCS and a mentor for the College of Engineering. Next year I will be the VP of WiCS. I worked at Digital Media Academy (a kid's tech program) for three summers and interned for my local cable station (WHoH-TV) for three years. This summer I will be an intern at Morgan Stanley. In High school I was the president of Film Club for two years. I have a passion for the artistic side of tech (film, web design, etc.) as well as the logical side of tech!

CS + Entrepreneurship

Alicia Thomas is the founder and CEO of Dibs, a B2B digital platform that gives studios quick and easy access to real-time pricing for the boutique fitness classes their clients want. A former developer and director of data strategy at Citigroup, Thomas chose to start a company in the fitness industry because she knew she would have a competitive advantage. Thomas graduated from UCLA with a BSc. in Math and Economics with a specialization in Computer Science, and got her M.B.A. from Columbia University. 

Liz Maida is the CEO and co-founder of Uplevel Security. Maida has also served as the company's CTO. Liz holds a Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree from Princeton University and dual Masters degrees in Computer Science and Engineering Systems from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her graduate school research examined the application of graph theory to network interconnection.

Beth Ferreira, a Managing Director at FirstMark Capital, invests in a broad range of consumer companies, including next-generation commerce, consumer tech, and mobile startups. Prior to FirstMark, Beth was the Managing Partner of WME Ventures, the venture capital arm of WME IMG and led investments in Glossier, Daily Harvest, Masterclass, and Hush.​ Prior to this role, Beth was Chief Operating Officer at Fab and ran operations in the early days of Etsy. Beth also held positions at Flatiron Partners, BCG and UBS. Beth holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business.

Dianna Liu is the founder of ARIX Technologies, a start-up engineering robotics and data analytics to assist oil & gas refineries in their predictive maintenance and operational decisions. She was formerly an engineer with ExxonMobil, having experience both in commercial operations on their trading floor as well as a field engineer at one of their refineries, and ARIX was inspired by many unmet needs she personally experienced on the job. She holds dual Mechanical and Biomedical Bachelor of Science in Engineering degrees from Duke University and is about to graduate from the Yale School of Management with an MBA. Aside from ARIX, she’s also the founder and a co-owner of an active 17-year old online horse game.

​CS For Good

Prof. Sarah Holloway is a member of the faculty at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) where she teaches social entrepreneurship and nonprofit management, runs the Management program and oversees a campus-wide entrepreneurship initiative focused on global Education Technology for the Center for Development Economics & Policy.Sarah is a serial social entrepreneur and the co-founder of six ventures in K-12 education including MOUSE.org and Computer Science for All (CSforAll). She is a native New Yorker and graduate of The Chapin School, Bowdoin College and Columbia University.

Karen Xiao is a Deployments Engineer at Mark43, a civic technology company reinventing public safety software applications from the ground up, delivering unparalleled data integration and efficiency gains to first responders. After graduating from Harvard in 2014, Karen joined PricewaterhouseCoopers. She has since been at Mark43 for over two years.

Shae Smith is a Senior Software Engineer at DoSomething.org. DoSomething.org is the largest non-profit that gets young people involved in social change. Raised in Brooklyn, NY, she graduated from Poly Prep CDS in 2004 and went on to study computer science at Smith College(’08). Before DoSomething.org, she worked at GLAAD, a national LGBTQ media advocacy organization. It has been in her non-profit work that she has learned how powerful tech can be for creating change.​

Suzie Grange is Co-founder and Lead Product Engineer https://www.mavenclinic.com, the digital clinic for women. Maven offers instant access to women’s health and wellness providers via video chat and private message, and comprehensive fertility, maternity, and back-to-work programs for employers. A self-taught engineer, Suzie has a degree in Music Technology and after initially learning to code as a teenager, chose to pursue software development as a career path in her mid-twenties. Originally from the UK, she worked for art and fintech startups in London before moving to the USA in 2014 to build Maven.

Noelle Francois is co-founder and Executive Director of Heat Seek NYC, a civic technology nonprofit operating at the intersection of data, the internet of things (IoT), and housing justice. Recognizing that the #1 housing maintenance issue in NYC is inadequate heat in the wintertime, Heat Seek builds and deploys web-connected temperature sensors and a corresponding web app to document when an apartment's temperature dips below the legal limit set forth in the city's housing code. The organization assists tenant organizers, legal service providers, and individual tenants across all five boroughs in using their sensor data to demand safe, healthy housing. 

​Noelle received a BA in Sociology and Cultural Studies from the College of William and Mary, and a Masters in Public Administration from New York University.