International Women’s Day #IWD2021
BY SHUYAN SUN
Do you know what day it is today? It’s March 8th, International Women’s Day! This year the theme is #ChooseToChallenge. A challenging world is an alert world where changes take place. So let’s take a look at what obstacles women are facing and how women across different industries forge innovation through technology!
Zepeto engages its 200 million community to #ChooseToChallenge
Zepeto, a 3D avatar-based virtual social platform, helps raise awareness about women’s equality and conquer stereotypes through their campaign. By building the #ChooseToChallenge call-to-action into their platform, more than 200 million registered users around the world can engage in supporting the IWD theme. Also, they have released new themes to celebrate IWD, inviting their users to try the new costumes and create content for that. This is not the first time they have advocated for gender equality. From what we can see, #GIRLPOWER is a topic that is already very popular on their platform, with 11,000 + related posts. Additionally, there are many talented women involved in their company’s core position, such as Soojeong Kim (Head of Content Planning), Ihae Joung (Head of Service Operation), Eunyoung Lee (Product Lead), etc.
Pictured Here: their new avatar costumes for International Women’s Day!
Gender and AI: Addressing bias in artificial intelligence
Do you know that AI has biases? Yeah, this is the case in reality. It’s not the AI who has inborn biases, but it’s the people who make the algorithms that are biased. AI could just be the mirror of the creators. According to Harvard Business Review, there have been many incidences of AI adopting gender bias from humans. Harvard Business Review cites an example of natural language processing (NLP) that is present in Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri. They also pointed out that there are correlations like “men” with “doctors” and “women” with “nurses”.
One major problem contributing to this scenario is the feeding datasets for AI to learn, since the dataset is not diverse enough, this may make AI form biased judgments later. One way to conquer the problem is to make sure that the training samples are as diverse as possible – in terms of gender, ethnicity, age, and sexuality, and make sure that the people in the development team come from different cultures.
Although we may concede that bias is an unavoidable aspect of life, at least what we want to do is try our best to avoid it for new technologies. New technologies give us a chance to refresh, but it depends on how people utilize them, not the AIs. According to the Financial Times, without the training of human problem solvers to diversify AI, algorithms will always reflect our own biases. So hopefully in the future men and women can cooperate to eliminate biases in the algorithms.
Suggestions from women working in the Cybersecurity industry
Have you ever dreamed about working in the cybersecurity industry? Does this sound like high barriers to entry? Let’s hear from Anna Chung who worked in the Unit 42 team at Palo Alto Networks to share her experiences and insights about this job field.
As Anna describes, she mainly spent her time researching new malicious tools, tactics and procedures discovered by the global security community. Part of her work is to track the latest threats and attacks, along with understanding cybercriminals’ motivation and methods to then help organizations be better protected and prepared.
Does this sound like a tech-heavy industry which requires strong math, engineering, and coding skills? Don’t worry since Anna shares that she is not so good at Math herself, but used her curiosity and interest to help her learn these skills.If you are interested in any of the fields including threat actor profiling, underground economics, reverse engineering, incident response, digital forensic, statistics, malware analysis, artificial intelligence, data mining, privacy and legal framework and cyber behavior analysis, you may find yourself suitable for this job! Anna also suggests taking online courses or workshops to further expand your knowledge in the field you are interested in, and what you may gain is much more than a job offer!
It’s true that there’s no identical or predetermined path to the dream job, but never stop challenging yourself and pursuing what you truly love. Remember that you are not alone, feel free to ask for help from your friends and us at USWIB! Together we will show our power and create a better future!
