On December 16 took place the meeting Chile Women in Computing 2022 (ChileWiC), the most important event of women in computing held in the country, which seeks to promote the experience and the first level work of women working in IT and computing, as well as to make visible the initiatives of various organizations dedicated to promoting STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education in girls and young women. The meeting was attended by about 70 female undergraduate and graduate students from careers related to technology, computing and related areas.
In this opportunity, the National Center for Artificial Intelligence participated as a sponsor of the event, while Cenia researchers Claudia López and Valeria Herkskovic were an active part of the organization along with other academics from the Universidad de Chile, Universidad de Los Andes, Universidad de La Frontera and the Instituto Milenio Fundamentos de los Datos (IMFD).
The event included a student competition to present the intermediate and final results of development or research projects on which they are working. Francesca Luchinni, computer science engineer and member of Cenia’s development team, participated in this competition, together with Camila Vera, master’s student in Engineering Sciences UC, who presented their project “Detecting neighborhoods with AI: assessment of urban clustering methods.” The best presentations were awarded by a vote of the general public and a jury, which included the participation of Noemi Crosby, a software engineer from Cenia’s development team.
In addition, a keynote speech was given by Dr. Bárbara Poblete, Cenia main investigator of the “Human-centered AI” line and winner of the Test of Time Award for being the first to formally investigate fake-news in social networks. During her presentation she explained her path to become an expert researcher in computer science, as well as her main areas of study, such as social network analysis, web data mining and information retrieval, and her participation as an academic in the Department of Computer Science at Universidad de Chile (DCC UChile), main researcher at Cenia and as an associate researcher at IMFD.
