Posts tagged WiML
Organizing WiML 2014
- 26 January 2015
Since April, I’ve served as a co-organizer with Marzyeh Ghassmi Jessica Thompson, and Allison Chaney for the 9th Annual Women in Machine Learning Workshop (WiML) co-located with the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference, in in Montréal, QC, Canada in December. This year we had record attendance and sponsorship. As Finance and Sponsorship Chair, I’m especially proud of our sponsorship accomplishments: we had 3 Gold Sponsors, 2 Silver and 6 Bronze and 2 Supporter Sponsors, which in total, doubled sponsorship over the previous year- a new WiML record.
As an organizing team, we met for an hour biweekly by Skype over the months leading up to the workshop. We worked fairly independently, but got great support from the WiML board as well. Organizing WiML is like running a small conference so there are a lot of things to keep track of, but past organizers have done a great job, with the support of the board at archiving everything. For a lot of tasks we were able to copy & edit what was done the previous year, so even though the organizing team changes completely every year it’s not that hard. Organizing WiML was was of the best event-planning experiences I’ve had. We really didn’t hit any major bumps or have painfully long meetings to avoid that. In the days leading up to the conference, one of the last minute “problems” we has was that we had more people offer to volunteer than we had imagined jobs for. That really speaks to the community of WiML, it’s a very supportive group of women.
WiML and NIPS 2013
- 21 January 2014
Last month I attended the Women In Machine Learning (WiML) workshop and the Neural Information Processing Symposium (NIPS) for the second time. For a second year, the conference was located in South Lake Tahoe, NV.
The WiML workshop was started as a co-located workshop to the Grace Hopper Conference and moved to be co-located with NIPS, a premiere machine learning conference, after a couple years. The workshop was started by a group of women in the field after noticing how few women were at NIPS each year. In the workshop, women researchers and students give presentations, we have a poster session, and close the day out with a panel on career paths. At breakfast and lunch we get to network wither each other and senior women in the field. The organizers also connect attendees into mentoring groups based on career stage and research interests. This year was nice that I got to reconnect with a lot of the women I met last year.