0:01  

So Linda Calhoun is an entrepreneur, activist, and community leader based in San Francisco, California, a graduate of Boston University with a BA, BS, and mass communication. Linda’s career path led her to work in international policy coordination, mi EDR, technology, and data management. Linda is the founder and CEO of career goals are nonprofit that were created Linda encountered in her own story. She is the president of the career girls, board, career girls board, and additionally alliance for girls and friends of the Commission on the Status of Women. Please well, come. Linda Calle Hahn. Hi, Linda. Oh, my God.

0:58  

Thank you. I feel like I’m on stage now. Um, can you see my slides? Or should I share my screen? How would you like me too, to handle my talk at this point?

1:17  

Five, please add your slides.

1:20  

My slides are up. Awesome. So first slide. And one thing I’d like to make abundantly clear is I am not an expert in AI. But I had the pleasure and the privilege of interviewing 25.

1:43  

Sorry, Linda, do you have your slides?

1:47  

I can share.

1:49  

Yeah. Do you want to share your slides? Yes,

1:52  

yes, yes. See, if it comes up.

1:59  

I know you’re going to add the video to it. And then you’re going to share that. So

2:04  

hold on, I think.

2:07  

Okay, there you are. Okay,

2:09  

so let’s see if we can get the slides going.

2:13  

Ah, see this go to press present mode?

2:16  

Yes. Here we go.

2:23  

There you go. I’m going to go backstage and let you continue.

2:28  

I’ll take it from here. Thank you so much. As I was saying, I am not an AI expert. But I’ve had the extreme pleasure and privilege of interviewing dozens of very diverse and accomplished women who are working in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics. So you should consider me someone who’s worked with your current colleagues, to hopefully grow a pipeline for future colleagues. And so I thought it would be fun to start with this throwback Thursday photo. So here I am in second grade. And I think what’s important to know about me at that time is, you know, I am the first in my family to graduate from college. My parents were the first in their family to graduate from high school. And all four of my grandparents never went beyond the eighth grade. So my family knew the power of education, and that it was a way to have a better life. And I’m also not ashamed to say that encyclopedias were my best friends growing up. And those books really fed my imagination. And I loved learning and experiencing the power that comes from knowledge. So, you know, here I am, closer in age to college. And this is where a lot of my critical work and preparing for college came from, you know, I studied hard, everyone in my family was like, you know, you are college material, you can go to college, but I knew there was no money to send me and that I’d have to earn an academic scholarship, you know, so I did the things that were necessary at that time to be able to compete for a scholarship, you know, I took AP classes, Honours level classes. You know, I watched my class rank, because I knew I had to be at a certain grade point average in order to be seriously considered by the universities that I was interested in. And I really challenged myself to and made sacrifices to achieve my goals and you know, just try and broaden my experience outside of the very small town that I was living in at the time, you know, PBS documentaries, newspapers. And I also remember the library being a refuge for me this, this bastion of where you can discover and learn. And I think second only to getting my driver’s license, having my library card was my most prized possession. So here I am, you know, on my graduation day I did it, that milestone was accomplished. But then what and, you know, I had so many examples of very hardworking women who, you know, were conscientious and, but they didn’t have careers, like what I inspired to do. And so it took me a very long time, from when this photo was taken to where I was really able to hit upon work that was fulfilling in every way. And it just so happened that it happened to be in database design. These are in the early days of building geographic information systems, relational databases, I was doing it on an international development project. And it was just extraordinary, you know, rewarding financially, economically, intellectually. And I wanted girls coming up behind me, especially girls from under-resourced areas, to know that you could have complete agency over your life, based on what you’re passionate about how your mind works, coupled with educational attainment. So that was really my aha moment.

6:50  

So now you know how the idea for career girls was born. And I was just absolutely determined to give back to girls. And as they said, Girls who could really relate to the circumstances that I grew up under, and I just started reaching out to very successful and accomplished and diverse women. And just ask them to share, you know, what it, what it is that they do, how they got there, but most importantly, what girls can do in order to create a life and a career of their dreams. And this is how it’s happened. This is how I was able to start my nonprofit. And one of the things that I love is this is just a tiny sample of the 800 women that I’ve interviewed since the site went live in January 2011 Is that we disrupt stereotypes, we show that there’s no group that has a lock on being smart, successful, any adjective you want to use, you know, this collage speaks to the diversity of the women that we’ve been able to interview. And it’s just wonderful to be able to have girls anywhere, come to our site, and be able to navigate to someone whose story would resonate with them. So we are a free career exploration and readiness video platform. And not only do we provide the video inspiration, but the see-it part of you also can’t be it if you can’t see it. We also combine that with the how to be a part of the curriculum, with career readiness information with college readiness information to really provide one-stop shopping for girls who come to our site, and also stakeholders, parents, educators, mentors, who want to use our content to underscore their messaging. We just want girls to be able to come here and be able to create a career and a life of their dreams. So I wish I know, particularly in the STEM fields, you know, girls really don’t see themselves in these careers as much as boys and they tend to get left behind. So if you remember when I mentioned encyclopedias and how they fed my imagination, so did watching television, you know, getting the sources of ideas and stimulus. They’re really important for developing your imagination of what’s possible. And imagination lets you find the things that are important to you and honor your interest and, you know, help you show up who you are. And so, you know, we want girls to understand what are their dreams, what are their passions? What is it that excites them? And then not only is it you know, so that they can come in develop their own full, full potential but how are they going to make a difference in the world? How are they going to give back using this passion using their education, and all of these, you know, concepts are very important in terms of, you know, letting girls see what’s possible. You know, I simply wish I had known that you could have a career based on how your mind works, writing a scope of work, saying you would do it, what you would do it for, and people would pay you because I would have prepared myself a lot sooner. And so we want girls to understand, stay on track in math and science, which there’s parity in terms of how boys and girls do with their interest inaptitude for math and science, till about fourth grade when girls start to fall behind unless they can see women role models who are working in those fields. So we like to think of ourselves as sort of the bumper guards to help girls stay on track academically. And while we aim to serve a young age cohort of girls, ages 10 to 13. We also know from our analytics that 47% of our audience are young women, ages 13 to 14. So our solution, you know, our mission career girls has founded on the dream that every girl around the world has access to diverse and accomplished women role models, to learn from their experiences, but for those girls to discover their own path to empowerment, so we close the imagination gap.

11:44  

And when you navigate to career girls.org over 600 role model pages, which translates into over 13,000 inspirational and informative videos, we have career prep information for 150 Plus careers, you can also take a personality-based career quiz. For those first-generation college students, we have over 100 college majors, and what you would need to study in order to earn a bachelor’s degree related to any of those careers. We also have information. We call them empowerment lessons, several role models speaking to a career-based exploration theme, or a soft skill required for social and emotional learning. And then we have a curriculum and toolkits to make it easy for those stakeholders. As I mentioned, educators, mentors, parents, to be able to use our content to augment or supplement any of their own programmings. So in 2020, and we all had to pivot and make do with the fact that there wasn’t direct engagement with students, we decided that we would do virtual programming. And the very first one we did was last summer, in 2020, which brought together so many of those women that I’ve been interviewing over the past two and a half years. Once I learned about JoyBell and weenies research on the deficiencies of facial recognition software, it just became a driving intentional act on my part that we’re ever we did a video she we was going to interview diverse and accomplished women who are going to speak to the important issues in an AI as well as the different career paths that you could have. And so this summer, we also did a repeat of that camp, where we had 75 Campers are 25 role models. These are all women experts, subject matter experts who were speaking to girls about artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics, as well as careers in those particular fields. And the feedback was astonishing that the first year that we had our virtual camp, we had a small core cohort of about 30 Girls, and 10 of those girls after the end of our week-long camp also agreed and wanted to participate in another three-day minicamp that was a deeper dive into artificial intelligence and machine learning. And our campers are incredibly diverse. As you can see, we had a large degree of Black and African American girls, Latina and Hispanic girls, Caucasian, Asian, indigenous First Nation so We just had an amazingly diverse group of girls who enjoyed seeing role models who are diverse and very much internalized a lot of the messaging and understanding of the issues that they can address in the future related to artificial intelligence, the bias issues, machine learning, where did those datasets come from, and for robotics, understanding who is programming a robot to do what, so it was a phenomenal experience. And now I’m going to play a short video for you that is the highlight of our camp.

15:45  

Career girls are connecting role models and girls around the world through our virtual camps. These inspirational camps feature industry-leading role models and are offered free of charge to girls of all backgrounds. Career girls second virtual AI and robotics cam focus on how AI enhances the creative process of machine learning how robots see and react to the world ethics and AI and career exploration.

16:12  

A lot of the things that we do in technology are based on creativity alone. No one would ever think that I’d be doing a zoom call over a mobile device. So someone had to really visualize this happening. How can AI be used to enhance dance, it could

16:28  

like Teach you specific types of dance, or inspire

16:31  

you to be more creative,

16:33  

it can bring people together through dance

16:37  

The video was that interesting to see how the movement of the people could be transformed into a computer, and that it would pick up on your key joints and stuff without weighing any special.

16:54  

We’ve seen robots that could help us explore area that is dangerous or invisible for human beings. We have seen robots who can improve our productivity. And the robots that I personally like the most who can take care of our tedious housework,

17:09  

I learned about a robot in my breakout room, it looks at the water, and like the deep sea with the Sona and camera. It also examines cruise ships to look for any damage or things that could be hazardous to the ship so that humans don’t have to go down there. It’s dangerous.

17:29  

It’s all machine learning concepts based on neural networks. And lots and lots of this is going to be a game pretty much like the game of Pictionary, except the computer is going to guess. And they do this by using machine learning. I see a line or leg or hockey stick. Oh, I know it’s an umbrella,

17:48  

He noticed that it was going through stages and picking out exactly what potentially it could be. But there was one trigger that made it specific to what she was drawing. And that is exactly how machine language works.

18:04  

So that drop-down list is a dataset that is important because of the data that goes into those datasets that create the algorithms and create the models that you see. And so it’s really important that we have a diverse set of folks who are building those datasets that go into the results that you see to be

18:24  

Involved in robotics. Is it important to have knowledge of both hardware and software? Or is it completely fine to specialize?

18:32  

It’s completely fine if you specialize in one. And I think that if you weren’t about the one you usually end up learning about

18:39  

Something I didn’t know when I was the campers ages that you can have many jobs and many careers. It’s not just one thing, and you are doing it forever. Or it’s not even just one thing in your day today.

18:52  

What’s really exciting about being an AI, in general, is just really early so you have kind of this wide-open field of what you’re able to accomplish. In my breakout room, I learned that you have to keep going get your dream. Don’t give up. And even if

19:12  

You don’t know what a robot is, or how to work your robot doesn’t mean you can’t work for the company of the robot. Thank you to all of our industry leaders and experts for volunteering their time to share their knowledge and insights with our campers. And thank you to the campers for joining us. We can’t wait to see your success in the future. Bye everyone

19:49  

Thank you. I’m trying to stop sharing my screen is it gone away?

19:54  

Yeah, I did. Yeah, exactly. Awesome. So I don’t think we have any questions for you but very inspirational messages coming from all over Linda. You are an inspiration, brilliant topic, love your vibrations. Love how you pivoted during the pandemic social awakening moment, all these kudos for you and your team, Linda’s career. Good,

20:25  

Thank you. But I hope everyone understands that they’re watching their future colleagues, these girls are amazing. And it’s so inspiring to see how they want to take their perspectives, their knowledge, and expertise to make the world better for all of us.

20:44  

Absolutely, yes, they are our future leaders. And I think you nailed it like we have to, for our free stem program also, that’s what we feel like, you know, it’s like, we have to honor these kids, and they just have, they’re not just an abundance of energy, they have so many great ideas, and they know they have a perspective on how things should be run, how things should be done. And we have teenagers and their friends and we have these discussions and you see this inspiring group of youth leaders today who have so many ideas to change the world. And so, yes, I’m very positive about what the future holds for us. Thanks again, Linda.

21:30  

Thank you for having me.

21:32  

Take care.  Bye-bye.