Data Afterwork Event – Munich

December 20, 2019

Kendy Rannenberg, Pat Piritburana, Nahia Orduna, Antje Barth, Rielah-Jean de Jesus, Astrid Neumann, Katharina Brass

On November 14, 2019, the Munich chapter of Women in Big Data organised an afterwork evening in the new amazing offices of AWS in the city center. We gathered again around one hundred people from our community.

This event showed the collaboration of the Women in Big Data network across chapters and continents. Our host was Antje Barth, from the Düsseldorf Women in Big Data chapter and Senior Developer Advocate, AI and Machine Learning at AWS. In addition, Rielah-Jean De Jesus, Senior Solution Architect at AWS joined us from WiBD US.

We kicked off the event with the introduction from Astrid Neumann and Pat Piritburana about the Women in Big Data initiative and a presentation of the chapter and next events.

Then Rielah conducted a great session about Building Conversational Bots using Amazon Lex and Polly. Speech recognition and natural language understanding are some of the most challenging problems to solve in computer science, requiring sophisticated deep learning algorithms to be trained on massive amounts of data and infrastructure. Amazon Lex democratizes these deep learning technologies by putting the power of Amazon Alexa within reach of all developers. During her presentation, Rielah explained how you can integrate AWS AI/ML services such as Amazon Lex and Amazon Polly to build conversational bots that can help you define entirely new categories of products and services. She presented a great demo that really impressed the audience, who kept asking many questions the presentation concluded.

Next, Nahia Orduna, Senior Manager in Analytics and Digital Integration at Vodafone, delivered a presentation about the Future of Work, how AI is transforming the jobs, and what can we do about it. To hear the presentation for yourself and feel the atmosphere in our event, click here.

Finally, we had a quiz with questions from the presentations of the evenings. The lucky winners won a coaching session with Maribel Ortega, a passionate coaching professional who supports her clients in taking their professional skillsets to the next level. Maribel specializes in leadership, teamwork, and public speaking, providing her clients with the tools to become the architects of their lives and to thrive in their leadership roles. Maribel has a master’s degree in philology and is a certified coach and business cultural trainer with more than ten years of experience. If you want to hear more about her, you can visit her website www.maribelortega.com or connect with her on social media at Facebook or LinkedIn.

We have had a lot of great feedback about our prizes (coaching sessions, HR reviews of LinkedIn profile, etc.) from our community and we will keep supporting them this way. The event was possible thanks to the engagement of many people apart from the ones presenting, as Kendy Rannenberg, and Katharina Brass from the Women in Big Data Munich Chapter team.