We held the Women in Big Data Meetup/Luncheon on March 30, 2016 at the Hilton San Jose, co-located with Strata+Hadoop World Conference. The Meetup included several great speakers:

• Yanbing Li, Sr. VP and GM of storage and availability BU at VMware and one of Business Insider’s most powerful engineers of 2015
• Jill Dyche, speaker, author, and vice president of SAS best practices
• Karen Matthys, Stanford Women in Data Science initiative

See Event Page for more details.

We planned for 100 attendees but due to overwhelming response we extended the venue and hosted over 200 attendees. Thanks to Suzanne Axtell, Marketing Operations & Diversity Outreach with O’Reilly Media, for all the logistical support to make it a great experience for all.

Our speakers covered a range of engaging topics. I started with opening remarks and summary of our Women in Big Data initiative and its membership growth to 500 since we started the initiative in June of 2015. Also, we announced the launch of womeninbigdata.org.

Yanbing Li shared her insight and experience on career navigation, from technical leadership to business leadership.

Jill Dyche covered the very emotional topic “Big Data, One Dog at a time”.  Her presentation is included here.

And Karen Matthys discussed Women in Data Science initiatives at Stanford, addressing challenges with diversity and lack of women in Computational & Mathematical Engineering. Click here to view her presentation.

After presenting, the speakers stayed around and addressed questions by audience. Many thanks to our all our speakers and organizers for a successful meetup.