WiDS Maastricht Conference 2023 - A Lookback
WiDS Maastricht Conference 2023: A Lookback in words and pictures.
On Tuesday 7 March 2023, the 4th edition of the Women in Data Science (WiDS) Maastricht Conference was held in-person at Maastricht University. The event was organized by the Maastricht University Institute of Data Science, in collaboration with the Department of Advanced Computing Sciences (DACS), Maastricht University Library, Female Empowerment Maastricht (FEM) and Brightlands Institute for Smart Sciences (BISS) Heerlen.
The conference included keynote speakers, technical talks, interactive sessions, a panel discussion, and a data science award ceremony. The invited speakers discussed the impact of data science on the social good and came from academia and industry. The discussed topics featured a new improved perspective on health data sharing, both conceptually and from a distributed learning perspective. To this extent:
Dr. Isabelle de Zegher talked about health data sharing, the challenges of data curation and how this is being achieved within AIDAVA.
Dr. Fadila Zerka provided her experience in analyzing health data with privacy preserving methods. She showed how distributed learning and blockchain-based approaches can support such analysis even when data are distributed in very small datasets.
The speakers highlighted the importance of explainability, and the challenges of legal protection by design in relation to technology.
Prof. Dr. Nava Tintarev discussed the importance of interactive explanation interfaces in recommender systems, stimulating the user to explore more diverse explanations.
Prof. Dr. Mireille Hildebrandt highlighted the challenges of legal protection by design, emphasizing the need for a coherent integration of technologies, mindsets and resources between lawyers and computer scientists.
Finally, an interesting case of data-driven, AI-based solution was proposed in the energy sector: A team of 3 (Cristiana Pompei, Jelena Grujic, and Anabel Maréchal), explained their work on offering precise predictions of energy consumption, translating into fixed contracts for the clients.
During the conference, we also announced the winners of the Maastricht Datathon challenge, Team 'Genetic Mess', as well as the two Amrapali Zaveri Awards winners:
1) The Future Data Scientist Award (Yaru Zhang)
2) The Early Career Data Scientist Award (David Barnett).
We hope to see you in our next WiDS Maastricht Conference, which will be held in March 2024!
