Nearly 200 participants in ChileWiC 2024

With a focus on the future of computing and the need to enhance the representation and inclusion of women and diversity in the area, the XII version of Chile Women in Computing 2024 , the most important meeting of women in the area of computing in Chile, was held in the auditorium of Universidad Mayor in Providencia.
"This meeting started with a small group of female academics, and each year it has grown more and more, so having close to 200 participants this year is already a tremendous success, and allows us to belong to a community," emphasizes Valeria Herskovic, director of the Department of Computing at Universidad Católica and one of the organizers of the activity. "We seek to give visibility to the contributions that we women make in the area of computer science, technology and engineering, especially in Chile". 

"ChileWIC is a celebration and that was very much felt. The day was spectacular, with a lot of joy and complicity among the participants and this year, particularly, there was a lot of interest in the calls and we are very proud of what we have achieved and there are more and more signs that people are organizing to attend from other universities and regions such as USM Concepción and Valparaíso, the UFRO and UV", shares Claudia López, USM academic and part of the organization.

Emerging talents in charge of today's challenges

The emerging talent of the community of women in computing in Chile was present in the student competition, in which more than 20 posters were presented, with works covering different topics and challenges for computing in various areas such as health, machine learning, transportation and others.

"The student competition is, without a doubt, the heart of ChileWiC", says Ana Bustamante, academic from Universidad de la Frontera, in charge of this segment, in which this year 22 projects from different students from all over the country participated: "The spirit is that they tell us what they are doing within their universities, formulating it as a project. This can be their theses, internship projects in the industry: what interests us is to see what they are working on and promote it," says the academic. We seek "that this core of competitors also be a representative sample of what our new or future female engineers who are developing in the area of technologies at a national level are doing". That is why in ChileWiC there is a system of scholarships for those who must travel from different parts of the country to the meeting to participate in the competition, which is growing every year.

 In the individual student track, first place went to Keiko Sahory, a student at the Universidad de Valparaíso, with "Modelo de Análisis y Predicción de No-Asistencias a Appointments Médicas en Atención Primaria" (Model for Analysis and Prediction of Non-Attendance at Medical Appointments in Primary Care). Meanwhile, the work "Automatic Classification of Vascular States Using RGB Analysis in Finger Videos for Invasive Diagnosis", by Josefa Fernández Pavez (PUC), obtained the second place, and Antonia Labarca Sanchez (U. Chile), with "Redes de Autómatas con Pesos" (Automata Networks with Weights), won third place.
Meanwhile, in the duplicate competition, the winning work was "Modelo de madurez en Ciberseguridad para PYMES" (Cybersecurity Maturity Model for SMEs), by Gemita Escalona Troncoso and Francisca Neira González, from Universidad de la Frontera (Temuco). The second place went to "The effects of E-Scooters in public transportation: case study in Santiago de Chile", with Matilde Rivas and Natalia Meza, both from Universidad de Chile; and the third place went to "ProtoAI", by Renata Martinez (U. Mayor) and Lorenzo Saavedra. 

Outstanding presentations

In the keynote by Raquel Pezoa, a prominent academic at the Universidad Federico Santa María, she related her "experience as a computer scientist in teaching and research and my applied and interdisciplinary work in machine learning in different areas of science such as particle physics, astrophysics, astro particles and histopathological image processing". Meanwhile, in the talk "From 0 to 1: entrepreneurship in technology and sustainability", by Florencia Valladares - Co-founder Bloom Reuse, the attendees shared a series of questions about the development of the speaker, seeking to learn from her experience.

Focusing on the challenges of artificial intelligence

In this version of ChileWiC, four parallel workshops on different challenges in the area of Artificial Intelligence were coordinated by groups that seek to actively promote the participation of women in this area. 

"Considering that AI is more present than ever in our daily lives, in this version of ChileWIC 2024, together with Romina Torres from UAI, we organized the track of parallel sessions with interactive workshops on teaching AI from different approaches. We are very happy for the high call and interest of institutions and organizations in presenting innovative and inspiring proposals that covered different target audiences," says Violeta Chang, an academic at the University of Santiago and organizer of the workshops. "The choice of which session to choose was complicated for the attendees, but we are very satisfied, because in all of them there was a high attendance and all participants came out learning a lot in this instance. That is the beauty of ChileWIC, besides inspiring and networking, we learn together in this great celebration of women in computing in Chile", she adds. 

On Developing Abstract Thinking in AI Development: Fundación Tec Mujer' s Executive Director, Constanza Díaz, highlighted the importance of abstract thinking in AI design, based on recent research on STEM education.

Meanwhile, in Introduction to Explainable AI (XAI), by the also keynote ChileWiC 2024, Raquel Pezoa, UTFSM academic, attendees addressed techniques such as SHAP and LIME for the interpretation of machine learning models.
In AI and Leadership: Tools for Professional Impact: Jenny Loyola, director of the Association of Business and Professional Women, explored the use of AI to enhance skills and develop effective action plans.
And the great challenge of addressing biases in artificial intelligence models was the topic of "AI, Ethics and Fairness: A Case of Selection Bias"; in which Cinthya Vergara, expert in data analytics, guided a practical analysis to mitigate biases in algorithms through examples in Python.

Acknowledgments

ChileWiC is organized by academics from various universities in Chile, including the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Universidad de Los Andes, Universidad de la Frontera, Universidad Mayor, and Universidad Autónoma de Chile. The event is also supported by NIC Chile, the Instituto de Sistemas Complejos de Ingeniería (ISCI), the Centro Nacional de Inteligencia Artificial (Cenia) and the Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data (IMFD).