Diane Jurgens, executive vice president and chief information officer at The Walt Disney Co., believes the most crippling limitations are self-imposed, and she spoke about this during a keynote.
She began her own big dreams by becoming the first in her family to both attend college and get a passport. While working for Boeing, General Motors and Disney, she visited 75 countries and all seven continents.
“I boldly created my future,” she told the audience.
She broke down the event’s theme of “Daring” into an acronym: D for dreaming boldly, A for adventure, R for relationships and E for experiences. All are crucial to achieving bold dreams, she said. And if you find yourself in a roadblock at work, find a way to excel and get noticed.
“Get yourself recognized. That’s the best way to get out,” she said with a chuckle.
Disney’s CIO Wants You To ‘Dream Boldly’
AI Scientist & Activist
Often, Black women
are the last to benefit from any movement centered around women but are called on to clean up everyone’s mess—
the way we are raising alarms around harmful technology.”
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TIMNIT GEBRU
Gebru is a cautionary voice in a field filled with unbridled optimism. She’s been a vocal advocate for the underrepresented in concerns related to artificial intelligence and is the cofounder of Black in AI, a nonprofit for Black professionals in the field.
As Gebru describes it, her work focuses on minimizing the negative societal impact of artificial intelligence. Examples of AI algorithms that unwittingly perpetuated the biases of their creators have been well documented, and Gebru authored a groundbreaking study showing that facial recognition was less accurate when considering women and people of color.
Her departure from Google in December—as one of the only female Black researchers there and colead of its Ethical AI team—was contentious, she noted in her keynote. She spent much of her time urging the event’s copresenter, AnitaB.org, to reconsider its sponsorship policies as a result of Google’s sponsorship of the tech event.
AI Scholar Timnit Gebru Answers New Tech’s Thorniest Ethical Questions
If a single company caught the technological wave of the pandemic, it was Zoom. Hardly known outside of its IPO in 2019, the videoconferencing platform almost instantly became a national pastime when businesses and schools were forced wholesale by the pandemic to move to remote work.
Aparna Bawa, chief operating officer and interim chief legal officer at Zoom, spoke in a fireside chat about the tumult of the previous three years.
Zoom went from 10 million to 300 million meeting participants a day in four months—and from primarily serving IT directors at corporations to serving the general public.
“We discovered, unwittingly, that we were going to be the IT department to the world, teaching the teachers,” she said. “Our challenge is to be an enterprise-focused business, and at the same time, serve the needs of the consumer. I don’t think there’s been a technology-focused company today that does both with the same platform.”
Zoom Became ‘The IT Department To The World’ During The Pandemic
Susan Rice is the domestic policy advisor to President Joe Biden, and her career in diplomacy spans most of the major posts the profession has to offer. Under former President Barack Obama, she was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and U.S. national security advisor.
She currently heads up the Domestic Policy Council, coordinating the Biden administration’s domestic policy agenda.
In her spare time, she wrote a New York Times bestselling memoir, Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For, and acted as a visiting fellow at American University’s School of International Service and Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
Under the Clinton administration, Rice was U.S. assistant secretary of state, senior director for African affairs and director for international organizations and peacekeeping at the National Security Council. She kicked off her career as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where she earned her master’s and doctorate in international relations.
Tech Workers Are Fundamental To A Well-Functioning Government
Domestic Policy Advisor, President Biden
Good policy on paper doesn’t mean much if it doesn’t get to the people it’s intended to benefit. Writing legislation is critical, but so is writing the code that makes that legislation mean something.”
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SUSAN RICE
