Why this newsletter?

Who am I and why am I starting this newsletter?

Hi,

my name is Verena and I have been working as a machine learning scientist for over 7 years. My background originally is in statistics but I started working directly in the field of Machine Learning after graduating from university. Last year I left my job as a Research Scientist at Amazon Alexa and became a self-employed Generative AI consultant.

But enough about the dry facts - the reason I am starting this newsletter is not to talk about tech skills and credentials. Instead I want to talk about how it FEELS and what it is like to be a woman in AI. I want to connect to other women in AI (or tech in general) and give us a platform where we can support each other and share our experiences. Because being a woman in AI is not always easy! But having community to share our lived experience with makes it so much easier! When I was still at Amazon, the women in AI affinity group gave me that. Now that I left, I want to create that for every woman in AI - independent of their employer or work mode.

𝐈𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐟 𝐦𝐲 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐫 𝐈 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐧𝐨 𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐚 𝐨𝐟 how to navigate a male-dominated environment 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐟𝐞𝐥𝐭 𝐭𝐨𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐞𝐦𝐩𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐝 𝐚 𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐥. Over the time I have developed some strategies and tools that help me staying in control. And guess what - it’s not about the tech skills that you acquire. Yes they are important but only a piece of the puzzle. Soft skills often get overlooked in tech environments - but they might be even more crucial. I had to learn this the hard way. A male-dominated environment creates special challenges that call for special tools. Only doing good work is not enough. You need to advocate for yourself, promote your work (in a way that feels comfortable to you), develop confidence, ask for the things you want (likely several times) and work on your limiting beliefs as well as learn to reduce overwhelm and stress.

What can you expect from this newsletter?

Every month I share a mix of studies or facts about being a woman in AI, what helped me throughout the years, some interesting AI news (cause staying up to date is one of the challenges the AI world poses 😉 ) and give you some content and event recommendations. But happy to hear from you what you would like to see, just reply to this email 🙂

Is this community only for women?

No! We welcome everyone who wants to learn about what it means to be a woman in a male-dominated environment and maybe even wants to become an ally.

Studies and stats

I decided to include a section about studies because reading that my lived experience aligns with what studies find, validates my experience and helps me letting go of the “maybe it’s just me” thought. In addition, I want to use it to show the gender imbalance and the effects it has.

Source: McKinsey Study Women in tech: The best bet to solve Europe’s talent shortage published in January 2023

AI

In this section I will share resources I find useful to keep up with recent AI developments or to learn more about the field. I will put a level behind each resource indicating whether this is for people with expertise or people just starting to learn about AI.

• Advanced Data Analytics for Management Support - beginner who want to understand how AI works
  This is a lecture series from one of my former professors - this lecture actually ignited my interest in AI.

• Data Masterclass Podcast - Leveraging Generative AI in Corporate Environments - beginner to intermediate

  Nice high-level and descriptive explanation of how Large Language models work (LLM) and how they can be used in corporates

• Prompt Engineering Guide - includes all levels
  This website gives a great overview of all the different approaches to prompting. It is a great starting point. It also references a lot of papers in the area in case you want to go deeper.

• Large Language Model (LLM) Surveys - advanced

  LLMs are evolving at a rapid speed making it hard to keep a good overview. The following paper fill that gap and provide a nice overview of the recent developments and compare the different LLMs.
  1) Naveed, Humza, et al. "A comprehensive overview of large language models." arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.06435 (2023).
  2) Minaee, Shervin, et al. "Large Language Models: A Survey." arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.06196 (2024).

Wellbeing Hack

In this section I will share all kind of wellbeing hacks - wellbeing is key not only to our quality of life but also our professional performance. If you want to do good work, you need to be well! So make it a priority!

Psychological sigh (< 1 min)

Stress and overwhelm are often part of our daily life. However, too high stress levels impede performance as the area in the brain where our logical thinking happens (the frontal lobe) goes offline. The next time you feel stressed, try the psychological sigh described by Andrew Huberman, a professor for Neurobiology & Ophthalmology at Stanford Medicine and podcast host in this tweet:

Events

In this section, I am sharing interesting events to attend in person or online. Since I am based in Berlin, there is a little bit of a bias 😛 

International Women’s Day is coming up on the 8th of March and it even is a bank holiday in Berlin, there is a lot happening in the Women in AI / tech communities. Find out more about what the International Women’s day is about.

• Women’s Empowerment Meetup @Thoughtworks
  Feb 29th, 6 to 8.30 pm

• RI Meetup: Sustainable AI - How to make it work? - ONLINE
  Feb 29th, 6 to 9 pm

• AWS WUG Berlin Meetup - Women's Day Empowerment Event 2024 @ AWS Berlin
  Mar 5th, 6 to 9 pm

• International Women’s Day 2024: Celebrating Women in Berlin's AI Ecosystem @ hubraum - tech incubator of Deutsche Telekom
  Mar 20th, 6 to 9:45 pm

Content recommendations

My favorite pieces of content to learn and grow!

• The Women in AI making a difference - Tech Crunch

  Tech Crunch launched a series to introduce women with a crucial role for AI. The coverage on AI is dominated by males - Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Larry Page. It failed to mention women. While women are still underrepresented in the field, there are women with a crucial role. Tech crunch is interviewing them in this series:
  Irene Solaiman, head of global policy at Hugging Face

  Eva Maydell, member of European Parliament and EU AI Act advisor

  Lee Tiedrich, AI expert at the Global Partnership on AI

  Rashida Richardson, senior counsel at Mastercard focusing on AI and privacy

  Krystal Kauffman, research fellow at the Distributed AI Research Institute
  Check it out to find new role models!

• Mindset by Dr. Carol Dweck
  A book that truly changed my perspective on how much of excellence can be attributed to talent vs practice and discipline. I used to think that many strengths and skills can be rather attributed to talent than dedicated practice (fixed mindset), now I am convinced I could learn anything, literally anything, if I put in the work (growth mindset). Also great advice on how to educate children in a growth mindset.

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