Our Speakers

Daphne Larose - Keynote Speaker

Daphne Larose is a feminist-identified, happily lesbian Haitian-American programmer who has spent her career so far designing APIs, adding features to various programming languages, writing security software for printers, writing the string logic for previously released Apple emoji and now working on Pokemon GO at Niantic. She studied CS at Barnard and Georgia Tech, presented twice at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference and, in 2012, she founded BlackFemaleCoders, a blog highlighting black female developers. In 2015, she founded Black Feminist Book Club in Oakland that continues to meet once a month and has since grown to nearly 500 members and has a second chapter in DC. She loves writing and telling stories, reads constantly and grew up playing console and PC games. Her ultimate goal is to be the inspiration she would like to see in our world and she loves connecting with anyone else who is trying their best to do the same.

Taniya Mishra - Learning by Doing (Machine Learning Talk)

Taniya Mishra is Director of AI Research and Lead Speech Scientist at Affectiva, where her current research focuses on developing techniques for estimating human emotion from spoken utterances, with a goal to improve human-machine or human-human communication. These techniques involve training deep learning models from speech, either alone or in conjunction with other information streams, such as text or facial expressions, to estimate a speaker’s emotion about the topic at hand, their engagement in a task, their confidence, or their stress level. Taniya’s past research includes text-to-speech synthesis, voice search, and usage of the latter in child-directed and accessibility applications. Taniya has been a coauthor on more than 25 technical publications and has been awarded more than a dozen patents related to speech technology. She is passionate about STEM education and mentoring. Taniya holds a PhD in computer science from the OGI School of Science and Engineering at OHSU.

Helena Deus - NLP Talk

I’m a biologist by training and was brought into Elsevier to bridge the work we do in life sciences and healthcare with machine learning. One of the models I’m working on will be able to identify whether a sentence in an abstract is a result, method, hypothesis or a goal. This is important to compare papers with each other and understand the validity of the science. Non-reproducibility is a big problem, which has enormous implications for drug companies, who can’t always trust new research coming out of academia and often have to do studies all over again. If machine learning could improve the quality of science, this would have huge implications on the price and speed of drug manufacturing.

Anna Rumshisky - Understanding Human Language Talk (NLP)

Anna Rumshisky is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she leads the Text Machine Lab for NLP. Her primary research area is machine learning for natural language processing. The focus of her research is building computational models for understanding human language, creating computational representations for word and sentence meaning. Applications of her work on computational modeling of human language stretch from clinical informatics to computational social science and digital humanities. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Brandeis University and completed postdoctoral training at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. She is the recipient of NSF CAREER award in 2017.

Kira Prentice - UI/UX Workshop

Kira is a UX Designer and Front-end Engineer at financial tech start-up Gradifi, specializing in designing and implementing impactful software. She has worked in industries from VC to media to healthcare. She holds a B.A. in Computer Science and Linguistics from NYU. In her spare time, Kira directs a non-profit focused on mentoring technical women, and enjoys running and biking around Boston.

Carla Deras - POC Panel

Carla works as an IoT Application Engineer at PTC where she focuses on course/training development and mentorship for IoT (Internet of Things) and AR (Augmented Reality). She was born and raised in El Salvador and moved to the United State to study Aerospace Engineering at the Florida Institute of Technology, where she obtained her master’s degree in Engineering Management. While in college, she kept her extra-curricular activities aligned with her focus on leadership and empowering others. As a result, she first served as the Student Body Secretary, then the Student Body Vice President, and eventually the Student Body President for two years while having the first ever all-women Executive Board in the history of Florida Tech, which also happened to be all women in STEM fields. She was also an active member of the Society of Women Engineers, the Latin American Student Association, and served as the Public Relations Vice-President for the Gamma Phi Beta Sorority chapter at her school. Her goal is to encourage others, especially women in technical fields, to not be afraid of breaking the mold of stereotypes and their limitations.

Rica Elysee - POC Panel

Entrepreneur Rica Elysee is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of BeautyLynk, a company that makes it possible to get beauty services directly to your home with just a few clicks. With BeautyLynk, all the style and convenience of a professional salon are transported into the comfort of your living room. In July 2015, BeautyLynk officially launched. Today, the company serves both the Boston, MA, and Providence, RI, areas, and in spring 2016, service will be expanded further. Recently BeautyLynk was selected out of 300 applicants from around the world as part of Morgan Stanley's 2nd Cohort of Innovation Lab targeting Multicultural and Women Founders. BeautyLynk has been featured in such major, nationwide publications as Black Enterprise, CNBC, Forbes, and Bloomberg. A platform for connecting beauty professionals and potential clients, this platform has rapidly proven itself capable of tackling some of the most pressing issues in the beauty industry. She won gold at MassChallenge in 2016. A natural leader, she sets a solid example in her businesses and strives for greatness in everything that she does.

Anjali Shankar - POC Panel, Tufts Alumni Panel

I’m Anjali Shankar, Class of 2015 at Tufts. I studied Physics and CS while I was an undergrad and then began working at Amazon Robotics soon after graduating.

Meghana Chethan - Product Management

Meghana Chethan is a VP in the Aladdin Product Management group at BlackRock where she manages products that provide access to APIs via Python and Excel from across the Aladdin investment management platform. She has 10 years of experience as a Product Manager in financial technology service firms. Prior to BlackRock, she was a consultant at Ernst & Young in the Data Enterprise and Intelligence financial advisory group. She started her career at Credit Suisse in the Private Banking Technology division where she managed a team of business analysts, built technology to manage orders and trades, structured products, private banking account and client master data and more! Meghana graduated from NYU Tandon School of Engineering with a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering in 2008. She lives in New York & is passionate about art, design and technology.

Eileen Chu Hing - Cybersecurity

Eileen Chu Hing is the Founder and CEO of ZIOS Corporation. She founded her software company in 1999 as a hobby business from her dining room table, when her youngest child started Kindergarten.
Born and raised in New York City to immigrant parents from Shanghai, China, Eileen’s first language is Shanghainese. She attended Brooklyn Tech High School and graduated from the University of Delaware with a BS in Chemistry, where she was mentored by Dr. Richard F. Heck, the 2010 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. Eileen continued her studies in business and computer science at Wharton and Drexel University while she raised a family in Philadelphia.
In 2003, Eileen’s first software product, EsquireTimeBot(R), was showcased in Silicon Valley by PalmSource at the Palm Developer Conference. In addition, her software product, ProteanTimeBot(R), was showcased in Silicon Valley by PalmSource in 2005. This recognition and attention helped propel her company to develop early strategic partnerships with IBM and AT&T.
Eileen Chu Hing is the sole inventor of eight US and international patents in cybersecurity, with more patents pending.
As a female American innovator, inventor, and entrepreneur, hear her inspiring story about her strength, resilience, and ingenuity in her journey against all odds in building a successful startup.

Diane Hessan - Tufts Alumni Panel

Diane Hessan is a leading Boston entrepreneur. She is the founder and Chairman of C Space, which was the first company to build online communities for market research – and is also CEO of Salient Ventures, which is accelerating the next generation of growth companies in tech.
Since December of 2016, Diane has been researching voters across the U.S., and has been sharing her insights in a regular Boston Globe column. She co-authored the book Customer-Centered Growth: Five Strategies for Building Competitive Advantage, a best-seller that is published in 11 languages.
She serves on the boards of Eastern Bank, Brightcove, Tufts University, Mass Challenge, CoachUp, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and on the editorial board of The Boston Globe. She has an M.B.A. from Harvard and a B.A. in Economics from Tufts. She has 2 grown daughters, and is also founder of The Sound Bytes, an a cappella group that sings about business.

Anjali Midha - Tufts Alumni Panel

Anjali is an entrepreneur with a passion for driving innovation in media and marketing analytics. She is the co-founder & CEO of Diesel Labs, a content analytics company that illuminates audience preferences across the fragmented media spectrum. Diesel levels the playing field by surfacing the content an audience cares about most regardless of format, distribution channel, or device - from TV shows to video games to vlogs. Before starting Diesel Labs she was the Global Managing Director of Media Research at Twitter where she studied the interactivity between traditional and new media. She joined Twitter via their acquisition of Bluefin Labs, the pioneer of Social TV Analytics, prior to which she was the VP of Strategy & Analytics at Digitas. Anjali holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management and a BA in Economics with a double minor in Communications & Media Studies and Multimedia Arts from Tufts University.

Elise Ewing - Tufts Alumni Panel

I graduated from Tufts in 2013 with a BA in the Interdisciplinary Study of Computational Neurobiology. Since then I have been working as a Financial Software Consultant in Davis Square. Tufts gave me a great CS foundation and I have done a lot more learning on the job. I was attracted to a career in software development by the collegiate team-oriented environment and the complex problem solving opportunities. Outside work I enjoy running, comedy, and spending time with friends.

Allison Perkel - Tufts Alumni Panel

Allison has been involved on the Boston tech scene since she graduated from Tufts. She's worked in several startups, advised a few, delivered lifesaving military robots and telepresence robots, created software for a heart pump, and now is at Carbon Black where she's a leader in the delivering the next generation of security software. In her 20+ years in tech, she's delivered millions of products to market. When not making the world a better place through technology, she can be found with her camera documenting the world around her.

Bobbie Carlton - Public Speaking and Job Searching

Bobbie Carlton, founder of Carlton PR & Marketing, Innovation Nights and Innovation Women, is an award-winning marketing, PR and social media professional. She speaks regularly on social media, community building, product launches, public speaking and PR.
Previously, in addition to working with a number of Boston-area PR and marketing firms, she headed global PR at enterprise software companies PTC and Cognos. In 2006 she switched gears, joining a startup focused on supporting self-esteem and positive role models for preteen girls through a social network and book series. In 2008, she started her own company…the first one.
Carlton PR & Marketing is a boutique agency servicing a wide variety of startups and small companies, providing support for PR, content creation, social media marketing and marketing programs.
Mass Innovation Nights (MIN) is a social media powered new product showcase and networking event. MIN has launched more than 1000 new products which have received more than $2 billion in funding.
Innovation Women is an online “visibility bureau” helping drive visibility for entrepreneurial, technical and innovative women through speaking engagements.
In 2010 she was named one of the “Ten Bostonians who have done the most for the startup community”, and in 2011 she was a recipient of a Mass High Tech All-star award. In 2015 she was named a Boston Business Journal Woman to Watch. PR News called her a Gamechanger in 2017.

Julianne Zimmerman - Tech for Social Good

For over 25 years, Julianne Zimmerman has focused on putting technology (and capital) to work for the greater good. In her current role as Managing Director with Reinventure Capital, she is raising a fund to invest in a chronically overlooked pool of entrepreneurs: people of color and women. She recently served on the board of Flocktory, a Moscow-based company acquired by Qiwi in Q1 17. Previously as Co-Founder of a seed-stage investment firm, Julianne invested in startups in energy, water, food, and health. As a co-founder, external consultant, VP of Communications, VP of Business Development, and VP of Engineering, Julianne has built departments, managed alpha projects, guided branding and identity efforts, and led a wide variety of initiatives from blank page to successful, in many cases award-winning, completion. Along the way she and her co-conspirators have catalyzed industry shifts, changed conversations, won awards, and set new standards for performance.

Julianne earned two undergraduate degrees from MIT in Humanities/Literature and Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, an MS in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Maryland, and an executive certificate in Sustainability Management from the Presidio Graduate School; she previously served as a certified EMT in Maryland and Massachusetts. She was twice a finalist in the NASA astronaut selection process. A frequent speaker, reviewer and judge for innovation and entrepreneurship programs in the US and abroad, she currently serves on the MIT Venture Mentoring Service, among others. She is also a Founding Principal of Great Dome Associates, and teaches Innovative Social Enterprises at Tufts University.

Fahad Dogar - Tech for Social Good

Fahad Dogar is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department and the Senior Tisch Fellow for Civic Technology at Tufts University. Previously he has worked at Microsoft Research, UK and at LUMS. He received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University and an undergraduate degree in CS from LUMS, Pakistan. His honors and awards include the Facebook/Oculus Faculty fellowship, Tisch Fellowship, and a gold medal from LUMS. He is broadly interested in networked systems, with a focus on cloud systems, future Internet architectures, and technologies for developing regions.

Parna Sarkar-Basu - Tech for Social Good, Turning Passion into Career

Parna Sarkar-Basu, an innovation marketing strategist, helps companies navigate the digital era and created the robot technology category and ecosystem along with the founders of iRobot.
She appears frequently as a speaker and moderator at key industry events and leads executive discussions on topics ranging from innovation and entrepreneurship to tech trends and digital transformation. Some of the events she has participated in includes AI World, ISPIM Innovation Forum, Boston GreenFest, MassTLC, HUBweek, MIT CIO Symposium (lunch roundtables), Sales and Marketing Innovators and WITI Summit. She has been a guest speaker at local colleges including Harvard and Boston University.
Leveraging her two passions – technology and brand building – Parna humanizes corporate brands, simplifies the complex, and creates industry buzz to elevate companies to new heights. She has been instrumental in revitalizing product-lines and propelling tech companies into category leaders in highly competitive markets, and including artificial intelligence, enterprise software, storage systems and robots.
   Recipient of multiple awards, Parna serves as a strategic advisor to entrepreneurs in the U.S. and Europe and works with their team on a variety of initiatives, including product messaging and positioning, product launch, brand development fundraising and reputation management. Prior to starting her own business, Parna has led marketing and communications functions at various global companies, including Kaminario, iRobot, iCorps Technologies, Invention Machine (acquired by IHS), and PTC.
   A champion of STEM initiatives and innovation, Parna builds and supports programs to inspire future innovators and entrepreneurs. She has created corporate programs for K-12 students, so they can see 'science in motion' and pursue non-traditional careers. She is V.P.of Marketing for Women in Technology International (WITI) and V.P. of Brand Marketing for American Marketing Association Boston.

Mira Wilczek - Big Data

Mira Wilczek is President and CEO of Cogo Labs and a Senior Partner at Link Ventures. Her mission is to take the Cogo incubator’s 10-year track record of successfully of building internet companies like CourseAdvisor, EverQuote, and CareDash on the back of 5B rows/day of big consumer data, and scale it 10X over the next three years. Since she became CEO in 2017, the incubator itself has already more than tripled its revenues. Last year Mira was named Top 40 Under 40 by the BBJ. She couldn’t attend the award ceremony because she was busy... having her first child!

Mira serves on the Board of Directors at EverQuote (NASDAQ: EVER), CareDash, and Hopjump, and the Advisory Boards of Vestigo Ventures and SciHub. She is a Co-Director at the Brahe Educational Foundation. Prior to joining Cogo, Mira was founder and CEO of Red Panda Security, Principal Investigator under the DARPA CFT program, and Director of Business Development at Lyric Semiconductor, where she garnered industry recognition including TR50, Silicon 60, and an EE Times ACE Award. She started her career at IBM, architecting their first automated security testing platform. Mira holds patents both granted and pending in the fields of cyber security and sensor data fusion. She has an S.B. in EECS from MIT, and an MBA from MIT Sloan.

Tati Doyle - Technical Interview Prep

Tati is a senior at Tufts University majoring in Computer Science with a minor in Foreign Policy Analysis. She's interned at a startup incubator program at Berkeley Haas, Paytronix, and Square. She's interested in backend engineering and is passionate about dogs, boba, and international relations. She is the Professional Development Officer for Tufts' Women in Computer Science organization, where she works to bring professional opportunities to female/non-binary CS students.