Tag: techology

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A Month of Panels in The Milky Way!

Panels, Panels, and more Panels!

This month I had the opportunity to moderate and speak on several panels. I picked up some amazing gems along the way that I had to share!

Toward the beginning of the month I had the pleasure of being on a panel hosted by Northwestern Mutual’s African American Employee Resource Group!  It was such an honor to sit along side amazing women to discuss  navigating tech careers and sharing the importance of representation in tech! I was super thrilled to be sitting next to Keisha Howard founder of Sugar gamers. She’s a true gem ! 

Key takeaways from this panel: 

  • Communities that want to help address the racial and gender disparities in STEM fields should commit to giving time, money and resources.
  • When exploring career paths— educate yourself as much as possible on the industry and all it has to offer.
  • Technology is democratizing entrepreneurship.— Create what you want!

This month I also moderated a panel for Northwestern Mutuals Girls in Tech day!  This panel was geared toward young girls in middle school! We talked about the power of standing out! Knowing that these brilliant young women are interested in a career in STEM gives me hope for the future! 

Key takeaways: 

  • Leverage what makes you unique.
  • Ask questions early and often.
  • YouTube University is a great way to pick up a new skill!
  • It’s possible to be artsy/creative and have a passion for STEM at the same time!

Lastly, yesterday I sat on a panel hosted by Panther Hacks. Again, it was an incredible honor to sit alongside amazing leaders in Milwaukee. We had a candid conversation about Milwaukee’s entrepreneurial capabilities and the need to address Milwaukee’s segregation issues in order to ensure Milwaukee reaches its full potential. 

Key take aways:

  • Take risks!
  • It’s better to fail big than to fail small because of the level of learning along the way.
  • Don’t allow people to project their limitations on you! 
  • Never underestimate your ability to make change!
  • Keep a solid support system.. but believe in yourself enough to fly solo if you have to. 

I ‘m grateful for the community leaders in the city that made all of these amazing events possible. I especially am grateful for the amazing folks at Northwestern Mutual that continue pour their time and resources into the community to empower Milwaukee’s tech hub!

Good stuff!

Check out my new podcast – https://anchor.fm/downtomarsmke

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Startup Milwaukee Week Emphasizes the Importance of Diversity in Milwaukee’s Tech and Startup Ecosystem

JetConstellationsdesignstudio (5)

Jet Constellations Presents the Inaugural
Startup Milwaukee Week Diversity Track

Milwaukee, Wisconsin – As Milwaukee’s startup community continues to grow it is extremely important that this community is a reflection of Milwaukee’s diverse population. Startup Milwaukee recognizes the importance of diversity in Milwaukee’s tech and startup ecosystems and is partnering with Jet Constellations, a local startup focused on building a nurturing ecosystem of techies and entrepreneurs that represent Milwaukee’s diverse population to ensure inclusion through Startup Milwaukee Week’s diversity track programming.

This is the first year Startup Milwaukee Week which runs November 5 – 11, 2018 has included a diversity track which will include nine events hosted by organizations such as Jet Constellations, MalmaDoe, Spearity and 88nine Radio Milwaukee.

“Having a strong STEM workforce that is inclusive of people from diverse backgrounds is critical for the Milwaukee region to be competitive in the 21st century,” said Nadiyah Johnson founder of Jet Constellations “We are committed to closing the diversity gap in Milwaukee’s tech and  startup community and aim to raise awareness of the need to do so throughout Startup Milwaukee Week’s diversity track.”

“Cultivating a diverse and inclusive workforce for the tech and startup community would be a competitive advantage for Milwaukee as we continue to develop the ecosystem,” said Matt Cordio president of Skills Pipeline and organizer of Startup Milwaukee Week. “We are excited to partner with Jet Constellations as part of our commitment to advance the tech community, moving southeastern Wisconsin’s economy forward, and provide more opportunity to build and grow a pipeline of startups and technology talent.”

According to Pew Research, Black and Hispanic workers continue to be underrepresented in the STEM workforce. Blacks are 9% of STEM workforce while being 11% of the total US workforce. The lack of representation of women, Blacks and Hispanics hold strong financial implications. It’s no secret that jobs in STEM fields average higher salaries compared with many non-STEM jobs. If there is not a significant push for STEM education in underrepresented communities the wage gap will not only persist but also expand. There will be an approximate 9 million jobs in the STEM industry by 2022.

Jet Constellations believes that quality STEM education should be afforded to everyone not just the elite institutions. It is vital that we as a country understand what’s at stake and care enough to take action.

Diversity Track Event Information

Event

Date

Time

Location

Jet Constellations: The Milky Way –

Changing the Culture of STEM

11/7/2018

6:00PM

88Nine Radio Milwaukee

MalmaDoe: Women Founder’s Business Lifecycle

11/5/2018

11:30AM

MalmaDoe

Thrive: People Strategy – setting and growing thriving culture

11/5/2018

1:00 PM

Technology Innovation Center

Spearity: Developing Inner City Tech Entrepreneurs

11/6/2018

Milwaukee Networking Hub: Speednetworking – Building Relationships, One Round at a Time

11/7/2018

5:00PM

Central Standard

UWM’s Immerisive Media Lab (Augmented & Virtual Realities):

Tour UWM’s Immersive Media Lab

11/9/2018

9:00 AM

Kenilworth Square East Side of Building

Lubar Entrepreneurship Center:

UWM Social Good Morning with Dr. Moe Mukiibi

11/9/2018

9:30 AM

UWM Freshwater Science

88Nine Radio Milwaukee:

88Nine Labs | Moving the needle: How new technology is changing the music industry

11/9/2018

5:30 PM

Northwestern Mutual’s Cream City Labs

88Nine Radio Milwaukee:

88Nine x Capitol Records Hackathon

11/10/2018

10:00 AM

Northwestern Mutual’s Cream City Labs

About Jet Constellations:

Jet Constellations is a community tech hub that functions to promote STEM education in our communities, consult tech oriented startups, and build a nurturing ecosystem of techies and entrepreneurs that represent Milwaukee’s diverse population. Startup Milwaukee Week’s  Diversity Track presented by Jet Constellations’ Milky Way initiative aims to promote diversity in Milwaukee‘s tech scene.

About Startup Week Milwaukee:

Startup Milwaukee Week presented by Advocate Aurora Health takes place on November 5 – 11, 2018, and is designed to connect, educate, and celebrate entrepreneurship in Southeast Wisconsin. The week’s programming showcases the community’s emerging companies while highlighting the resources and organizations available to foster support for entrepreneurs on their journey. The week will feature 40+ events hosted by 35+ partner organizations in the community. Startup Milwaukee Week is supported by Advocate Aurora Health, Concordia University Wisconsin, Husch Blackwell, Northwestern Mutual, Accelity Marketing, Headway, Milwaukee Business Journal and Newsradio 620 WTMJ and is a part of the Startup Wisconsin initiative.

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Tech-Hub for The Milky Way

stikerdesktop (1)Jet Constellations is a local startup that functions to promote STEM education in Milwaukee, consult tech oriented startups, and build a nurturing ecosystem of techies and entrepreneurs . Jet Constellations’ Milky Way initiative works to transform Milwaukee into a tech hub that represents the city’s diverse population through community workshops, panels, talks, hackathons and design thinking sessions.  It is evident diversity in STEM spurs innovation and plays a significant role in ensuring the best ideas and solutions see the light of day.  An inclusive tech scene in Milwaukee will help the city reach its full potential. Milwaukee will be known as The Milky Way, a tech hub made up of creators and innovators that are representative of its population.
Follow Jet Constellations
Instagram – @jetconstellations
Facebook- Jet Constellations
 

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DeepVariant: Genomics Meet Deep Learning

Collage of DNA images and people

Yesterday I attended a talk on deep learning and genomics by Pi-Chauan Chang, a software engineer at Google.  Pi-Chauan gave a high level overview of deep learning and how her team formulates a problem in genomics to successfully apply deep learning techniques. She also discussed DeepVariant – a software built by Google to enable community efforts to progress genomic sequencing.

What is deep learning?:

Deep Learning is a subfield of machine learning concerned with algorithms inspired by the structure and function of the brain called artificial neural networks.

Deep learning is playing a huge role in advancements in genomic research such as high processing of sequencing techniques.  This information era where we continue to be presented with an outpouring of data has truly began to challenge conventional methods used in genomics. While deep learning has succeeded in a variety of fields such as vision, speech, and text processing it is now presented with the unique challenge of helping us to explore beyond our current knowledge to interpret the genome.

Pi-Chauan Chang shared that genome sequencing is a core technology in biology.. It allows us to ask how can we personalize medicine  based on genome?

What is a Genome?:

A genome is an organism’s complete set of genetic instructions. Each genome contains all of the information needed to build that organism and allow it to grow and develop.

There are 23 chromosome we inherent from our parents.

Most of our DNA is similar.. 99.9% of our DNA are the same– this makes us human..

Its the .1 pecent that makes us unique. 

The Human Genome Project was a milestone of genome sequencing . This was the massive international collaboration to map the complete human genome. This project outputted a  genome dictionary ~ 3.2 million characters.

A decade ago it was expensive to sequence people..now it cost ~$1000 to sequence an individual. This creates much opportunity for precision medicine.

There is, however, a trade off.

The new sequencing technology has errors! From blood draw computational biologists get raw data(characters of ACTG) which are really short snippets of  the whole genome.. much like puzzle pieces. They try to map the puzzle pieces but are faced having to find the variants.

Variant calling:

Variant calling is the process by which we identify variants from sequence data.

Typically variant calling consist of a three step process:

  1. Carry out whole genome or whole exome sequencing to create FASTQ files.
  2. Align the sequences to a reference genome, creating BAM or CRAM files.
  3. Identify where the aligned reads differ from the reference genome and write to a VCF file.
A CRAM file aligned to a reference genomic region as visualised in Ensembl. Differences are highlighted in red in the reads, and will be called as variants.

The audience was informed that it is pretty common that computational biologists regularly inspect genomic data..

The question at hand is can we teach machines to perform the same task? Can we teach a machine to detect the variants?

This is where deep learning steps in.

DeepVariant

DeepVariant is a deep learning technology to reconstruct the true genome sequence from HTS(high-throughput sequencing)  sequencer data with significantly greater accuracy than previous classical methods. DeepVariant transforms the task of variant calling, as this reconstruction problem is known in genomics, into an image classification problem well-suited to Google’s existing technology and expertise.

DeepVariant is now an open source software to encourage collaboration and to accelerate the use of this technology to solve real world problems!

https://github.com/google/deepvariant