2024 Tucson Women in Data Conference
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We recently wrapped up the Women in Data Science regional conference in Tucson! This annual event is a great opportunity to bring together underrepresented folks in the Tucson community who are working with data and data science tools and approaches. We strive to create a welcoming and open environment, with a focus on presenters who identify as women or non-binary to bring those voices to the forefront.
This event is affiliated with the Women in Data Science Worldwide organization, which recently became a non-profit. There are around 200 regional WIDS conferences worldwide, and this is the fifth year of our regional event in Tucson!
We had many excellent speakers during the conference. Topics ranged widely, from natural language processing approaches for recognizing emotions and detecting hate speech, to the challenges and opportunities that many of our speakers have encountered in their data science careers, to lightning talks highlighting innovative projects across domains from health sciences to ecology to music.
We greatly appreciate the technical and professional insights shared by our amazing speakers, and the thoughtful conversation among all attendees.
The Tucson WiDS conference would not be possible without the work of many people behind the scenes who volunteered their time. We also want to give a big thanks to our sponsors: the University of Arizona’s Data Science Institute and Institute for Computation & Data-Enabled Insight! Because of their generosity and support, we were able to provide lunch, morning coffee and snacks, and appetizers to attendees and hosted a social to provide opportunities for informal networking and community building.
We closed out the conference with a great discussion about how to further build the Tucson WiDS community going forward. In addition to having the annual conference next year, we discussed having smaller, more interactive events such as writing groups and panels, social events, more ways to communicate about data science careers and jobs, and more detailed and curated information about WiDS presenters and community members. If you would like to get involved in these efforts, please contact us!
A huge thank you again to the many people that made this year’s event so great!
