Gender diverse teams make better decisions across a wide range of settings, including startups. Nevertheless, investors make few investments in women, especially female CEOs. This talk will share data-driven research findings that shed light on the nature and extent of gender bias in venture capital allocation. Solutions for lasting change will be discussed. Speaker: Researcher and entrepreneur, Dr. Maya Ackerman, is an expert on Machine Learning, named “Woman of Influence” by the Silicon Valley Business Journal. She is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Santa Clara University, and CEO/Co-Founder of musical AI startup, WaveAI. Interviews with Dr. Ackerman appeared on NBC News, New Scientist, Sirius XM, and international television stations across the globe, and she has been an invited speaker at the United Nations, IBM Research, Google, and Stanford University, amongst many other venues. She earned her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, and held Postdoctoral Fellowships at Caltech and UC San Diego. Hybrid event: @Santa Clara University and @virtual* * Zoom info will be sent shortly before the event to those who are registered. Registration ends at 4:30PM on Oct 25. Speaker(s): Maya Ackerman, Room: SCDI 3301, Bldg: Sobrato Campus for Discovery and Innovation, 500 El Camino Real, Santa Clara, California, United States, 95053

ABSTRACT: Growing data volumes and velocities are driving exciting new methods across the sciences in which data analytics and machine learning are increasingly intertwined with research. To address these needs we have developed funcX, a high-performance function-as-a-service (FaaS) platform that enables intuitive, flexible, efficient, scalable, and performant remote function execution on existing infrastructure including clouds, clusters, and supercomputers. I will describe the motivation for developing funcX and review its use in a variety of scientific use cases. (https://funcx.org/) and https://labs.globus.org. SPEAKER: (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianfoster) is Senior Scientist and Distinguished Fellow, and director of the Data Science and Learning Division, at Argonne National Laboratory, and the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. He is a fellow of the AAAS, ACM, BCS, and IEEE, and recently received the ACM/IEEE Ken Kennedy award and IEEE Internet award. Co-sponsored by: IEEE SCV Computer Society Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/328324