Posted: 23/04/19
The ADAPT Centre recently hosted a Girls in STEM event at DCU. The event featured a lineup of female researchers, presenting their recent projects to a group of students from Mercy College, Coolock. The researchers and scientists worked to inspire the students to consider careers in STEM and to increase appreciation for women in these fields.
Researchers and scientists, Ana Guerberof, Annalina Caputo, Cara Greene, Eva Vanmassenhove, Daria Dzendzik, Teresa Lynn, Abigail Walsh, Laura Grehan, Lucy McKenna and Natalia Resende, took turns describing their recent projects, which involved gender bias machine translation systems, eye-tracking technology, visualization machine learning, and more.
The Mercy College students were able to see exactly where their eyes are looking when presented slides on the screen in front of them, using an advanced eye-tracker. They were also able to use a system on iPads to search words such as ‘carpenter, ‘fragile,’ and ‘president’ to see the gender bias in the results that appear from big data sources online. Then the girls played around with small robots that can follow and navigate drawn-out lines on paper, along with many more complex tasks.
Following a lunch break and some mingling between the students and researchers, a panel discussion took place so that the girls had an opportunity to ask questions and find out more about a career in STEM.
Speaking about the day, one student commented: “I loved working on the practical side of the science as well as hearing the speakers stories. Very inspirational.”
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