Diversity and Inclusion Program

Diversity and Inclusion Program

Leading Women in Tech: Insights, Experiences, and Designing for Diversity and Inclusion

IEEE’s mission to foster technological innovation and excellence to benefit humanity requires the talents and perspectives of people with different personal, cultural, and disciplinary backgrounds. IEEE is committed to advancing diversity in the technical profession and to promoting an inclusive and equitable culture that welcomes, engages, and rewards all who contribute to the field without regard to race, religion, gender, disability, age, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.

In this context, IEEE COINS, in collaboration with IEEE Computer Society and Data Engineering Technical Community, offers the following Diversity and Inclusion (DnI) programs and activities to help everyone from any backgrounds achieve their full potential, improve wider society, and bring people closer together. The programs are led by Chairs Dr. Nagham Saeed ([email protected]) and Prof. Bahar Farahani ([email protected]). This year, we are thrilled to invite you to attend the IEEE WIE UK & Ireland 2024 Challenges and Opportunities event, “Leading Women in Tech: Insights, Experiences, and Designing for Diversity and Inclusion,” at the IEEE COINS conference (29-31 July 2024, London, UK). This event will take place on 30 July 2024 at King’s College London 10:30 am -12:00 pm and hosts two-panel discussions:

Panel 1: Navigating the Tech. Industry as a Woman: Insights, Experience, and Lessons Learned from Leading Women in Tech.

This panel will provide a platform for our guests in which tech leaders as women or advocates for women in technology will provide insight into their experiences and share their perspectives. The panelists will highlight the stories and experiences about their successes and challenges in the tech industry, providing opportunities for women in tech to relate to one another and creating an open dialogue about the central role of skills (e.g., practical skills, technical skills, and entrepreneurial skills), career, and relationship building. This holistic panel will also address some of the key questions many women have regarding navigating the tech space, career development, and growth in the fields of IoT/AI/Data.

Panel 2: Designing for Diversity and Inclusion.

Although the convergence of IoT, AI, Data, Edge-Fog-Cloud Computing, and Blockchain provides one of the most significant opportunities for humanity, the corresponding products/services/devices are typically not designed with the diversity of their user base in mind. This panel will discuss and establish strategies to foster genuine and holistic inclusion regarding the design for these important technologies capturing the world’s complex cultural and environmental diversity factors to tackle the risk of abuse and imbalance.

See the schedule below and the digital flyer below.

About the Panelists

Dr. Carol Marsh

Dr. Carol Marsh OBE is the Engineering Director at Celestia UK, a Visiting Professor at Edinburgh Napier University (ENU), a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Deacon of the Hammermen of Edinburgh, a Trustee and Vice-President of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), Vice-President of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts (RSSA), Treasurer of Engineering Scotland and a member of several boards.

Carol graduated with an HND in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from ENU in 1985 and was awarded a Doctor of Engineering in System Level Integration from the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt, and Strathclyde in 2011, so she is an alumnus of five Scottish Universities.

She has worked in electronics for 40 years, specializing in programmable logic. Carol has published 11 papers, including 3 journal papers, been featured in newspapers and magazines, and presented many times, including at the Edinburgh Science Festival.

A winner of many technologies and diversity awards, she was Strathclyde University’s Alumni of the Year in 2022, received an Honorary Doctorate from ENU in 2023, was inducted into the Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame in 2023, and was awarded an OBE in 2020 for services to Diversity and Inclusion in Electronic Engineering.

Carol is a Chartered Engineer, Fellow of the IET, IES, RSSA, and the Women’s Engineering Society (WES), Past President of WES, a Burgess of the City of Edinburgh, a STEM Ambassador, a Fellow Advisor and a Professional Registration Advisor and Interviewer.

Dr. Ramona Marfievici

Ramona Marfievici brings over 20 years of deep technical expertise across embedded systems, wireless sensor networks, IoT devices, and communications in R&D and IoT solutions development. She has led the design, build, and deployment of end-to-end IoT systems in the wild and urban environments, leading multidisciplinary teams along the way.

Currently at Digital Catapult, Ramona is the Principal IoT Engineer, advancing and implementing IoT solutions that make a big difference to UK businesses and organizations. Her role involves a range of activities from applying IoT technologies to real-world problems, translating research into prototypes, building demonstrators and pilots, finding early technology adopters, co-creating new testbeds and accelerator programs to help innovators leverage IoT technology.

In addition to her professional role, Ramona serves on industry forums, scientific committees, and technology-focused accelerators. She has been a member of the IoT/1 Committee at the British Standard Institute since 2021 and has served on the SBWT5B PhD fellowship panel at Research Foundation Flanders—FWO since 2020.

Ramona holds a PhD from the University of Trento, Italy and an MSc degree from the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca. Prior to joining Digital Catapult, she served as a lecturer in the Computer Science Department at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca and held a senior researcher position at Nimbus Research Centre in Cork, Ireland.

Dr. Zeba Khanam

Dr Zeba Khanam received my PhD degree in Computing and Electronic Systems from the University of Essex in 2022, where she was a recipient of the University of Essex’s Embedded and Intelligent Systems Scholarship.  Currently, she is working as a research scientist with the Emerging Defence Technology team at BT’s Security Research Group. In her current role, she drives the development of novel ML models for unstructured data for the cybersecurity domain. Her research has won multiple awards and generated additional grant funding.

Dr. Fehmida Jafferali

With over 30 years of teaching experience and actively involved in quality assurance processes in the higher education sector, I have gained expertise in leading, developing, and delivering courses across diverse student demography.  Born in Tanzania, I arrived in the UK at the age of 14.  My successful academic journey has allowed me to reflect upon my own learning experience in understanding student diversity and adapting strategies to mentor students and get the best out of them. Excellent negotiator who can create and foster trust relationships between diverse groups of people, backgrounds, cultures, and age levels.

Dr. Saumya Kareem Reni

Dr. Saumya Kareem Reni has been a member of IEEE since 2009. Her most substantial role in an IEEE- designated field is her current position as the Secretary of IEEE UK and Ireland Section. Before taking up this role she has served as the Assistant Secretary and Enotice Co-ordinator of the Section. In addition, Saumya have been serving the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurements Chapter for the past 10 years, initially as a committee member and now as the Vice-Chair of the Chapter.

Saumya is an academic and a research scholar. She is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Westminster, London. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Applied DSP and VLSI Research Group. She has authored more than a dozen IEEE publications and journals. She is also an active reviewer of IEEE conference papers and journals. She has organized numerous IEEE conferences. She currently holds the position as the Treasurer of ISCAS 2025 conference and also the technical program committee member of ICTH- 2022,2023 and 2024 conferences as well as reviewer of ISCAS 2024 conference. She is also the IEEE Liaison Officer and played a key role in organizing the International Conference on Pattern Recognition Systems (ICPRS 2024), which will be taking place at the UoW in July 2024.

Saumya’s research interest is in ‘Engineering for healthcare as well as Sustainable device development’ which aligns well with the IEEE designated fields.  Consecutively, for two years, her team has been awarded the UoW Sustainability Funding and was awarded grants to build sustainable student-centric prototypes. The first one was a smart weather station in 2023, and the second project is to build a sustainable motorized microscope stage for Pathological image analysis (2024). She is also collaborating with the University College London Hospital to work on Innovative imaging modalities for Clinical pathology. She has also been an invited speaker at a number of IEEE and IET events, including the IET PHEE Annual Conference (2018), Early Career Researcher Talk conducted by IEEE Women in Engineering (2022) as well as IEEE UK and Ireland Annual General Meeting (2023).

Saumya’s research contributions were acknowledged at the prestigious Pathology Visions Conference 2012 and 2014. She was also invited to present her research work at the British Society for Parasitology in 2014, at the University of Cambridge. In addition, she was awarded the Cavendish Research Scholarship for research in the field of Image Processing for Biomedical applications. She is a co-investigator of UKIERI 2012- thematic grant for collaborative research awarded by UK India Educational Research Grant. She has successfully received the Enterprise Mini-grant (2016) as well as the Developing Researcher Grant (2020) at UoW. Saumya is also a part of the Women of Westminster (WoW) Mentoring program and is a mentor to new female staff, supporting their progression at UoW.

Apart from supervising PhD students with two successful PhD completions Saumya is also serving as an external examiner at a number of institutions including the University College London (UCL) and Anna University, India. She is also mentoring potential researchers at the Applied DSP and VLSI research group including the international exchange students participating in the Summer Research Internship Programme at UoW.

Dr. Erika Sanchez-Velazquez

Erika has been an active academic and researcher for over a decade, specializing in computer networks and security. At Anglia Ruskin University, she leads the Cisco Networking Academy, bringing her extensive expertise in networks and security to the forefront. Erika’s interests include emerging technologies like Software Defined Networks and the Internet of Things, particularly their impact on network security and potential improvements.

As a member of the Cyber Security and Networking Research Group, Erika supervises numerous undergraduate, MSc, and PhD dissertations, guiding the next generation of experts in the field.

Registration Discounts & Travel Funds.

IEEE COINS provides registration discounts as well as a limited number of travel funds (e.g., students from low-GDP countries) that promote diversity and inclusion.

The awardees of the 2024 Dnl Program are

• Mohammadnavid Ghader
• Khursheed Sabee
• Ridhima Verma
• Suhail Odeh
• MEGHA SHARMA
• Neil Christian Astrologo
• Diane Tuyizere

We also deeply appreciate the unwavering support of Prof. Erich Neuhold and Prof. Murat Kantarcioglu for their invaluable support of the DnI activities at the conference. Their commitment and dedication have been instrumental to our success.

DnI would not have been possible without the generous support from IEEE CS, IEEE TCDE, IEEE COINS, and IEEE WIE UK & Ireland. This achievement is a testament to our commitment to making a difference and creating balance.