Bringing Young Women to Tech: Daughter’s Day Vienna 2019

It’s no secret that the AI sector is booming – every year, there are more startups & job openings; here at Anyline, we’ve more than doubled in size in the last year alone! But as we all know too well, women are significantly underrepresented across the tech sector.

Anyline wants to change this – and that’s why we support the Wiener Töchtertag 2019 (Daughter’s Day Vienna 2019), a day when girls aged 11-16 can get hands-on experience in the professional world, especially in technical & scientific professions.

We were delighted to welcome 10 young women to Anyline to find out how we work and see what kind of opportunities are awaiting them in the world of AI & machine learning!

We think one of the best ways to build confidence is to get your hands dirty and to learn-by-doing, so we put our new Anyliners through a rigorous day of a variety of workshops to discover a bit of everything – from computer vision & making apps, to even co-writing this blog!

Glimpse into the World of AI & Machine Learning

After breaking the ice and getting comfortable, we started off with a presentation on the who, what, where, when & why of Anyline, courtesy of Krisztina Orosz, our Chief Experience Officer. Krisz explained to them why Anyline’s mobile scanning is unique, and how our team of women & men are designing and providing scanning solutions for a growing base of customers around the world.

Computer Vision & Machine Learning 101

With the groundwork & basic knowledge in place, it was time to get into action! The girls were given a crash-course on computer vision from Michael Schwarz,  one of our star Computer Vision & Machine Learning Engineers. Michi threw his new team in the deep end, with a walkthrough of how face recognition software can be programmed.

“Although there is a lot of theory hidden behind the scenes, it was surprisingly easy to change the behaviour of an app. Thanks Michi, for showing us the basics of computer vision!”

– Denisa, Elena, Maddy & Kiki

Intro to Anyline SDK & Demo App

Next up, our Computer Vision Engineer Hanna Huber led a workshop, covering our full SDK (Software Development Kit) and how our demo app works.  Our new engineers were going deep into the code soon after, experimenting with the UI, changing the cutout area, and the colors.

With all this technical wizardry, one thing that stood out to the girls was how chilled out things are here at Anyline HQ! We’re happy to hear that because our work environment is the key to bringing out the best collaboration & teamwork from everyone.

And the results show; by the end of the session, the girls had a fully-functional hashtag scanning app, which they could download & take with them!

“It was interesting to learn that it’s not always simple – things don’t always work as planned, but in the end, the hashtag scanner worked amazingly! It was great to experiment on the demo app with Hanna.”

Xenia, Jenny & Tina

Telling the World!

With their product in place, the last workshop of the day for our new women in tech-focused on getting their product to the market by creating content for marketing. To make this happen, we wrote this very blog post you are reading!

Guided by Co-Founder Jakob Hofer, we started by collecting impressions and preconceptions about the tech industry and discussed why Daughter’s Day is important for changing attitudes.

When we think of tech companies, lots of ideas come to mind: Google, social media, our smartphones – but all too often, we think of men doing these jobs. So it was surprising to find not only women working & leading teams in Anyline, but also that not everyone here has a technical background.

“Daughter’s Day is important because it gives us new ideas and impressions about working in IT. We learned that you can achieve anything, regardless of your gender, and you can bring different skills to work in this sector.”

Emely, Hasnaa & Eda

Empowering Women to AI & Machine Learning

We’re so glad to have the opportunity to give these young women in tech an insight into how we work at Anyline – and not just how our unique mobile scanning technology works, but our whole process, our work culture, and what makes us unique as a team. We hope they learned a lot – we certainly did!

Thank you to Denisa, Elena, Maddy, Kiki, Xenia, Jenny, Tina, Emely, Hasnaa & Eda for joining us today!

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