A day at ATO’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Conference (DEI)

Sunday, October 27, Yesterday as I write this, was an amazing day. The All Things Open DEI Conference featured some amazing speakers who offered some new and interesting insights into what this really means and how to understand neurodiversity. There’s so much could write about, but two things really stand out to me from this year’s conference.

The first session was presented by Emily Maxie of Firm360. It was about gender bias in large AI models. In one case study, a large company was having trouble sorting through the huge volumes of job applications to determine which ones to contact for interviews, and wanted to apply AI to the problem. They loaded in well over a decade of data pertaining to previous applicants, their resumes, and who was hired, into an AI model to train it. It was soon discovered that the AI had a significant bias towards males in recommending applications for the organization to further pursue. The company discovered that the AI was basing it’s decisions on the data it was fed; data that was biased because the vast majority of previous hires were male. Attempts to expunge the bias from the AI was unsuccessful and the project was scrapped.

The second session that really meant a lot to me was about neurodiversity. This was an amazing session by Matt Henry of Bigfoot Systems, who is on the spectrum and who described how that affects his interactions with people in general, as well as co-workers and managers in particular. The thing that helped me most to understand his world was a description he used. He told us that we’re all bombarded by millions of bits of information every second, visual, audible, taste,smell, and touch are all streaming information into our brains. Most people’s brains, he said, are able to filter out all but 50 or so of those incoming messages. His brain, like so many of those on the spectrum, is unable to do that filtering so the cacophony is not just confusing but can be unbearable and result in a shutdown. This session opened my eyes to how difficult his world must be. Not that I can ever truly understand it.

Both of these sessions went into more detail than I’m relating here. And the rest of the sessions were also informative and unsettling at times. But that’s a good thing.

I try to attend the DEI conference every year and highly recommend attending if you can. Seating is limited so be sure to sign up early next year.