Gender's Role in Climate Change, AI Highlighted at NJIT Women's Tech Conference

A keynote speaker at NJIT’s Women Designing the Future conference explained the imperative for holistic approaches to climate change policy, while another shared her tale of breaking through glass ceilings to develop innovative artificial intelligence software.

The speakers — Rhiana Gunn-Wright, who orchestrated behind-the-scenes policymaking for the 2019 Green New Deal, and Danielle Feinberg, visual effects supervisor at Pixar — were on campus March 7 to help celebrate the 30th anniversary of the NJIT Murray Center for Women in Technology, and also for Women’s History Month.

“We had two interconnected goals in designing this conference: to look back and honor the women who worked to create the Murray Center for Women in Technology 30 years ago — and to look forward to the work that still needs to be done to ensure that the high-tech world of tomorrow is just and inclusive,” Center Director Nancy Steffen-Fluhr said.

Gunn-Wright emphasized the importance of developing climate change policies that impact all aspects of life. “I'm talking about policies and decisions that get us closer to addressing the root causes of all the levels of the climate crisis — political, social, economic, technical. And that means that every climate policy is not a solution. Environmental racism is not a solution. More fossil fuel production is not a solution. Nor are policies that prioritize technical progress but pay little attention to social and political consequences, or how these solutions or policies replicate existing hierarchies and power relationships that have both caused the climate crisis but have kept us trapped,” she noted. “I’ve worked in federal policy for a long time now. It's rarely a situation where there's no solution, it's which choice will you pick?”

“People make those decisions based on frameworks — the way that they think the world should work, what they think of as order, what they think of as success — all of which is obviously shaped by lots of external factors. But that's just to say, if you all go into STEM careers, there's going to probably be pressure. You're just here to solve a problem, but just remember solving a problem is not just one-way.”

“Those are things that you need to be thinking about, and that we all need to be thinking about. Even with the climate crisis … the problem is rarely not having solutions. Often what we lack is a framework to decide, and in the absence of that framework, it’s just going with the hierarchy. And if we are going to have any chance of getting out of this point and of addressing the climate crisis, we need to get very explicit about the fact that our frameworks are ones that are about changing power relationships, that are ones that reject injustice as the cost of doing business or as a trade-off, not just because we're good people, but because we actually understand what the long tail of that is, and we also understand that we are here to solve problems, not just find a way to live next to them.”

Others who spoke about climate change at the event included NJIT senior lecturer Caroline Devan, along with representatives from government and industry: Nathaly Agosto Filión, New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection; Melissa Miles, New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance; and Nicole Wiley, American Water.

In the AI segment of the conference, Feinberg spoke of her journey from learning the LOGO educational programming language on Apple II computers in the 1980s, all the way to designing a software curling iron that tackled the math behind Princess Merida’s tresses in the 2012 movie Brave.

Along the way, Feinberg was the only woman in her high school engine repair class — and the only student in that class who got a lawnmower working on the first try; told that tale in her Harvard admissions essay; and became a lighting director on big-budget films when others, and herself, thought she wasn’t yet qualified.

Feinberg said being fearless was crucial to her and colleagues using AI for the 2019 movie Toy Story 4. “There's 24 images per second of film. And what we're doing is we're stopping the computers before it's pristine, and instead, we stop it when it's pretty close, and then we run this machine learning de-noiser on it, which knows it has learned enough about these images that it can clean it up and give us exactly what we intended. It feels very much like magic,” she explained. “And what this means is that we can put more things on screen, because we're saving sometimes 100-200 hours of compute time per frame by cutting it off. Running the de-noiser takes five or 10 minutes. So it's become this huge advantage for us, and made some of our films that we would never have been able to make or thought possible.”

“So my hope with AI is, it’s just going to make things more possible. What I have learned, and it’s totally ingrained with me at this point, is how sort of deeply the human experience and emotion resonates with people, and I have to think that AI is a tool for humans to present those experiences to you, and that it is not the thing that takes over trying to tell us what the human experience and emotion is.”

Additional speakers about artificial intelligence were Jamie Payton, dean of NJIT’s Ying Wu College of Computing, plus academic and industry experts: Michele Alcazar, Prudential Global Technology and Operations; Chitra Dorai, Amicus Brain Innovations; Anna Gates, University of Texas - El Paso; and Olga Russakovsky, of Princeton University and the AI4All initiative.

I was especially encouraged to see so many young people in the room, including an entire class of high school girls from St. Dominic’s Academy. When we think about ‘moving forward’ they are the ones who will have to forge the path.

NJIT student Nairi Orellana, a senior from Hackensack studying biochemistry, said she found the conference informative and inspiring. “[Gunn-Wright] brought up real events that are happening and how they uphold the patriarchy and other societal hierarchies,” she said. Regarding AI, Orellana said her favorite uses are for editing her resume to help get it through corporate hiring filters, and to help generate ideas for her board gaming club.

“We were very pleased with the way the conference turned out. We had an exceptionally powerful set of speakers and a large and engaged audience,” Steffen-Fluhr said. “I was especially encouraged to see so many young people in the room, including an entire class of high school girls from St. Dominic’s Academy. When we think about ‘moving forward’ they are the ones who will have to forge the path.”

Steffen-Fluhr added that Alcazar, from the AI speakers, and Wiley, from the climate speakers, are the daughters of Anne Wiley who co-directed the Murray Center from 1997 until her death in 2003. A newly renovated conference room in the university’s campus center was dedicated in Anne Wiley’s honor following the conference.

NJIT Provost, John Pelesko, reminded attendees that much work remains ahead. “We celebrate 30 years of the Murray Center for Women in Technology, 30 years of breaking barriers, 30 years of building bridges, 30 years of ensuring that the doors to science, technology, engineering and mathematics remain open, no matter your gender, no matter your background, no matter the obstacles,” he observed.

“Because when we look around today at what's happening right in front of us, we see a moment in history that demands our attention. … When a woman walks into a STEM faculty meeting, a laboratory or a boardroom, she is still too often the only one in the room. That is why the Murray Center was founded 30 years ago, not as a symbol, but as a necessity. And that is why, despite all of the progress we have made, we cannot afford to pretend that the work is done.”