In Parhlo World ongoing Women in AI series, which aims to give women academics and others working in AI their well-deserved (and long-overdue) time in the spotlight, Marissa Hummon, chief technology officer at Utilidata, an energy company, was interviewed. Hummon is working to make the electric grid more sustainable.
Hummon told Parhlo World, “The work I do at Utilidata is challenging the status quo of the utility industry.” He also said that AI will help the utility sector run more efficiently. “Utilities will be able to run a clean, modern, and reliable grid that will offer better service to the people and businesses linked to it.”
Hummon’s first job was at the National Renewable Energy Lab, where she worked on ways to get the energy business to switch from solutions that use a lot of carbon to ones that use cleaner sources. She remembered that she had to change the way she modelled things because some physics equations “could not be solved using traditional analytical methods.”
She said, “Instead, we had to use numerical methods and machine learning.” In 2010, this happened.
Tips For Women
Hummon worked her way up. She started at the energy company Tendril and now is the CTO at Utilidata, a job she has had since 2018. The woman got her PhD in applied physics from Harvard. When she moved from graduate school to working in engineering, she noticed that there were a lot fewer women working in the field. “Many times, I’ve felt like I had to live up to higher standards at work than my male coworkers,” she said.
Hummon said that as a leader, she tries to show other women how to do it and give them chances to be seen as leaders. On the other hand, she said, men should make room for more women to start and stay in the field.
She went on, “The change we need must be systemic and widespread; it can’t just happen in practice.” “Starting with hiring and recruiting, continuing with mentoring and coaching, and ending with fair and equal recognition and promotion—all while making the workplace safe and welcoming for everyone.”
If a woman wants to work in AI, she tells them to always keep in mind that being a woman can be an advantage. “It’s given you a different point of view than your male peers, and new technological advances always come from different points of view.”
She says to look for jobs at companies that have shown they value diversity and whose leaders have shown they are willing to work hard to support women and minorities. “Do not judge a potential employer by what they say or do on their website; instead, judge them by how they act in the interview.”
Making AI That Is Moral
Hummon told users that AI is not a magic bullet that can fix all issues. Instead, AI is a skilled helper that can help with tasks, make them more efficient, and provide support.
“Knowing its limits and making sure there are the right checkpoints is important,” she said.
She said it’s always important to know how generative AI was taught and made so that you can figure out if it has any biases. “This information is very useful when working with language models to look at data and see if solutions are possible,” she said. “AI is only as good as the data and data it learned from.”
She also talked about how to make AI safe and said that Utilidata chose early on to keep all of its data local. When you use spread AI computing to build models, you send less and less information to the cloud. This makes it less likely that your security or privacy will be compromised.
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She told investors that they need to look at how a company wants to use AI, just like the other experts we talked to. This is because responsible AI looks different in each business. “Investments in responsible AI shouldn’t be the same for all companies; they should be based on the risk and complexity of each one.”
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