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Why R? Foundation (Liquidation)

Data Science Conferences, Meetups and Hackathons



Supporting grant for Women in Data Science

Motivation

The Why R? Foundation aims to reinforce the growth of data science in Poland by keeping it balanced and diverse. To do so, since 2018, Why R? Foundation has been distributing the Why R? Supporting Grant for Women in Data Science. The idea is to aid exceptional female data scientists and showcase them as role models to the whole community.

Terms and Conditions

Terms and Conditions of award and disbursement of Why R? Foundation grants for exceptional women scientists from the field of data science are available here.

Scientific committee (2021)

  • Agnieszka Borsuk-De Moor (Why R? Foundation)
  • Michał Burdukiewicz (Wroclaw R User Group, Why R? Foundation)
  • Adelina Frydel (Fundacja Carrots)
  • Marta Karas (Johns Hopkins University)
  • Żaneta Łucka-Tomczyk (Woman in AI Poland)
  • Małgorzata Schmidt (Pearson)
  • Agnieszka Sitko (Choreograph)
  • Barbara Sobkowiak (Woman in Machine Learning and Data Science Poland)

2021 Sponsor

Pearson is the global experts in education. Their team in Poznań develops AI-first, outcome-driven capabilities that impact millions of people. Learn more about their work: aipearson.pl. Why R? Foundation is grateful for Pearson’s support for the 5th time. Pearson sponsored 2 grants!

The third grant was be funded from the sources collected during SatRday 2019 Gdansk that was organized by Triger - TriCity R User Group. Many thanks to Ania Rybińska-Fryca, Olgun Aydin and Michał Maj, main organizers of SatRday 2019 Gdansk who invested their time and energy so that the scholarship for 3 awardees in this year will be possible!

Partners

  • Geek Girls Carrots

  • ML in PL

  • RLadies Warsaw

  • Woman in AI Poland

  • Woman in Machine Learning and Data Science Poland

Acknowledgements

Terms and Conditions of award and disbursement of Why R? Foundation grants for exceptional women scientists from the field of data science were prepared by Leśniewski, Borkiewicz & Partners. Leśniewski, Borkiewicz & Partners is a modern, boutique law firm with a business approach. LB&P works mainly with clients from IT, TMT and e-commerce areas, both within defined projects and as a comprehensive, ongoing service. The main areas of LB&P specialization are negotiating commercial contracts, mergers, acquisitions and restructuring (M&A), personal data protection, legal support in the field of designing mobile applications, image and personal rights protection, cybersecurity, compliance and taxes. For more details please check a website lbplegal.com or LB&P LinkedIn account.

Awardees

Maja Jabłońska

Maja is currently finishing her Master’s studies in Astronomy at the University of Warsaw. A big part of her research work includes processing and analyzing observational and simulated data, as well as applying machine learning to scientific problems earlier solved with statistical approaches. She is also a member of ML in PL Association and had the opportunity of leading the 2021 ML in PL Conference. One of her goals for the upcoming years is to continue organizing similar events and initiatives, as well as helping the university community to learn and use data science in astronomy.

Agnieszka Mikołajczyk

Agnieszka Mikołajczyk graduated with a Master of Engineering degree in Automatic Control. She is an author of scientific papers, holds numerous scholarships and awards, and happily contributes to creating open repositories on GitHub. She gave talks at AI Bay Gdańsk, MLGroup Gdańsk, DataTalksClub, AggregateIntellect, and others.
Moreover, Agnieszka organizes and actively contributes to the AI4Good scientific community in her free time; she is a former organizer and a team leader at the open-source project detectwaste.ml about detecting waste in natural and urban environments. Currently, she takes part in another AI4Good project as Principal ML Researcher: HearAI for sign language recognition. Daily, she conducts her research in her grant “Detecting and overcoming bias in data with explainable artificial intelligence” Preludium, awarded by Polish National Centre. She supports the industry problems by working in the R&D NLP team at Voicelab.ai. Additionally, she co-organized Poleval 2021 (Task 1) and co-created the first Polish corpus for punctuation restoration from read text.

Katarzyna Sidorczuk

Katarzyna received the M.Sc. degree in biotechnology from the University of Wrocław in 2019. She is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in biological sciences at the University of Wrocław. Her research focuses on bioinformatics, especially use of machine learning in prediction of peptide properties, protein localization and bacterial adhesins. She is the main developer of AmpGram and CancerGram R packages. She participates in the organization of Wrocław R Users Group (STWUR) meetings for R enthusiasts. These meetings include workshops for beginners and lectures given by people from the fields related to data science. Speaker at conferences, such as SatRday Gdańsk 2019, Why R? 2020, Data Science Summit 2020, EMBO Young Scientists’ Forum 2021.

Former Awardees

2020 2020 2019 2018

Sylwia Majchrowska (2020)

Sylwia completed master studies in mathematics at the University of Wrocław, as well as in physics at the Wrocław University of Science and Technology, where she continues her education towards the doctorate degree. Currently she investigates novel nonlinear optical phenomena that occur in multimode optical fibers by developing numerical tools to identify the impact of several modeling approximations for typical experimental parameters.

In her professional career, she is designing and developing deep learning algorithms for image processing using neural network models. She was a member of a team working on developing a method to automate the analysis of bacterial colonies on Petri dishes using artificial neural networks and machine learning algorithms, in particular, to classify the type of bacteria and to determine the number of colonies.

She is also a mentor in many volunteering programs, in which she teaches programming and tech knowledge at schools to increase interest in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) area among children.

Sylwia’s social media:

Anna Kozak (2020)

Anna has graduated with a master’s degree in mathematics at the Warsaw University of Technology and works as a Data Scientist and Research Software Engineer. She is associated with MI2 Data Lab. Her interests include analysis, interpretable machine learning, and data visualization. She is the author of R vivo package.

She organizes and conducts workshops related to the popularization of R. The event of which she is the initiator and main coordinator is the PoweR - Python and R in Data Science for beginners.

Speaker at conferences, Why R? 2019 and MLinPL 2019. Also, she co-conducted the workshop at eRum 2020.

Anna’s social media:

Hanna Piotrowska (2019)

Hanna is an information designer and has graduated with honors at the Graphic Design Department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 2019.

Her main fields of work include data visualization, branding and design for publishing. Winner of contests such as: The Kantar Information Is Beautiful Awards, HOW International Design Awards, Polish Graphic Design Awards and KTR. She participated in exhibitions in Poland and abroad, such as: „Data in graphics” (Graphic Days Torino in Italy), „Print Control. Best printed matter from Poland” (Design BWA Gallery in Wrocław) and „Gotong Royong” (Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw).

She cooperated with: Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Museum of Warsaw, Warsaw University of Technology, ERGO Hestia Group, Krytyka Polityczna Publishing House, Data4Cure and others.

Speaker at conferences, such as SatRday Gdańsk 2019 or Digital Cultures 2017. Her main interest are: perception theory, data science and alternative education.

Hanna’s social media: Behance Twitter LinkedIn Webpage

Alicja Gosiewska (2018)

Alicja Gosiewska is a PhD student in Computer Science, keen on machine learning and its applications. She is interested in Interpretable Machine Learning (IML), Automated Machine Learning (AutoML), auditability of predictive models, and bioinformatics.

Packages are bread-and-butter of R, a vital tool that allows R enthusiasts to exchange their creations in an easy and accessible way. Although packages are so useful, their development is always associated with a lot of challenges, including huge time investments. Alicja received the grant for her achievements in the development of the auditor package.

Alicja’s social media: Twitter Linkedin Webpage

Former sponsors

In 2020 WhyR Supporting Grants were sponsored by McKinsey & Company.

McKinsey Analytics in Poland combines advanced data analytics solutions with in-depth industry and business knowledge, including multiple sectors such as commerce, banking, insurance, telecommunications, industrial production and heavy industry. McKinsey data scientists and architects, together with machine learning and data engineers, complement strategic and operational consulting and provide clients with advanced and robust data-driven solutions. McKinsey Analytics experts specialize in many different areas: statistical learning, deep learning, evolutionary and multi-criteria optimization, multi-agent simulations, game theory, reinforcement learning, advanced econometrics, causal & Bayesian inference, uplift modelling, Explainable Artificial Intelligence, visualization and data engineering.

The second grant was funded from the sources collected during SatRday 2019 Gdansk that was organized by Triger - TriCity R User Group. Many thanks to main organizers Ania Rybińska-Fryca, Olgun Aydin and Michał Maj, main organizers of SatRday 2019 Gdansk who invested their time and energy so that the scholarship for 2 awardees in this year was possible!