Camille Eddy learned early how to break down barriers. "At Boise State University, the student population is about 1.6 percent black," the mechanical engineering graduate said during a recent talk on recognizing bias in Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Currently, only about 2 percent of America's tech workforce are women of color.
"If it wasn't for women like Mae Jemison, I wouldn't be here," Camille said in another keynote. "By seeing someone who looks like my mom, looks like my aunt, I was encouraged to go the next step. Hidden figures, I've seen it five times, shows that (women of color) were there all along, and we just didn't know their stories."
Since 2016, Camille has been using personal stories to positively influence young girls in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).
Thanks to the leadership of Barbara Morgan, a former NASA astronaut and distinguished educator in residence for Boise State University's science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education, Camille was involved in the NASA Microgravity Undgreaguate Research program.
In the fall of 2016, Camille spoke at the Student Innovation in Space Research stage at Dent: Space, a celebration of humans denting the future of who can be involved and what can be achieved in space exploration.
Camille was also involved in Boise State's Space Broncos, a program focused on helping students participate in collaborative research projects and scholarly programs hosted by NASA.
She earned a research grant from the five-year Miles Undergraduate Research Initiative (MURI) where she studied Augmented Reality. More than 56 percent of MURI participants were female.
At the end of her second year Camille accepted an internship at HP and began developing robotics in the Robot Development Lab. She then advanced to an internship in the summer of 2016 to HP Inc’s headquarters in Palo Alto, California as a Machine Learning Intern building a new generation of smart robotics.
A robotic hand trained by 3D computer vision project is what started Camille on her AI journey.
It's "trying to understand the technology, what it does, why it does what it does, how to make it better. More importantly, what happens when an entire segment of the population is invisible to the technology being used," Camille said in one presentation.
During 2017, Camille spoke about where machine learning and AI exists in our lives at the Nonprofit Technology Conference. In her talk, she touched on gender bias, sexism, and working in a male-dominated field, one size fits all algorithms that maintain misidentification, and cultural bias. Watch the full presentation here on Vimeo.
