Susanne and her colleague Victoria Rammer, research associate at the Research and Development Department in Hagenberg, have designed a very interesting workshop about artificial intelligence, the importance of diversity and why gender-neutral training is necessary.

Last week they held this workshop for 40 female HTL pupils and their teachers. In this workshop, the pupils learned about artificial intelligence, what is important, a few practical examples where shown and the pupils got an introduction to the HeuristicLab framework. This framework enables solving process optimization problems, performing classification and regression tasks, and data-based structure identification. HeuristicLab is implemented and maintained by the members of the Heuristic Evolutionary Algorithm Laboratory Group (HEAL) in Hagenberg. The pupils learned how to train models, e.g., random forests and support vector machines, to validate them and how to use the models on test data. Problems in AI such as overfitting in training and how to evaluate the best model were discussed as well. The importance of diversity in parameter optimization, gender-neutral data sets for training and the aspects of demographic factors were analyzed. 

This workshop was organized by Mag. Dr. Martina Gaisch, the head of diversity management at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria in cooperation with the "Frauenreferat des Landes OÖ".