Speakers

President, Hitokuchi Consulting

Hanae Hara has built a career creating the art of the possible. She is honored to have served for over 15 years as a civilian with the US Navy. In a traditionally male-dominated field, Hanae is a highly successful subject matter expert for enterprise policy and program management in cybersecurity. As the president of Hitokuchi Consulting, she has pivoted to developing the next generation of cyber professionals from traditionally underrepresented communities.

Hailing from Silicon Valley with an international childhood, Ms. Hara has a proven track record of translating geek into plain speak. Hanae began her career in commercial sales and took a chance as a project assistant with the Navy Modeling and Simulation Office. Over her career, she strategically raised her hand to learn and hone skills in policy development, conflict resolution, network security, cybersecurity, and program management.

With a tiny-but-mighty team of three, she is proud to have led the cyber services that drove approval for the Navy Research & Development Establishment (NRDE) cloud, the Navy’s first research cloud and containerization deployment and 26 other network projects across Naval Information Warfare Center, Pacific. Recognizing a gap in workforce skills on cloud development, Hanae served as the Director for Organizational Development, cultivating on-demand training across technical and soft skills for a 5,400-person government workforce.

Never one to sit by dispassionately, you will most likely find Ms. Hara connecting unlikely stakeholders together to create new opportunities for innovative solutions. As a minority woman in IT, Hanae understands the importance - and challenges - of diversity and inclusivity in every workplace. She has actively led initiatives aimed at promoting gender equality in the IT workspace and is an enthusiastic mentor of IT professionals across the color and gender sphere.

When not strategizing the next big thing, Hanae can be found knitting, wandering Disneyland, or reading/listening to a book (or sometimes at the same time!). A committed supporter of causes that ensure basic nutrition for all in San Diego, Hanae is an avid supporter of Mama’s Kitchen, Kiku Gardens, and turning food donated by military families changing duty stations into meals to feed downtown San Diego’s most in need.

Dr. Helen Turner is a biologist and data scientist at Chaminade University. Her research interests are in the application of biophysical and data analytics techniques to understanding the interactions between human cells and exogenous inputs such as noxious small molecules, environmental toxins and emerging novel materials. She leads a portfolio of NSF, DOD and NIh funding focused on this research, capacity building for Data Science education and training, and STEM equity and inclusion. She is Principal Investigator of the NSF INCLUDES ALL-SPICE AlLiance and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute 'Inclusive Excellence' Program, and leads NSF S-STEM and the Ho`oulu STEM Scholars programs. After serving as Dean of Natural Sciences at Chaminade for 12 years and 4 years' service as the university's Vice President for Strategy and Innovation, she was recently appointed as the Research Director of Chaminade's new United Nations CIFAL Center focused on sustainable development goals in Hawaii and the Indo-Pacific region. She loves walking, traveling to Japan and her new 4 month old daughter Harriet Alice.

Professor of Information and Computer Sciences,  University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

Dr. Martha E. Crosby is a Professor in the Department of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. She has a background in mathematics, computer science and educational psychology and has consistently worked on the leading edge of computer applications. Her methods and programs for prediction of the ionosphere’s characteristics from a very early stage of the computer age were adopted for international use by the International Telecommunication Union in Geneva Switzerland and have been in use for long-distance short-wave radio communication and are a back-up for the military when satellite communication is interrupted. Dr. Crosby is one of the first researchers to use eye movements to investigate the cognitive processes by which people understand algorithms, a methodology that has now become highly influential, with the greater availability of eye-tracking technology. She has extended this work to the use of other physiological measures, such as heart rate, seeking to understand the basis for differences in performance and to integrate an understanding of individual differences in the development of adaptive software so as to better meet individual needs. She received a patent, with Dr. Curtis Ikehara, for an input device to continuously detect biometrics or a “pressure mouse.” In addition to the importance of continuous authentication for security applications, this technology can predict peoples’ cognitive load giving researchers an ability to understand differences in their performance. Understanding peoples’ individual perception of task difficulty is a step toward the goal of building adaptive software to better meet individual needs.