What is this thing called Artificial intelligence? Is it really that important? What can and what cant it do? And how is it going to change everything about the world as we know it?

What is this thing called machine learning? What are its constituents and what does it entail. How do we make machines that learn and what can we do to make sure we make responsible machines that do not amplify all the bad things about being human.

Looking forward to the "fourth industrial revolution", why is it so important that womxn are a part of this change? Why has their been such a small contribution from us as a community? Who can we look to as examples of how to leap forward into the future?

A data analytics professional at Rain and co-founder of RLadies in Johannesburg, with a background in Comp Sci and Applied Math and through her passion for technical leadership was inspired to do her MBA. Vebashni is driven by getting more girls and women into STEM related fields and building the Womxn community.

Organiser of ORSSA's Ada Lovelace Day 2019 which highlights the achievements of women in STEM, Gemma has a background in Applied Mathematics and Statistics Gemma spent a decade as a teacher. She went on to obtain an Honours degree in Operations Research. Gemma has worked as an analytics consultant as well as a full-stack developer and has recently joined PwC as a Data Analyst.

With a marketing background, Elisja has 14 years of IT project managment experience, is innovation lead for Data Science at MTN and master planner of TADHack. She is also the co-founder of Coding Mamas, mother to a beautiful 4-year-old son and wife to a loving and supportive husband. Coding Mamas is an organisation that teaches moms and children to code with the hopes of inspiring women to participate in the 4th industrial revolution and the digital economy.

With a background in Social Sciences, and an MSc in Strategic Management and Planning from UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School she has extensive experience in Executive Talent acquisition and management in Mining, Telecoms, Financial Services and Media Entertainment sectors. She currently works as an Innovation and Digital Talent consultant and aims to connect, inspire and increase the inclusion of women in Big Data fields as chair of Women in Big Data South Africa

Innovator, Inventor, recently accepted to Stanford University, FNB’s only black female 1st prize Innovation winner for 4 years, winning the 1st ever Innovation prize at the age of 23, leads Woman in AI SA Education Stream and if this is not enough she has a PhD: Passion for HER Development.

Inventor: Africa’s 1st Autonomous RPA (Robotic Process Automation) software, bio-degradable 3D printed drinking filters and straws and with inventor partnerships, built Africa’s 1st AI Walking Stick and various other Machine Learning firsts all of which give rise to Robots Can Think.

Jade Abbott is a Machine Learning engineer at Retro Rabbit. She's built software for every field from social upliftment to banking, working on projects throughout Africa and considers herself a polyglot. Her current project involves training and deploying deep learning system to perform a variety of NLP tasks for real life systems - from training the models, to scaling them in production. In her free time, she does ML research on Neural Machine Translation for African languages.

A founding partner of Indoni Digital and Chairperson for Women in Computer Science UCT 2017, Onalerona is a Bsc Computer Science graduate. She has worked as a volunteer for Code4CT but is currently at non-profit tech company Praekelt.org She also tutors programming at a high school level. Onalerona was awarded the Entelect Social Responsiveness Award, for her impact in the computer science community. Her life plan is to continuously make a positive difference in the lives of women, using tech.

Jessica is an Associate Lecturer in the School for Electrical and Information Engineering at the University of Witwatersrand where she teaches the Sociology of Artificial Intelligence. She also works as a researcher for the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU) and the Center for Social Development in Africa (CSDA) where she researches potential interventions and support packages for unemployed youth in South Africa. Jessica holds an Mphil from Cambridge University and an MA from the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER). She is a Mandela Rhodes Scholar, a Chevening Scholar and a Oppenheimer Memorial Trust fellow.

Kerryn's formal educational background lies in Philosophy. She has however found herself in the AI space as a Credit Risk Analyst (acquisitions and pricing for Home Loans). A self taught Machine Learning enthusiast, Kerryn is passionate about sharing all she has learned with the non-technical world to ensure non-technical people are enabled to engage in the decision making processes that will govern how they live their lives. With a passion for people, Kerryn simultaneously acts to open up the world of humanness to technical beings. She aims to facilitate the intersectional broadening of technology's scope of the world.

Tshiamo Setshwaelo is a techie at heart. Having fallen in love with coding 10 years ago she lives and breathes code. Besides her 9-5 as a Data Scientist, she is also a Tech Social Activist, fighting to get more girls into tech. She also facilitates workshops to equip women and get them started in technical roles.

A Mail & Guardian top 200 Young South African 2019 with three engineering degrees, Pelonomi is currently a Junior Data Scientist at Nedbank working on Machine learning solutions within the Data Services and Data Driven Intelligence team spending her spare time advocating for machine learning fairness, youth coding initiatives, mobilising tech and womxn communities and succulents