 Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Women in Data Science Worldwide Conference, WIDS 2022, live from Stanford University. I'm Lisa Martin. I have a guest next here with me, Maggie Wongus here, autonomy engineer at Skydio. Maggie, welcome to the program. Thanks so much. I'm so happy to be here. Excited to talk to you. You are one of the event speakers, but this is your first WIDS. What's your take so far? I'm really excited that there's a conference dedicated to getting more women in STEM. I think it's extremely important and I'm so happy to be here. Were you always interested in STEM subjects when you were growing up? I think I've always been drawn to STEM, but not only STEM, but I've always been interested in arts, humanities, getting more interested in the science as well. And I think STEM robotics was really my way to express myself and make things move in the real world. Nice. So you've got interest, I was reading about you, interest in motion planning, control theory, computer vision, and deep learning. Talk to me about those interests. It sounds very fascinating. Yeah, so I think what really drew me into robotics was just how interdisciplinary the subject is. So I think a lot goes into creating a robot. So not only is it about actually understanding where you are in the world, it's also about seeing where you are in the world. And it's so interesting because I feel like humans, we take this all for granted, but it's actually so difficult to do that in an actual robot. So I'm excited about the possibilities of robotics now and in the future. Lots of possibilities. And you only graduated from Harvard last May. You have, but with a Bachelor's and a Master's, tell me a little bit about what you studied at Harvard. Yeah, so I studied physics as my undergrad degree. And that was really interesting because I've always been interested in science and actually part of what got me interested in STEM was just learning about the universe and astrophysics and that's what gets me excited. And I think I also wanted to supplement that with computer science and building things in the real world. And so that's why I got my Master's in that. And I always knew that I wanted to kind of blend a lot of different disciplines and study that. There's so much benefit from blending disciplines in terms of even the thought diversity alone, which just opens up the opportunities to be almost endless. So you graduated in May, you're now at Skydio, autonomy engineer, talk to me a little bit. First of all, tell me a bit about Skydio as a company, the products, what differentiates it and then talk to me about what you're doing there specifically. So Skydio is a really amazing company. I'm super fortunate to work there. So what they do is create autonomous drones and what differentiates them is the autonomy. So in typical drones, it's very difficult to actually make sure that it has full understanding of the environment and obstacle avoidance. So what happens is we fly these drones manually, but we aren't able to harness the full potential of these drones because of lack of autonomy. So what we do is really push into this autonomous sphere and make sure that we're able to kind of understand the environment. We have deep learning algorithms on the drone and we have really good planning and controls on the drone as well. So yeah, our company basically makes the most autonomous drones in the market. Nice. And tell me about your role specifically. Yeah. So as an autonomy engineer, I write algorithms that run on the drone, which is super exciting. I can create some algorithms and design it and then also fly it in simulation and then fly it in the real world. So it's just really amazing to see the things I work with actually come to life. Talk to me about how you got involved in WIDS. You were saying it was your first WIDS and Margo Garrison found you on LinkedIn. But what are some of the things that you've heard so far? I mean, I was in one of the panels this morning before we came out to the set and I loved how they were talking about the importance of mentors and sponsors. Talk to me about some of your mentors along the way. Yeah, I had so many great mentors along the way. I definitely would not be here had it not been for them. Starting from my parents, they're immigrants from China and they inspire me in so many ways. They're very hardworking. And they always encourage me to fail and just be courageous and follow my passions. And I think beyond that, in high school, I had great mentors. One was an astrophysics professor. Yeah, so it was very amazing that I was able to have these opportunities at a young age. And even in high school, I was involved in all girls robotics team. And that really opened my eyes to how technology can be used and why more women should be in STEM. And it's not like STEM should not be only for males. And it's really important for everyone to be involved. It is for so many reasons. If we look at the data in the workforce, it's about 50-50. But the number of women in STEM positions is less than 25%. It's something that's new to the tech industry. What are some of the things that you do you see that? Do you feel that? Or are you just really excited to be able to focus on doing the autonomous engineering that you're doing? Well, I think that it's kind of easy to try to separate yourself and your identity from your work. But I don't necessarily agree with that. I think you need to, as best as possible, bring yourself to the table and bring your whole identity. And I think part of growing up for me was trying to understand who I was as a woman and also as an Asian-American. And try to combine all of my identities into how I bring myself to the workplace. And I think as we become more vulnerable and try to understand ourselves and express ourselves to others, we're able to build more inclusive communities in STEM and beyond. I agree. Very wise words. So you're going to be talking on the career panel today. What are some of the parts of wisdom are you going to leave the audience with this afternoon? Well, wisdom. I think everyone should be able to know and have intuitive understanding of what they actually bring to the table. I think so many times, women shy away from bringing themselves and showing up as themselves. And I think it's really important for a woman to understand that they hold a lot of power, that they have a voice that needs to be heard. And I think I just want to encourage everyone to be passionate and show up. Be passionate and show up. That's great advice. One of the things that was talked about this morning, and we talk about this a lot when we talk about data science is the inherent bias in data. Talk to me about the importance of data in robotics. Is there bias there? How do you navigate around that? Yeah, there's definitely bias in robotics. There's definitely a lot of data involved in robotics. So in many cases right now in robotics, we work in specialized fields. So you can see picking robots that will pick in specific factory locations. But if you bring them to other locations, like in your garage or something and make it clean up, it's really difficult to do so. So I think having a lot of different streams of data and having very diverse sets of data is very important. And also being able to run these in the real world, I think, is also super important in something that Skydio addresses a lot. So you talked about Skydio, what you guys do there, some of the differentiators. What are some of the technical challenges that you face in trying to do what you're doing? Well, first of all, Skydio is trying to run everything on board on the drone. So already there's a lot of technical challenges that goes into putting everything in the small form factor and making sure that we trade off between compute and all of these different resources and making sure that we utilize all of our resources in the best possible way. So that's definitely one challenge and making sure that we have these trade-offs and understand the trade-offs that we make. That's a good point. Talk to me about why robotics researchers and industry practitioners, what should be some of the key things that they're focusing on? Yeah, so I think right now, as I said, like a lot of robotics is in very specialized environments and what we're trying to do in robotics is try to expand to more complex real world applications and I think Skydio is at the forefront of this and trying to get these drones in all different types of locations is very difficult because you might not have good priors, you might not have good information on like your data sources. So I think, yeah, getting good diverse data and making sure that these robots can work in multiple environments can hopefully help us in the future when we use robots. Right, there's gotta be so many real world applications of that. Yeah, for sure. I imagine, definitely. So talk to me about being a female in the drone industry. What's that like? Why do you think it's important to have the female voice and mind in the drone industry? Well, I think, first of all, I think it's kind of sad to see not many women in the drone space because I think there's a lot of potential for drones to be used for good in all the different areas that women care about. And for instance, like climate change, there's a lot of ways that drones can help in reducing waste in many different ways. Search and rescue, for instance. Like those are huge issues and potential solutions from drones. And I think that if women understand these solutions and understand how drones can be used for good, I think we could get more women and excited about this. And how do you see your role in that in helping to get more women excited? And maybe even just to aware of it as a career opportunity. Yeah, so I think sometimes robotics can be a very niche subject and a lot of people get into it from gaming or other things. But I think if we come to it as a way to solve humanity's greatest problems, I think that's what really inspires me. I think that's what would inspire a lot of young women is to see that robotics is a way to help others. And also that it may not, if we don't consciously make it so that robotics helps others, and if we don't put our voices into the table, then potentially robotics will do harm. But we need to push it into the right direction. Do you feel it's going in the right direction? Yes, I think with more conferences like this, like with I think we're going in the right direction. Yeah, this is a great conference. It's one of my favorite shows to host. And it only started back in 2015 as a one day technical conference. And look at it now, it's a global movement. They found you, you're now part of the community, but there's hundreds of events going on in 60 countries. You have the opportunity there to really grow your network but also reach a much bigger audience just based on something like what Marko Garrett's and the team have done with Wins. What does that mean to you? It means a lot. I think it's so amazing that we're able to spread the word of how technology can be used in many different fields, not just robotics, but in healthcare and search and rescue and just environmental protection. So just seeing the power that technology can bring and spreading that to underserved communities, not just in the United States. I love how Wins is a global community and there's regional chapters everywhere. And I think there should be more of this global collaboration in technology. I agree. Every company these days is a technology company or a data company or both. They think of even your local retailer or grocery store that has to be a technology company. So for women to get involved in technology, there's so many different applications of that. It doesn't have to be just coding, for example. You're doing work with drones. There's so much potential there. I think the more that we can do events like this and leverage platforms like theCUBE, the more we can get that word out there. I agree. So you have the career panel and then you're also doing a tech vision talk? Yeah, tech talk. What are some of the things that you're gonna talk about there? Yeah, so I'm gonna talk about, so at the career panel, just advice in general to young people who may be as confused and starting off their career just like I am. And at the tech talk, I'll be talking about some different aspects of Skydio and a specific use case, which is 3D scanning any physical object and putting that into a digital model. Ooh, well, tell me a little bit more about that. Yeah, so 3D scan is one of our products and it allows for us to take pictures of anything in the physical world and make sure that we can put it into a digital form. So we can create digital twins into digital form, which is very cool. Very cool. So we're talking any type of physical object. So if you wanna inspect a building or any crumbling infrastructure, a lot of the times right now we use helicopters or big snooper trucks or just things that could be expensive or potentially dangerous, instead we can use a drone. So this is just one example of how drones can be used to help save lives potentially. Tremendous amount of opportunity that that drones provide. It's very exciting. What are some of the things that you're looking forward to? Is here, we're very early in calendar year 2022, but what are you excited about as the year progresses? Hmm, what am I excited about? I think there's a lot of really interesting drone related companies and also a lot of robotics companies in general. A lot of startups and there's a lot of excitement there. And I think as the robotics community grows and grows, there will be seeing more robots in real life. And I think that's just extremely exciting to me. It is, and you're at the forefront of that. Maggie, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you for sharing what you're doing at Skydio, your history, your past and what you're going to be encouraging the audience to be able to go and achieve. We appreciate your time. Thanks so much. All right. For Maggie Wong, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Women in Data Science Worldwide Conference, WINS 2022. Stick around, I'll be right back with my next guest.