All our invited speakers are female executives, engineers, policy makers, and academics who help solve the unique challenges facing autonomous driving.
Driving Your Career
(Virtual)
Speakers Include:
Driving Your Career
(Virtual)
Speakers Include:
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Julie Derence is a founding member of TBD Robotics, LLC in Pittsburgh, PA. Julie has been in the software engineering world for over 20 years working in a variety of technology areas. She has developed the front-end interface for military weapons programs, worked in glass manufacturing plants to deploy in-line inspection equipment, and helped develop technology for autonomous vehicles. For over nine years, Julie worked to develop core infrastructure used in Robotic applications for the National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) with Carnegie Mellon University. Her main focus was integration developed for a fleet of Autonomous Haul Trucks in populated open pit mines. The Haul Trucks not only navigate the mine roads without human intervention, but they also operate in the same area with manned vehicles and human personnel.
Continuing work on autonomous technologies, Julie developed a fleet of autonomous vehicles for Uber’s Advanced Technologies Center. With a focus on key infrastructure software to enhance the safety, mapping, user interaction, fleet management, and autonomy for Uber's advancements. During her time with Uber, Julie helped lead the Women's Employee Resource Group, focusing energy on recruiting initiatives, community service outreach, and mentoring programs. With TBD Robotics, Julie is able to leverage her experience to develop tools and infrastructure to aid in rapidly building safe and reliable robotic systems. Julie graduated from Bucknell University with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science Engineering. She resides in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with her husband and two sons. She is constantly striving to perfect her work-life balance between raising her boys and pursuing a career in the fast-paced engineering world. She actively participates in the Society of Women Engineers events and encourages all women to continue to pursue science and technology careers. |
Julie Derence.
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Apoorva Sachdev Lakshmanan.
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Apoorva Sachdev Lakshmanan is a Technical Program Manager at Waymo, where she drives multiple cross-functional efforts - working alongside engineers and leadership to make safe, autonomous vehicles a reality. She has spent over five years in the autonomous vehicle space, having previously led several programs at Uber’s Advanced Technology Center. Prior to this, she was a Solution Architect at IBM in Singapore, where she worked closely with clients in the Asia Pacific finance sector to transform back-office processes. Apoorva holds a Masters degree in Robotics from UC Berkeley, where she conducted research in personal robotics. Her interests lie in productionizing cutting edge technology to deliver real-world impact, and she enjoys streamlining the efforts of large engineering teams towards achieving their goals. |
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Jessie Smith is a Senior Staff Technical Lead on the Perception Simulation team at Aurora. She graduated from the University of Nevada, Reno with an undergraduate and graduate degree in computer science, specializing in high performance computing. For her thesis, she built a forest fire simulator that ran in parallel using CUDA. She has worked on the simulation teams at Uber's ATG and Aurora and has worked on the full spectrum of simulation problems from motion simulation agent behaviors to writing the infrastructure for the renderers used in perception simulation. Her current project is building automated engines for procedurally generation of scenarios. Her journey at Aurora has included being an individual contributor, a manager, and a manager of managers before cycling back to being an individual contributor again. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and her too-smart blue heeler mix.
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Jessie Smith.
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