Women in Tech Meetup

Learning about risk-taking, sentiment analysis, cybersecurity, and psychological safety in one evening? That’s quite a mix, isn’t it?

That’s what the audience got offered at the Women in Tech meetup, which took place on February 29th in trivago’s office space. Together with iteratec, trivago had the pleasure of bringing together the vibrant community of female tech talents and their allies on the occasion of International Women’s Day, for an evening featuring stories about risk, safety, and continuous improvement.

Aida Orujova and Sophia Breth guided the crowd through the evening in which 60 guests listened to four talks on a diverse set of topics:

Andrea Fernandez: Unleashing the power of risk-taking

Andrea opened the evening with her perspective, recommending everyone to take calculated risks in both professional and personal lives. According to her, calculated risk-taking can greatly accelerate progress. The key is to learn fast from mistakes and to incorporate acquired knowledge into the future actions.

Lucia Leardini: The Language of Lodging - A sentimental journey through accommodation reviews

Lucia shared with us her first application of sentiment analysis on hotel review data. She compared the performance of VADER and TextBlob with a dataset of hotel reviews, with VADER slightly outperforming TextBlob in this context. Overall, she states that sentiment analysis has a lot of potential, but it also requires quite a deep dive into modeling, data structure, and theoretical foundation. A natural next step would be to benchmark tested libraries with GPT solutions.

Elke Hiendl: Redefining Cybersecurity - Beyond Tech to Culture and Awareness

Elke introduced us to the world of cybersecurity and all its aspects. She highlighted that there’s way more than “just” passwords and how most of cybersecurity issues are not about hacking computers, but hacking human brains. She underlined that it requires the right mindset and culture to safeguard our digital spaces.

Michael Thiel: The importance of psychological safety in teams

Michael closed the round of talks by sharing his experience on psychological safety in teams. With his background as a psychologist, he shared his best practices on how to create a safe space in teams. He guided the audience through the theoretical foundation and how it can be applied in real life. His first tips were “share something personal… to show that you are human” and “make a joke (if you can)…because laughter works against stress and anxiety”, which he applied to his talk as well.

Besides the talks, everyone had the chance to network over some food and drinks, creating a comfortable atmosphere to exchange on the topics presented by our speakers and beyond.

We want to thank our colleagues at iteratec for the great collaboration in organizing the “Women in Tech” meetup! We’re looking forward to the next edition 🙌

About the speakers:

Andrea Fernández, trivago

Andrea leads the Data Intelligence team at trivago. Data Intelligence aims to enable other teams to make data-driven decisions. Andrea completed a PhD in mathematics in the UK and has been working since then with marketing, bidding, prediction, and ranking algorithms, among others. She is eager to share her experience and learnings on leading data teams. Beyond her impactful role, Andrea is also a member of trivago’s FAME (Female Ambassadors and Mentors in Engineering) group, an initiative whose goal is to inspire, empower, and attract women to the tech field.

Lucia Leardini, trivago

Lucia is a Senior Data Scientist in the B2B Ventures team at trivago. After a PhD and post-doc in Physics at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität in Heidelberg, Lucia was part of the trivago Marketplace, working with the Auction algorithm and with market and advertisers’ dynamics. She recently moved to the B2B team, taking care of alternative revenue streams and third-party data exchange. Lucia is also a member of trivago’s FAME (Female Ambassadors and Mentors in Engineering) group, an initiative whose goal is to inspire, empower, and attract women to the tech field.

Elke Hiendl, iteratec

After completing her studies in biology and conducting basic research in molecular neurobiology, Elke switched to IT and began her career as a system and network administrator. She later assumed the position of data protection officer for the company and gradually shifted her focus to IT security.

Michael Thiel, iteratec

Michael has been working as a psychologist, therapist and coach for more than 35 years. He works as a psychological coach and supervisor in hospitals, media companies and in the IT sector.