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Tech & Innovation Blog
Hacking the Future of STEM with iWIN EMPOWER and GirlsHack
Early Talent, Impact, Women in STEM
We thank the EMPOWER committee and members who generously donated their time to make this event successful.
Hacking the Future of STEM with iWIN EMPOWER and GirlsHack
In celebration and recognition of International Women’s Month, ADP’s International Women’s Inclusion Network (iWIN) Business Resource Group (BRG) sponsored GirlHacks 2022 Hackathon event at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). GirlHacks 2022 was a 36-hour women-centric hackathon that featured motivational speakers, discussion panels, and mentoring programs created to inspire women and support advanced career growth.
The event was an initiative propelled by the iWIN EMPOWER Committee. With core values of inspiring innovation and social responsibility, many ADP iWIN BRG members volunteered to participate in the event. In addition to providing tech guidance during the hackathon, our associates engaged students in thought-provoking discussions about the GPT Development programs, summer internship positions, and work opportunities across ADP.
GirlHacks at New Jersey Institute of Technology
“With a commitment to growing opportunities for women in STEM, the iWIN Empower BRG is proud to offer insight and guidance to new technologists, even before they begin their careers,” said Aini Ali, Vice President of Major Accounts Operations at ADP. “This event aligns closely with our mission to provide tools, guidance, and a network for women and children of all ages to reach new heights of success in STEM careers. It was an amazing experience too.”
The first-place winner of GirlHacks 2022 was Imposter Bubble, a mobile app inspired by the idea submitter’s own experiences with Imposter Syndrome (IS). IS refers to an internal experience of believing you are not as competent as others perceive you. 75% of executive women identified having experienced IS at various points during their careers. Imposter Bubble provides positive, powerful affirmations to women, helping them process their negative thoughts. The application was built using Flutter, a cross-platform app development framework by Google that allows the same codebase to develop apps for iOS, Android, and web platforms. Learn more about the Imposter Bubble and other submissions on Devpost.
ADP iWIN BRG would like to thank the EMPOWER committee and members who generously donated their time to make this event successful. ADP is committed to Diversity and Inclusion. We encourage you to learn about the fantastic opportunities for collaboration and partnership our BRGs offer.
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Tech & Innovation Blog
Dr. Raji, Senior Director of Data Science, creates impact with data automation and transformation
Women in STEM, Voice of Our People, Innovation
Dr. Raji, one of the pioneers bringing AI/ML to Pi-Payroll innovation products at ADP, shares her career journey and the different automated processes her team creates.
Dr. Raji, Senior Director of Data Science
Dr. Raji came from a lower-middle-class family in which both of her parents did not receive high school diplomas. “I saw their struggles, and as a girl growing up, I also faced different social pressures. Then I soon realized my love for math at school.” As she says: “That was when I made the connection in my mind, and I believed a STEM career could make a difference.”
From Bioinformatics to Automotive Industry
Before joining ADP, Dr. Raji has worked in various industries, including three years in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where she worked on H1N1 Vaccine strain selection models. Her team took serology, sequence, protein structure, and phylogenetic data; they compared whether the current vaccine strain covered the virus’s dominant circulating strain. Dr. Raji took a break from Bioinformatics and later joined a Cox Automotive company called Manheim to help roll out OVE, a product providing car recommendations for online users. She also worked at a healthcare fraud prevention company called Cotiviti that focused on claim overpayment, fraud predictions, and prevention.
“When I first came to ADP, I was surprised to see the amount of data. We can produce so many innovative products from these. Every data scientist would love to work for ADP,” she says. “The second thing that surprised me was the freedom I got. The amount of support I got from the leadership teams was terrific. I got to be myself at work, knowing they welcomed innovative ideas.”
Dr. Raji and her family
Coming to ADP
When Dr. Raji joined ADP a few years ago, the company didn’t have many data scientists. She built a team of full-stack Automation Intelligence Machine Learning (AI/ML) technologists from scratch. “We call ourselves PiBrain, and we solve use cases across different business units through an advanced state of innovative AI/ML products and solutions,” she says. “I built three notable products through Digital Transformation, using AI/ML algorithms and APIs.”
“The first product involved automating digital implementation for some of our products, which eliminated manual processes and increased our net promoter scores, gave a better user experience, and increased client satisfaction,” she says. This process gave her team a more accurate data conversion process and saved costs for the clients. Dr. Raji introduced another automated compliance checkup product for pay statements, which eliminated the laborious process of scanning pay statements one by one and automating the process. The last project involved form digitization with a feedback loop that continuously learns from overrides.
Deep Learning
Dr. Raji’s team focuses on several key areas in their current work. The first product is Deep Learning, an authentication stack that identifies, extracts, and connects the documents. Another one is a Natural Language Processing stack that demonstrates transformation translation.
Her team helped build API services that take company handbooks as inputs. They used Natural Language Understanding models and elucidated answers for questions such as “What holidays are offered?” and “What is the holiday pay for full-time/temporary employees?” The responses were automatically sent back to implementation systems as callbacks to fill out the guided interview process.
Dr. Raji and her team at the Southern Data Science Conference
Giving Back to Community
Dr. Raji and her team attended last year’s GPT Connect and gave three presentations. The first presentation was open-source tools for AI/ML. Another one was Computer Vision and Deep Learning for naïve to advanced data extraction. “We also showed our Associates how to interpret Vendor Language and map those in ADP constructs,” she says.
“My team and I looked for outside opportunities to create an impact. We attended the Southern Data Science Conference in 2019, where we used data to predict human trafficking.” Her team successfully visualized and built models to predict trafficking. They identified “hubs,” where children were trafficked to and who trafficked them. An FBI director attended the presentation ceremony and found Intel helpful in targeting criminals. “The project gave me satisfaction because we worked for a cause. We wanted to make sure our knowledge continues to help others and give back to the communities,” Dr. Raji says.
One STEM Education at Innovation Academy
“People say it could be engineering, science, or math. But to me, STEM is a combination of all! It is an application of each field coming together to solve a business problem,” Dr. Raji says. She believes STEM is an applied field where interdisciplinary work is valued.
This is especially important in Dr. Raji’s involvement with Innovation Academy, a STEM school ADP sponsored in Alpharetta. “The goal is One Stem Education. I was one of the ambassadors who helped set up the syllabi and influenced the type of education students received,” she says. Dr. Raji’s love for children and STEM made this a perfect opportunity for her to have conversations about STEM opportunities. She is looking forward to planning and creating lab spaces for more talents who are interested.
Dr. Raji is also a painter. This is her work: Serene morning sunrise at St. Simon Island.
Best Advice
“We talked a lot about my background and where I came from. My life is a lesson itself. If you have a dream, don’t give up,” she says. Dr. Raji believes the secret of life is to fall seven times and get up on the eighth. For those pursuing data science, she recommends thinking outside the box and approaching problems from different perspectives. “Keep in mind being a data scientist means spending substantial time in data prep, data cleaning, deployment, and data quality checking. Patience is critical as each of the tasks is essential in building a complete model,” she says. “There will be challenges and disappointments, but don’t lose faith. Keep learning and chase your dreams.”
Dr. Raji is looking forward to inspiring more people and attracting more talents to ADP. To her, #ADPTech is innovative, supportive, and welcoming. Her team wants to mentor more women technologists and have more of them in leadership positions!
Interested in a tech career at ADP?
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Tech & Innovation Blog
Brazil Lab’s Carlos Nascimento Wins First Round NASA International Space Apps Challenge
Voice of Our People, Recognition, Innovation
Creating something out of this world almost came naturally to Carlos Nascimento, literally while he slept. Read about his innovation here.
Carlos recently won the first stage of the NASA International Space Apps Challenge. Yes, that NASA – the National Aeronautics and Space Administration…
Carlos developed a solution responsible for dynamically organizing the entire circadian cycle of astronauts, using Convolutional Neural Networks, being able to interpret brain frequencies, predict and stimulate the next stages of sleep.
“I could not have done this without the experience and knowledge I earned by working at ADP Brazil Labs,” said Carlos. “At the innovation center, we are working on a project that uses machine learning, which gave me the necessary knowledge and inspiration that I used for the NASA competition.”
NASA’s hackathon was the largest globally to develop an innovative app for its astronauts. With only 48 hours of active development, Carlos decided to focus on machine learning and brain signals. He gathered a team of his friends to select the challenge. They thought: “You know what? Everybody has some kind of sleep problem! Let’s help with that!”
Carlos will represent Brazil on the global stage, where they will choose the six best solutions.
At ADP, Carlos and his team work on a product that leverages machine learning. According to Carlos, “The best thing about working with Machine Learning is that the field is always evolving with new ideas and updates.”
Before Carlos travels to spaces and places, we caught up with him to learn just a little bit more:
What advice do you have for someone looking to participate in a global challenge?
These events are about innovation and teamwork, so choose your team wisely with professionals from different fields like designers, developers, and data scientists and read a lot about the subject you plan to solve.
What is your must-have app personally?
Brave Private Browser. We should always be very careful with our data. Like we are at ADP.
What is your favorite movie?
Interstellar.
If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life, what would it be?
Chocolate. I probably wouldn’t live much, but it would be a happy life.
What is the best advice you ever received?
Treat everyone the way you would like to be treated.
What’s the best place you’ve ever traveled to on vacation, and why?
That would be Arraial do Cabo. It’s close to my hometown, Rio de Janeiro. It has the most beautiful beaches I’ve ever seen.
Carlos will receive an award from the U.S. Embassy in Brazil for his work in the NASA Challenge. Results for 40 finalist teams, and six winning global teams, will be revealed in January 2021!
Congratulations, Carlos! Good luck to you and your team in the next round!
Learn more about working at Brazil Labs.
All-Female 48-Hour Hackathon Attracted 200 Virtual Participants
ADP supports events such as this in an effort to encourage more young women to pursue STEM careers.
During a global health event with social distancing in full swing, is there any group better prepared to embrace a 48-hour virtual gathering than tech-savvy female students? Probably not. For the second time, ADP sponsored the Major League Hacking (MLH) Hack Girl Summer Hackathon to encourage female software engineers to pursue their dreams. But this was the first time the event was not held in person.
The June 19-21 virtual hackathon attracted more than 200 participants and at least 50 ADP associates volunteered as organizers, mentors, judges and participants for this event.
Daina Bowler, ADP Vice President of Sales and iWIN board chairperson, kicked off the event, delivering her remarks via streaming platform. Daina told viewers that the ADP iWIN business resource group is comprised of 5,000 ADP women from around the world who are dedicated to encouraging and preparing women and young girls to achieve successful careers in STEM.
After the welcome, participants quickly organized into 70+ teams and then started the creative process and coding effort to develop the best application. The popular gaming chat application Discord was used to find team members to work with and to find mentors to chat with while hacking.
ADP volunteer mentors had their own active Discord channel where coders could ask for guidance on project ideas or pose technical questions to troubleshoot issues. As the corporate sponsor, ADP also presented two well-received workshops.
Workshops
Aini Ali, ADP Vice-President, SBS Operations and iWin Empower Board Chairperson; and Laura Colon, Senior Program Manager – SBS Operations; conducted the first workshop, “Up and Coming Technology” which described all the amazing ways technology has changed the world. She described the incredible advancements in robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning and automation that will drive future innovation. It is a very exciting time to be a techie!
Ellen Hongo, ADP Senior Director of Strategy GSS, conducted the second workshop “Crafting a Chatbot People Want to Use.” Ellen described what goes into designing and creating chatbots using IBM Watson technology, and how they are used at ADP to improve client experience and support. Ellen’s workshop opened a new area in automations for the young women to consider as they prepare to enter the workforce of the future.
The ADP challenge “Happy at Home Presented by ADP” was to create a hack that helps folks stay happy at home. The participants’ project could be designed to tackle at-home productivity and entertainment, make working remotely easier, or help users connect with friends and family remotely.
After 48 hours of intense coding and a long sleepless weekend, it was time for the judges to see all the application demos and presentations by the students. There were 27 terrific submissions on DevPost for the ADP challenge. DevPost is a global community where software developers share their projects to inspire and learn from one another. The ADP volunteers on the judging panel evaluated and rated the projects on originality, technology, design, completion, learning and adherence to theme. There were so many fantastic projects made by women, for women. It was no easy task to choose the winner of the ADP challenge.
Challenge Winner
During the closing ceremony, Aini Ali announced the ADP challenge winner which was the application called “Inspiration.” This creative iOS application was developed by a high school student who wanted to empower other young women to pursue their interests in STEM because diversity is important in the STEM field. The Inspiration app allows young girls to explore different STEM careers through simple objects.
Users point their phone’s camera at an object and take a picture of it. Using machine learning and object detection/image labeling, the app detects what object is in the photo. It then displays relevant careers in STEM involving the object and prompts the user to view an influential woman in the same career. Every day, the app’s home page displays a new influential female for girls to learn about.
The iOS app was built using Xcode and SwiftUI. For the front end, the student designed all the UI using Sketch. For the backend, she used machine learning API and Firebase. The machine learning API uses the ML Kit Image Labeling’s base TensorFlow model in order to predict the objects in the photos. The Inspiration app was truly a very creative and innovative application!
The Major League Hacking Organization (MLH) organizers truly appreciate ADP’s sponsorship and partnership. We look forward to doing many more hackathons together in the future. Thank you to all the ADP volunteers for the outstanding energy they brought to this event. We all learned so much about new technologies used to conduct a virtual event of this magnitude and it was an amazing experience.
ADP is proud to support women’s hackathons to encourage more young women to relentlessly pursue their dreams of changing the world using innovative technology. Through this hackathon sponsorship and our significant partnership with Girls Who Code – focused on closing the gender gap in tech — ADP demonstrates our commitment to Diversity and Inclusion by promoting and supporting women in technology careers.
Learn about STEM career opportunities at ADP by visiting tech.adp.com.
ADP Partners with Girls Who Hack on an all-female Hackathon
Female coders were encouraged to put their own self-doubt aside and to relentlessly pursue their education and dreams.
On a crisp autumn Saturday, 110 students arrived early to the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) campus center in Newark, New Jersey. They gathered to participate in the first-ever ALL-women 24-hour hackathon (where ADP was the diamond-level sponsor). There was a lot of excitement and anticipation in the air, both from the attendees and the Women in Computing Society organizers.
Don Weinstein, ADP Corporate Vice President and Chief Product and Technology Officer, kicked off the hackathon with a rousing keynote speech touting the importance of creating an inclusive work environment.
“I’m proud of ADP’s ability to continue to innovate as we lead the way in supporting the global workforce. Our edge comes from including varied perspectives and talent as demonstrated through events like this one,” Weinstein said. “We genuinely believe that diversity and inclusion will continue to fuel the future of work, and we remain committed to empowering a workforce that truly represents all walks of life.”
Next up was Isabel Espina, Vice President of WorkMarket Product Development (WorkMarket is an ADP company). Isabel shared her inspiring journey through the obstacles she had to overcome as one of a small handful of female engineering college students in a male dominated field. Her experience is familiar and relatable to many women in the STEM field. Isabel described how ADP has supported her career, as a technologist and as a mother, and that helped her find balance between both worlds.
Seema Murthy and Foram Shah from ADP’s enterprise architecture team conducted a very well-received hands-on workshop called Design Your Own API. The students found the material informative and immediately put their real-world coding skills to work in creating their projects. Lisa Schmidt from ADP’s college recruiting team brought a lot of energy and enthusiasm as students visited with her to learn more about internship opportunities at our company.
The judges evaluated the projects and had the difficult task of choosing the top five teams. The top five teams presented their ideas, and each team’s project was evaluated on the quality of the code, design appeal, functionality and creativity.
The first-place team, four NJIT computer science graduate students, created a Sign Language Alphabet Prediction Translator application. The application takes American sign language images, predicts what alphabet the image is depicting, and prints the predicted alphabet along with the confidence score. The use case and inspiration for the team was a fellow classmate who is deaf and mute. The team wanted to create an application for the specially-abled student to communicate more easily with professors and her classmates. This application would eliminate the need for a human translator to help the student make the technical language used in class understandable. The students used Google Cloud Platform’s Auto ML API with Tensorflow and Python for coding. It was a very creative idea!
In addition to winning cool prizes, the first-place team was invited to visit the ADP office to learn about the next generation of award-winning ADP solutions and experience our workplace culture. At the close of the event, I encouraged ALL student participants to put their own self-doubt aside and to relentlessly pursue their education and dreams. I reminded them that they alone have the biggest impact on their own education and career.
Through this Hackathon sponsorship (and the ones we plan to sponsor in the future), and our significant partnership with Girls Who Code focused on closing the Gender Gap in tech, ADP demonstrates our commitment to promoting and supporting women in technology careers.
Learn more about internship and career opportunities at ADP.
Tech & Innovation Blog
ADP Sponsors Junior Achievement Hackathon to influence the lives of the next generation of technologists
Community, Diversity
I never get tired of hearing students get excited about technology and business.
“I really liked the different activities that we could do. It was fun using the VR and learning more about Python.” –Jane, 9th grade
“I applied my previous knowledge, but I also learned how to be a group leader and split the work evenly.” –Kush, 11th grade
While we get the opportunity to do some amazing things at ADP, how often do you get to also say that you were a positive influence in a young person’s career? That you were personally involved in encouraging someone who became a next generation tech entrepreneur? Or maybe you’ll find out in a few years that the high school student you mentored eventually wound up developing an innovative solution to detect and stop criminals. Or perhaps you’ll hear that they contributed to find a cure for a debilitating illness or disease.
Well, some of your fellow associates are doing just that. Once again, ADP proudly sponsored the Junior Achievement of New Jersey’s HackJA events for the 2019-2020 school year. If you didn’t already know, HackJA is a 24-hour hackathon for approximately 100 New Jersey high school students, which is held twice every school year in October and February. During HackJA, students are assigned tasks and challenges related to computer science and information technology. Students also participate in workshops and meet with mentors from various backgrounds.
Several of our ADP associates from New Jersey and New York volunteered at HackJA. They helped students with their projects, helped prepare student presentations, and judged the final submissions.
“I had tons of fun being a judge. I was impressed by 30+ high school teams who presented projects that were put together within a weekend. Many not only worked, but very inspirational. I would highly recommend this event to everyone!” said Bo Li, Senior Director, GPT Product Management, and HackJA volunteer.
Although most volunteers have been from Global Product & Technology (GPT) and the Global Security Organization (GSO), we also had wonderful volunteers from other areas like Sales, Finance and Global Shared Services. In addition to providing their technical expertise in areas like web design, coding, data science, robotics, and cyber security, our volunteers also helped the students with public speaking, teamwork, career exploration discussions and presentation development.
Samantha Barone, MAS Sales District Manager and two-time HackJA volunteer said, “I loved the event and I had such a fun time speaking with the students and learning about what they were passionate about. I was in awe of how incredibly intelligent every student was and their technological abilities. One of my most cherished times with ADP by far.”
There is something incredibly rewarding about helping to a future generation of technical professionals who will change the world and hopefully become ADP associates someday!
More about Junior Achievement of New Jersey
Junior Achievement (JA) of New Jersey is a non-profit organization dedicated to preparing young people in grades K-12 to succeed in a global economy through real world relationships with business, government and educational partners. All JA programs are provided at no cost to schools, students or their families, and emphasize real world learning experiences and motivate youth to achieve by connecting them with corporate and community role models committed to investing in their future.
BY RAJ UTTAMCHANDANI
