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Tech & Innovation Blog
ADP – Month of Caring 2020
Month of Caring, Volunteerism, Giving Back
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Video: ADP – Month of Caring 2020
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[TEXT] Every year in May, our associates participate in different volunteer activities as part of our global Month of Caring initiative. This year due to the global health crisis, ADP associates participated in virtual and non-traditional ways to give back to our communities.
[LOGO] The month of caring
[DESCRIPTION] A woman at a sewing machine.
[TEXT] We made face masks and donated them. USA
[DESCRIPTION] Fabric and sewing supplies. Face masks in various patterns.
A woman places an ADP label on one of several cartons.
[TEXT] Food drive for local communities – Tunisia
[DESCRIPTION] Workers with boxes at the rear of a vehicle. A man arrange supplies inside a truck. A man and woman hold ADP signage.
[DESCRIPTION] A woman with face masks on her shoulder.
[TEXT] Face mask donations – Brazil
[DESCRIPTION] An iron on a face mask, masks in several patterns.
Medical personnel with brown bags.
[TEXT] Provided meals to our health care workers on the front lines. USA
[DESCRIPTION] Workers with food containers. A man’s sign reads, Thank You!
More health worker signs, Thank You So Much
Men and women hold bags outside a restaurant.
[TEXT] Food Donations – India
[DESCRIPTION] A woman and man distribute food.
[TEXT] Donated tablets to local hospitals to assist the communication between isolated patients and their loved ones. USA
[DESCRIPTION] A woman and a health care worker hold tablets.
Hospital workers hold tablets.
Hospital workers with a tablet and a sign that reads, Thank You
[TEXT] Thank you to all our associates for continuously making a positive impact in the communities where we live and work.
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[LOGO] ADP, Always Designing for People.
[TEXT] ADP and the ADP logo are registered trademarks of ADP, Inc. All other marks are the property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2020 ADP, Inc.
Every year, ADP dedicates the month of May to giving back to our communities where we live and work. Even during with a global pandemic, we found a way to make a difference!
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.
Tech & Innovation Blog
Cycle for the Cause: 150 riders, 4 days, 1 cause
Diversity, LGBTQ, Volunteerism
We put our helmets on and headed out on the 275-mile Ride – from Boston to New York City – to raise money and awareness in the fight to end HIV/AIDS.
This epic journey brought us to 20 different cities, putting our months of training to the test two years in a row. It wasn’t easy, but with ADP as an Endurance Sponsor for the Ride, we raised more than $900,000 over the last two years. Cycle for the Cause, The Northeast AIDS Ride, is an annual event that Team ADP proudly supports in body, mind and spirit.
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
