Nermeen Ghoniem

What is interesting for you right now? I want to talk about Hello Ada and how you are spending a lot of your time and energy on equipping kind of the younger generation with tools and skill sets for AI.

Can you just tell us about that? How you got started with it? What the project is about? What you're learning now?

Yes.

So I, around 2022, moved to Silicon Valley to work in a newly acquired startup that Jabra had acquired and realized very quickly I was one of the only women in my neighborhood, in my company.

And felt very lonely, first of all, but also more than anything, I think it was the first time in my career that I was reminded that I was the only woman in the room.

I knew I was in Denmark, but in the US, it's something people bring up in a conversation.

And I think it left me to look at my everyday work with AI.

And I was like, I think it's a deeply creative field.

I think it's a field where I have to constantly problem solve and think of creative new ways to solve a problem because a lot of the task is we have this black box and you're trying to understand intelligence.

You need to understand how a computer works.

And so I was wondering how come there's not more people like me or just more women in general, more diversity, because it was very typical like Silicon Valley sitcom culture.

it was the three stereotypes of men that were there.

And I was kind of left wondering how come there's not more of other people.

And I then looked into this study that I think Microsoft sponsored at the time, but it was done also with Venus Fund and other organization.

And it said that basically, going back to also my story, I think a lot of your decisions about what you want to be, but especially what you don't want to be gets decided around So around 11, you already have decided what you will not become.

And unfortunately, that means also that all the stereotypes that you have of a field, and that specifically also applies to technology, where I think a lot of how we understand technology when we're younger is social media or gaming.

So you don't have that concrete idea of what a career in technology looks like, such as, you know, a doctor, you know, that you help people.

But what does a developer do? That's not something that anyone can relate to, and specifically not AI, because if you ask a child nowadays, and I think you can see in the TikTok comments sometimes, what do you want to be an AI developer and you're like no that's bad for the environment I take jobs away from people because again it's fed by stereotypes so I think I felt very strongly connected to the mission of how do we embrace this new generation and understanding what it means to work in technology but also understand that it's not a choice to engage in technology or not I think especially the Nordics and European Union are not very good at digital literacy.

I think we've definitely taken the consumer face of technology rather than actually producing.

We're not the the Silicon Valley energy here.

And then I think specifically for Hello Ada, I think a lot of why I think kids are not engaging in creating technology is because it's not interesting to build a snake game because your teacher built a snake game.

It's interesting to build a game with your pet because you love your pet.

It's super interesting to build a recycling game because you want to help your mom with recycling.

All of those elements of building an app or a game or a prototype, for something that solves something in your community, that's something that inspires kids.

And so I think what we're focusing on in Hello Ada is how do you help kids get from A to B with AI so that it's more motivational for them to get to C? So how do you engage them in their process by giving them that first success? And that's especially something that also relates to why girls get more intrigued by technology.