Celebrating International Women’s Day

At Cerebras Systems, we’re on a mission to revolutionize the artificial intelligence (AI) compute landscape with extraordinary people for global impact! Diverse perspectives, curiosity, and ensuring everyone has the opportunity to contribute are key pillars of our culture.

For International Women’s Day, we asked a few of our extraordinary women to share what they’re working on and how they are breaking the bias to create a gender equal world.

Rebekah Leslie-Hurd is the Director of the Compiler team, working on novel programming languages and compilation challenges for our Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE), the world’s largest and fastest AI processor. This includes domain specific languages for programming the WSE, automatic kernel code generation for ML models, and compiling efficient machine code for each Cerebras architecture. Rebekah’s spent her career designing, reasoning about, and compiling for unique hardware architectures. Working in AI is exciting for her, because it’s an area that is evolving rapidly on every front. As a team leader at Cerebras, Rebekah is dedicated to #breakthebias by creating an environment where every single person is able to do their best work – regardless of gender identity, race, ethnicity, or other differences in background. As she explains, “this starts with hiring individuals who are collaborative and open to feedback and continues with processes that make space for everyone to contribute effectively.” She is always looking for opportunities to improve our organizational systems to ensure that women and other underrepresented groups have a level playing field. “Sometimes this means rethinking convention, which can be scary,” she says, “but ultimately everyone wins.”

Saumya Satish is a Senior Product Manager for AI/ML software, focused on building a world class machine learning user experience to make our CS-2 system the easiest, most streamlined platform to program for cluster scale AI. She has always been interested in AI and its application, noting that 15 years ago, her final undergrad paper was on neural networks and back propagation. Her career has spanned digital image processing, computer vision and now machine learning, and she continues to be in awe of the “unique problems we can now solve because of AI.” She is committed to #breakthebias by consciously challenging her own thought process and questioning the status quo around her, by being vocal in expressing concerns about biased actions she perceives, and by basing her own decisions purely on data instead of judgement calls based on stereotypes.

Daria Soboleva is a Member of the Technical Staff, working on ML models in TensorFlow and PyTorch. She first became interested in AI in college, while building a model to help people live longer, healthier lives by sharing potential future disease predictions based on health choices. Daria is deeply committed to #breakthebias by leading by example at Cerebras and in the broader AI community. As a facilitator in the #IamRemarkable community, she hosts workshops to help underrepresented groups learn how to speak openly about their accomplishments in the workplace and beyond.

Katherine Kowalski is a Design Verification Engineer on the hardware team, working with chip designers to understand circuit design and formulate test benches to verify proper functionality. She became interested in AIwhile pursuing an electrical engineering degree at Stanford and was drawn to AI theory and learning the low-level circuitry to optimize compute performance. Katherine credits her mentors with helping her and is actively committed to #breakthebias by volunteering at events for young women interested in STEM, tutoring, and mentoring girls and women. One of her most touching moments was when she was mentoring an EE student who was struggling with imposter syndrome. Katherine had her run through her accomplishments, goals, and work ethic, which helped her see for herself how capable she is. “It’s beautiful that way, how we all go down a different, yet similar path, and how we can pass along the torches to each new generation of women pursuing STEM,” Katherine explains. “With each torch we pass, we hope for more torches, for more representation, for less biases, and for more equality. Torch by torch we step closer to achieving that equality.”