WiDS Sweden 2025 Conference

13 March 08:30-20:00Epicenter Stockholm

We are back for the 8th time!

Welcome on March 13th, at the Epicenter Stockholm or Online with a great line-up of speakers from industry and academia who will share their experience and technical knowledge. The lightning talk theme this year concerns generative AI, and there will be a panel and a mingle, as usual.

WiDS Sweden is independently organized by the WiDS (AI&ML) Sweden organization to be part of the mission to increase participation of women in data science and to feature outstanding women doing outstanding work.

Participants of all genders and backgrounds are welcome and the conference is free to attend. Most talks are intentionally fairly technical and aimed towards current and aspiring data scientists, machine learning engineers, data analysts, data engineers, and AI experts.

Invited Speakers

Johanna Öjeling
Sr Software Engineer at Grafana Labs

Johanna Öjeling is a Senior Software Engineer at Grafana Labs with experience in backend, data, and platform engineering across SaaS and consulting businesses, including Normative, Datatonic, and Peltarion. She specializes in distributed, data-intensive systems and is committed to software quality, developer experience, and open source. Beyond her work at Grafana, she has contributed to open source projects such as Apache Beam, Apache Airflow, and OpenTelemetry.

Building scalable data solutions with open source

10:00 Thursday

30m

Have you ever wondered how large-scale data frameworks work internally to handle massive datasets—or how to create a scalable component yourself? This talk will introduce you to open source development for distributed data processing, showcasing the design of a dynamically scalable I/O connector. With insights from an Apache Beam contributor, you will explore the challenges and rewards of contributing to open source and leave inspired to make your own impact on the data community.

Evangelia Gogoulou
AI Researcher at RISE

Evi Gogoulou is an AI Researcher at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, specializing in language technology. She holds a PhD in Natural Language Processing from KTH Royal Institute of Technology on the topic of large-scale multilingual language models. Her PhD thesis was focused on studying different approaches for pre-training multilingual language models, as well as investigating the problem of hallucinations in machine-generated content. Passionate about advancing AI research, Evi aims to develop equitable and robust language technologies that drive innovation in both academia and industry.

Large language models: progress, pitfalls, and the challenge of evaluation

09:30 Thursday

30m

Gabriela Zarzar Gandler
Principal AI Research Engineer at King

Gabriela Zarzar Gandler works as Principal AI Research Engineer at King, a part of Microsoft Gaming. She develops, researches and mentors within machine learning, and nourishes a special interest towards probabilistic ML, LLMs, representation learning and more recently graph ML. Gabriela holds a master degree in machine learning and has previously worked i.a. at Peltarion, Looklet and ABB Corporate Research Center. She is passionate about crafting projects purposefully - blending technical and human perspectives - and about sharing knowledge with the wider community.

Learning about players: a journey through event streams

11:00 Thursday

30m

How can the combination of tracking event streams and self-supervised learning enhance our understanding of players? This talk explores insights gained from an applied research journey focused on deciphering mobile game players’ behavior, by analyzing and modeling intricate, continuous sequences of timestamped tracking events.

Amy Loutfi
Professor of Computer Science at Örebro University, Program Director for WASP

Amy Loutfi is a Professor in Computer Science at Örebro University and leads the research group AASS Machine Perception and Interaction Lab. She is also active in the programme management group for Wallenberg Autonomous Sensor Systems Programme in the AI branch. Amy received her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2006 with a research topic in machine perception. Specifically, she researched how gas sensors could be integrated onto robotic platforms and how these robots can interact with humans in order to solve a range of problems that require sensing and perception. She has since broadened her research interests to include general research directions within machine perception, where AI methods like machine learning are used for the interpretation of sensor data. She has also researched the area of Human Robot Interaction studying HRI in various platforms that include fully autonomous robots, but also teleoperated robots. She has a long experience working with the industry and the public sector on research projects dealing with AI, robotics and human-robot interaction.

In 2020, Amy was elected as a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences.

Fireside Chat

11:30 Thursday

30m

Panel: Careers in the age of generative AI

15:00 Thursday

45m

The rapid advancements in generative AI have thrust it into the forefront of technological discussions, sparking debates on its true impact. While some view it as an incremental step in AI development, others envision it as a transformative force threatening to reshape entire industries. In this panel, we aim to explore the potential implications of generative AI on the job market, job searches, and the evolution of career trajectories.

Zineb Senane
Machine Learning Engineer at Fever Energy

Zineb is a Machine Learning Engineer at Fever Energy, building data and ML forecasting pipelines. She holds a double MSc in Computer Science - Machine Learning from KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Télécom Paris. Zineb has done research work mainly focusing on time series representation learning and she has published and presented at KDD 2024.

TBD

13:00 Thursday

30m

Sophie Albrecht
Team Lead Data & Insights at Once Upon

Sophie is Head of Data and Insights at Once Upon. With a PhD in Public Health and a background in Psychology, she works with methods across the spectrum—from large-scale surveys to qualitative interviews and causal modeling. Passionate about connecting people and ideas, she focuses on making data impactful, approachable, and meaningful.

It’s a match! How qualitative approaches complement data in real-world contexts

14:30 Thursday

30m

Most of the data we use comes from humans doing things. Sophie (Data Science) and Diane (User Research) go over the spectrum of methods you can use to gain insights in a product context - from running computations on large datasets to talking to a handful of users in a coffee shop.

Diane Golay
User Researcher at Once Upon

Diane holds a Bachelor’s degree in Information Science, as well as a Master’s and PhD in Human-Computer Interaction. She has a passion for mixing methods and taking a creative approach to data collection. While her expertise lies in qualitative methods, she has also been exploring and expanding her skills in quantitative techniques.

It’s a match! How qualitative approaches complement data in real-world contexts

14:30 Thursday

30m

Dhiana Deva
Staff ML Engineer at EQT Group

Dhiana is an experienced Machine Learning Engineer from Brazil with a strong interest in building reliable and data-centric machine learning systems. As an undergrad researcher, 17 years ago, she worked on projects like using neural networks to aid tuberculosis diagnosis and detecting electrons at CERN. After stepping away from academia, she spent several years honing her skills in lean and agile engineering practices at consulting companies like Accenture and Thoughtworks. Later, Dhiana found herself back to neural networks at Spotify as a Senior Machine Learning Engineer and continued her tech leadership growth as a Staff Machine Learning Engineer at EQT.

Panel: Careers in the age of generative AI

15:00 Thursday

45m

Epicenter Stockholm

Malmskillnadsgatan 44a, 111 57 Stockholm, Stockholm

By signing up for a physical ticket you will be able to attend the event in person on March 13th at Epicenter, with a mingle after at a location that will be disclosed later. The number of physical tickets are however limited, and if you are unable to get one, please sign up for an online ticket. The streaming link and instructions on how to join will be sent to your email.

If you are sick on the day of the event, please join us online instead. We want everyone to be able to attend our events, so providing a great experience regardless of whether you join online or in person is a top priority!

Note that there is no need to sign up for both an in-person and an online ticket. Online tickets are unlimited and will be available throughout the event, so if you need to cancel your in-person ticket you will be able to then sign up for an online one instead.