Lara Babarinsa is the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Program Manager for Intel Labs.
Highlights:
- There are many outstanding women at Intel Labs, and in honor of International Women’s Day, we would like to highlight just a few of those women and their recent achievements.
The Women @ Intel Labs (WIL) program was founded in March 2021 with a long-term goal to provide support, mentorship, networking, career growth, and development opportunities for women in technology. Led by Lenitra Durham and Nicole Beckage, the group strives to make Intel Labs a place where women thrive equitably and can be authentically themselves.
As part of Intel’s 2030 RISE Goals, the company aims to significantly increase the representation of women in technical positions and double the number of women and underrepresented minorities in senior leadership roles. We believe that one of the necessities required to make this reality is to create an environment in which women support and celebrate one another.
Women deliver nuanced views and unique problem-solving skills to dynamic scenarios and drive collaborative efforts in all areas of technology. Our hardworking female researchers here at Intel Labs are constantly contributing to breakthrough technologies, and in honor of International Women’s Day, we would like to highlight just a few of those women and their recent achievements.
Debabani Choudhury is a Principal Engineer with Intel Labs, where she directs research and development on platform integration and RF/mmWave/sub-THz technologies/architectures for next-generation Intel Platforms. In 2023, Choudhury published an invited paper and served as a plenary speaker at the IEEE CODEC Conference. She served as organizer and moderator for an NTN panel at the IEEE MAPCON-2023 Conference. She also published an article on Connected Future to Issue 5 of the IEEE Microwave Magazine and was invited to be a speaker and mentor at 2023 IEEE AP-S Young Professional Career Development and Growth Conversations. Furthermore, at the IEEE IMS2023 conference, Choudhury served as the Session Chair, Technical Paper Review Committee (TPRC) Member, Steering Committee Member, and Chair of the Connected Future Summit. She served as TPRC member for European Microwave Conference, EuMC2023. Choudhury is an IEEE Fellow and holds multiple leadership positions within IEEE.
Eda Okur Kavil is an AI Research Scientist at Intel Labs. Kavil has been recently nominated for the Women in Machine Learning (WiML) Board of Directors and elected to the NeurIPS Liaison role in 2024. She has participated regularly in the WiML workshops at NeurIPS since 2017 and served as an Organizer & Chair for the 18th WiML Workshop @ NeurIPS 2023. She also published several main track & workshop papers at LREC, EMNLP, ACL, ICML, and NeurIPS in the last two years.
Elizabeth Watkins is a Research Scientist in the Social Science of AI at Intel Labs Intelligent Systems Research and a member of Intel's Responsible AI Advisory Council. Last year, Watkins served on the MIT Sloan Management Review Responsible AI Panel of Experts and was invited to return in 2024. Her co-authored paper was awarded an Honorable Mention for Best Paper at the 2023 Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conference. Watkins co-organized a workshop on Human-Centered Explainable AI at the CHI conference in 2022 and 2023 and is co-organizing the event again in 2024. Additionally, this year Watkins was invited to join the editorial board of the Medium publication, Human-Centered AI and to speak at the upcoming Conference Board event, “Change, Transformation, and Organization Design: Thrive Amid the Next Disruption” on the panel “How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Enterprises and What’s Ahead.”
Huijing Gong works as a Research Scientist at Intel Labs. Over the past few years, Gong has been working on several projects focusing on homomorphic encryption, spanning application, security, and contribution to the DARPA DPRIVE project, as well as post-quantum cryptography. Her work was published at various conferences, including CRYPTO 2023, WAHC 2023, GOMACTECH in 2023 and 2024, and the 2024 FHE.org conference. Since 2021, Gong has led a project to establish up-to-date security guidelines for implementing fully homomorphic encryption. This initiative involves collaboration with researchers from academia and industry worldwide and is nearing completion, with the guidelines set to be released in March 2024. Gong will deliver a talk at the 2024 FHE.org conference detailing security guidelines for implementing homomorphic encryption.
Ilke Demir is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Intel Labs working on topics in deepfakes, adversarial protection, 3D vision, computational geometry, and generative models. Throughout 2023, Demir gave over 35 press interviews, podcasts, and briefings about topics including Trusted Media, deepfakes, synthetic content, and generative AI, which were featured in venues such as The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, TechChannel podcast, MIT Tech Review, and more. Demir also gave invited talks, keynotes, and lectures at Duke University, Wayne State College, MIT EmTech, Montana State University, MIT Horizon, Visual 1st, Infinity Festival, and the Women in Computer Vision Workshop at CVPR 2023. Additionally, Demir served as an Area Chair for ICCV 2023, WACV 2024, BMVC 2024, and ECCV 2024.
Jesmin Jahan Tithi is an AI research scientist at Intel Labs. Jesmin is a task lead for the IARPA AGILE project. In 2023, Tithi served as a program committee at SC 2023, and also as an ACM Judge at ISEF 2023. This year, she has been a member of the program committee at ISC 2024 and ALENEX 2024 and will serve as a co-chair of the ACM ISEF committee 2024. Jesmin is also an active member of the ACM COPE (code of professional ethics) Board. She has recently published papers at several events and publications, including the IEEE Micro Journal, Digital Society Journal, 37th IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium, and IEEE ISPASS 2023. Jesmin has also filed seven patents in the last year.
Lenitra Durham is a Senior Software Research Engineer/Scientist at Intel Labs. She currently co-chairs Women at Intel Labs and is part of the Intel Labs DEI&B (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging) council. Her passion is architecting and prototyping solutions combining user experience (UX) research with artificial intelligence (AI), validating the solutions in real-world environments. She has 114 patents granted worldwide and has authored several publications in international conferences and journals. Dr. Durham is the technical lead on the Intel Labs Kid Space project published in 2023 in the British Journal of Educational Technology (BJET) a top tier educational technology research journal and shown in the BETT 2023 Show.
Mona Vij is a Senior Principal Engineer and Cloud and Data Center Security Research Manager at Intel Labs. Recently, Vij joined a podcast on Securing Applicating with Gramine, and was invited to give talks on pervasive confidential computing at several venues, including the 2023 Confidential Computing Summit, the New Software Abstractions for Hardware Security Technology Workshop, and the upcoming 20-year anniversary celebration of the ETH Information Security Center. In 2023, she also published papers at two security events, as well as a blog on Providing End-to-End Data Protection for AI/HPC/HPDA Workloads on Intel Communities. Meanwhile, Vij served on several program committees, including the AISCC Workshop, SysTex 2023, WORDS 2023, the Confidential Computing Summit and OC3 in both 2023 and 2024.
Mozhgan Mansuri is a Principal Engineer and leads Discrete Photonics Signaling Research Team with the PHY Research Laboratory within Intel Labs. In 2023, she served as a member of the ISSCC wireline subcommittee and chair of the CICC wireline subcommittee. At the 2024 ISSCC conference, she and her team submitted a paper and demonstration of a VCSEL-based optical transmitter which achieves 13% higher data rate with 25× better energy efficiency than the BiCMOS design. In addition to the paper, she organized an ISSCC forum on the topic “Toward next generation of highly integrated electrical and optical transceivers,” in which the speakers presented perspectives on challenges and innovation opportunities for enabling next generation of transceivers for big data applications.
Nesime Tatbul is a Senior Research Scientist at Intel Labs working on data systems and serving as Intel's lead PI for MIT DSAIL. In 2023, Tatbul was named an ACM Distinguished Member for her foundational scientific contributions in streaming data systems and time series analytics as well as an IEEE Senior Member. She co-authored five publications on learned and composable databases at VLDB 2023 along with receiving a Distinguished Associate Editor Award. She gave several invited talks in 2023 on improving data systems through ML and observability, including at Intel Innovation and PrestoCon. Her current community leadership roles include: elected member of the VLDB Endowment Board of Trustees, Editor in Chief for The VLDB Journal and PVLDB
2024-2025, VLDB 2024 Industrial Track Co-Chair, and PC Co-Chair for ACM SIGMOD Data Management on New Hardware Workshop (2023-2024).
Nicole Beckage works as an AI Research Scientist at Intel Labs. She works on algorithms design for social science systems and is currently working on how to improve the greenness of large deep neural network workloads and, separately, large language models for teaching and instruction. She serves as the co-chair for Women at Intel Labs. In 2023 she published a paper on carbon-efficient algorithms and was invited to speak on this topic at Verge. She previously was a professor at the University of Kansas and left this position to join Intel Labs. She has published multiple papers in a variety of fields including psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, computer science, and aerospace engineering.
Poornima Lalwaney leads research in Systems architecture for Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) at Intel Labs. The ability to compute directly on encrypted data is a big research and prototyping effort in Intel Labs across several teams. Poornima leads the end-to-end systems architecture, simulation and emulation for the Intel® HERACLES accelerator. To cover five orders of magnitude in performance improvement over CPU’s and GPU’s, required the team to design a new computer architecture and programming model to efficiently run FHE operations to enable direct computations on ciphertexts. In 2023 and 2024 Lalwaney and her team presented papers on the System design, software and performance of the Intel® HERACLES platform published at GOMACTech.
Srikathyayani Srikanteswara is a Principal Engineer at Intel Labs, where she leads research on Secure Intelligent Networking for the future. She has also led work in dynamic orchestration and in-network computing using Information Centric Networking that is being used by the BUs with Federal Customers. Over the last few years, Srikanteswara has served as an associate editor for the IEEE Communications Magazine and as a member of the Technical Program Committee (TPC) for the 2023 ACM/IEEE Symposium on Edge Computing. Additionally, she has papers accepted at IEEE WCNC 2023, IEEE VTC 2023, and the MDPI Sensors Journal, 2024. Srikanteswara has also filed 86 invention disclosures, most of which have been granted.
Subarna Tripathi is a Research Scientist at Intel Labs working in computer vision and machine learning. She leads Visual Algorithms Research on
long-form video representation learning. In 2023, Tripathi was invited to speak at several venues, including the “Beyond Tomorrow: AI’s impact on the workforce” conference at UC Berkeley; a “Deep Learning” graduate course at University of Catania; and career day in CSE 252A at UC San Diego. This year, Tripathi will serve as a panelist at the Women of color panel, which will be hosted at California State University San Marcos in March. Tripathi also serves as Intel’s Center Lead Liaison for JUMP2.0 COCOSYS. In the last two years, she published works at CVPR, ECCV, NeurIPS, WACV.
Vasantha Srirambhatla is a Research Manager in Silicon and Systems Prototyping Lab at Intel Labs. She leads the System on Chip Architecture, SOC design and execution of Intel® HERACLES, one of the largest SOC’s in Intel Labs. In 2023 and 2024 Srirambhatla and her team presented papers on the SOC design and performance of Intel® HERACLES platform published at GOMACTech.
Vy Vo is a Research Scientist in the Brain-Inspired Computing Lab, and her work focuses on language models and models of memory in machine learning. Last year, Vo served as a discussion panelist at LLM Day at the Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (KDD) 2023 conference, alongside industry professionals from Google, Microsoft, and Meta. She also published a paper with academic collaborators on multimodal foundation models that can predict human brain responses across language and vision at NeurIPS 2023.
Wen Wang is a Research Scientist in the Privacy Technologies Research Lab. She works on the FHE accelerator project spanning formal verification of the compute engine, development of the Instruction Set Architecture, and the Software Development Kit (SDK) for FHE. In the last year, Wang had several joint works on the Intel® HERACLES platform published at various conferences, including WAHC, DAC, and GOMACTech. She also served as a panel co-chair and PhD committee judge for HOST 2023, as a program committee member for numerous events – ISCA 2024, SAC 2023, and ICCAD 2023, among others – and a co-organizer for a special session on Provably-Correct Hardware Design at DAC 2023. In addition to her service within the community, Wang also delivered an invited talk on the Intel Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) accelerator at the Yale EE seminar.
Yi Zhang is a Research Scientist at Intel Labs. Her work concentrates on Wireless Communications, Network orchestration by using Information Centric Networks, Network Security and Edge Computing. In recent years, Zhang has made numerous contributions to 3GPP, a project to unite seven telecom standard development organizations to produce reports and specifications for mobile technologies. Additionally, she has served as associated editor for IEEE Internet of Things Magazine since 2021 and is serving as Technical Program Committee member for IEEE VTC 2024. She has accepted papers at IEEE WCNC 2023, IEEE VTC 2023, and the MDPI Sensors Journal 2024. Zhang also filed 82 invention disclosures and has over 20 published works at various conferences and in several journals.
Zhen Zhou is a Senior Research Scientist at Intel Labs\IDP\RF Platform Technology Lab and she is a senior member of IEEE. She served as IEEE Communication Society Communication Magazine guest editor from 2021 to 2023. In 2023, Zhou submitted an invited paper at IEEE JSSC detailing a new wireless transceiver for FDD wireless networks and short-range multicast applications. She also delivered an invited talk at the Virginia Tech ECE Multifunctional Integrated Circuits & Systems Research Center. Zhou has also served as co-chair of ISQED Cognitive Computing Hardware TCP since 2020, and as a tutorial chair at ISQED 2024. Zhou holds more than 32 patents and more than 40 journal and conference publications.
Read more about the amazing women at Intel:
Women's History Month: Meet the Women Innovating New Technologies at Intel Labs
Meet the Women at Intel Making Their Names in Thermal Engineering, Logic Design and NLP
How Black Women Inspire the Next Generation in STEM
Why More Women in Tech is Key to Innovation
Women at Intel Labs (WIL) Strives for Connection in a Remote World