Omoju Miller

JupyterCon 2020 keynote speaker announcement

Omoju Miller is Technical Advisor to the CEO at GitHub, where she was previously a Senior Machine Learning Engineer. She has a PhD in computer science education from UC Berkeley and an MSc degree in Intelligent Systems from University of Memphis. While a PhD candidate, Omoju worked at Google, co-leading the non-profit computer science education portfolio and helping launch several initiatives, including Made with Code, a program aimed at increasing the participation of girls in computing. She was also member of a team that won a White House hackathon on data and education, the Education Datapalooza, and later had the opportunity to advise the Presidential Innovation Fellows initiative on aspects of diversity and inclusion.

In her first post at GitHub, she worked on building recommendation engines targeting developers’ engagement in open source projects. With a long-time interest in cognitive science and computational thinking, the allure of working with a data set of millions of interacting programmers drew her to GitHub. In her new role, she is no longer narrowly focused on machine learning and data products. Instead, she has a view encircling the end-to-end experience of users on a platform that serves over 40 million users and provides critical infrastructure.

As part of her doctoral work, Omoju developed HipHopathy, a learning module in data science and natural language processing using rap lyrics. She wanted to give cultural relevance to introductory computing for young learners and show them how data science and programming could be used to explore the rich content in this artistic form. The module was included as part of the on edX MOOC, The Beauty and Joy of Computing, which launched in 2015 with over 20,000 learners. In her dissertation, she investigated how this learning module impacted student retention or attrition, particularly affecting historically under-represented students. Her work has deep implications for the design of inclusive computational science courses.

“Computation is a broad thing, and it has enough room to accommodate every single person. […] Computation applied to any field enhances that field and takes that field to the next level,” declared Omoju in her TEDx San Francisco talk entitled: “The myth of innate ability in tech.” She invites us all to be part of the new revolution, changing the world around us with AI and data science. And she quashes the myth of innate ability saying that it’s something invented to make the privileged feel better and as a way to justify the lack of representation of certain groups in the field.Her story of growth in the tech world is proof, from her early years in Nigeria, then coming to Memphis, Tennessee as a teenager and enrolling in an accounting degree, only to be gripped by fascination with the internet. After switching her major to computer science, she took a class on Expert Systems, and the rest is history. She tells the story in her blog post, #20YearsACoder.

I met Omoju while on my sabbatical stay at UC Berkeley — introduced by her advisor, Prof. Alice Agogino — and we had a memorable long lunch filled with conversation. We shared our common interest in computational thinking and widespread educational achievements via computing in context. I have since then witnessed her meteoric rise in the world of technology, and cannot wait to see how far she will continue to fly. With her humble attitude and profound thinking, I’m sure the JupyterCon community is in for a treat with her keynote.