Celebrating A New Chapter: Booz Allen’s Women in AI

Earlier this year at The Helix, Booz Allen’s Center for Innovation in Washington, DC, leaders in AI from across Booz Allen and industry partners took to the stage. They talked about their career paths, daily work, and the role AI will play as a catalyst for innovation across industries and its potential to reshape how we live and work. They also celebrated the recent rebrand of the company’s Women in Data Science group to Women in AI (WAI). It’s a gender-inclusive program for the personal and professional development of Booz Allen's employees, focusing on enhancing technical and leadership skillsets that advance AI competencies and technologies.

In honor of Women’s History Month, read on for highlights from the event, including the next steps in a new initiative with the Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Museum.

WAI’s three pillars of education, sponsorship, and social good were reflected throughout the conference’s activities.

The day started with a training session. Attendees learned how to migrate their data science workloads to the AWS cloud, a critical skill for enabling scalability, flexibility, and access to cutting-edge AI/machine learning (ML) tools, empowering participants to tackle more complex projects.

They gained more insights in an educational showcase from Booz Allen’s Project ResearcHER program. It supports the firm’s data scientists in presenting at conferences and submitting their work to academic journals. Participants learned about projects focused on automating drift detection, researching software self-repair functions, and comparing AutoML to human performance.

In other event sessions, data scientists presented their projects in The Incubator, WAI’s multiweek, gender-inclusive technical upskilling program. Two Incubator projects focused on Smithsonian research, while others involved generative AI and air quality.

In a fireside chat, leaders in the AI practice shared their experiences and advice. In a wide-ranging conversation, they talked about growing their technical expertise while cultivating leadership skills.

Executive Vice President John Larson, who heads Booz Allen’s AI practice, issued a call to action around the importance of mentorship. Given that AI’s impact will be as transformative as the development of electricity, “It’s incumbent on the leaders in AI to ensure that everyone will enjoy the economic opportunity.”

“This group was designed with a strong call to the mission: to help raise up more diverse talent around AI capability,” he said. “You all are the pathfinders. You’re the ones really leading the charge here.”

At the conference, digital strategy leaders from the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum joined the WAI planning team to launch a new initiative for social good: a hackathon using Smithsonian Open Access data.

Since 2020, Smithsonian Open Access has digitized millions of items and images for public use on a Creative Commons Zero license. In the WAI-Smithsonian hackathon, teams will work this spring to explore the following complex questions:

• How can the Smithsonian continue to be a trusted source while using AI to enhance its research and public engagement?
• How can the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum tell a story with this data?
• How can algorithms, models, and exploratory data analysis be used to identify and highlight women's contributions within the Smithsonian collections?

A panel of expert judges will review submissions throughout April, with awards presented at the Helix in May.

The hackathon builds on previous work by Booz Allen.

In 2022, a team of Booz Allen data scientists conducted a three-month pro bono project for the Smithsonian called Hidden Impacts.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, women played a significantly larger role than they’re currently given credit for in areas from botany and entomology to art and innovation. For example, in museum collections data, a woman’s name might be listed under her husband’s name or family member’s, and many women who participated in research projects or scientific expeditions can be hard to find in  official documentation.

While the millions of Smithsonian records with this information are too vast to sift through and cross-reference by hand, digitization and data science offer experts a new way to make connections across collections.

Recently, Booz Allen’s team used natural language processing (NLP) and graph analytics techniques to experiment with extracting the names of individual women from the Smithsonian’s collections and connect them to their contributions and fields of expertise.

“AI uncovers what’s really going on, like when credit hasn’t always been given to the right people,” says Senior Lead Data Scientist Melanie Laffin, who led Booz Allen’s original Hidden Impact project. “AI is good at finding hidden patterns and helping us see the actual truth.”