I would like to nominate Ms. Ashmi Banerjee, for the Emerging Talent Award because of her exemplary achievements in academic (professional) as well as extra-curricular (volunteering) activities at such a young age. Her achievements have been listed below. Background Ashmi was born and brought up in the city of Kolkata, India. She later defied all odds (financial and logistical) and moved to Munich to pursue her master’s in Computer Science. She is the first in her family to pursue a degree from outside India as well as the only master’s degree holder. Current Position Ashmi is currently employed as a Data Scientist at Deutsche Telekom, Germany. She is also an incoming doctoral student at the Department of Informatics (Computer Science) at Technical University of Munich beginning September 2022. Academic/Professional Experiences – Ashmi graduated from the Technical University of Munich with a Master’s degree in Computer Science and a major in Artificial Intelligence. – She has been a top scoring student during both her undergraduate (ranked 3/150 students) and graduate studies (top 1.5%). – Two times Best Outgoing Student Award winner: Tata Consultancy Services Best (Outgoing) Student Award 2016 in recognition of the academic excellence, as adjudged by the institute. Awards are presented to best students of 100 high-ranking engineering institutes across India. – Best Overall Performance Award 2016 from Heritage Institute of Technology (all departments combined) in recognition of the academic and extra-curricular excellence as adjudged by the institute. – Her experience in Computer Science have been bolstered through her prior experiences at Deutsche Telekom, Max Planck Institute of Software Systems, and Indian Statistical Institute where she worked on various Data Science, Artificial Intelligence or Software engineering related projects. – Works based on parts of her master’s thesis written in collaboration with Max Planck Institute of Software Systems and Technical University of Munich was published in top tier conferences such as RecSys 2020, FILA 2020 etc. – While working at Deutsche Telekom, Ashmi developed her own product-idea of a low-cost and energy-efficient bike-tracking solution using a combination of the Telekom Nu-sim and Narrowband-IoT to provide a location-accuracy up to 5metres and a battery-life of 1 year. The project was selected as a promising idea within Deutsche Telekom for their Lean-Innovation (Incubation) Scholarship Program and also received an initial internal funding for prototyping. – Ashmi was a student-contributor in the educational project MOVE-II (Munich-Orbital-Verification-Experiment), at her university. She contributed in building a CubeSat which was launched in space with a SpaceX rocket. – Proud recipient of multiple scholarships for her research and travels – Nominee for Inspiring Fifty Europe 2022 which honours top 50 influential women in tech. – Grace Hoppers Down Under Travel grant 2019 to attend Hoppers Down Under celebrations 2019 – Google Women Techmakers and Firebase Travel Grant to attend Firebase Summit 2018, in Prague – Informatics Forum Frauen (IFF) Gender and Diversity Grant from Technical University of Munich to attend European Women in Technology conference in 2018. – She also has a B2 Certificate in German language from Goethe Institut e.V. – Featured multiple times in the local media and newspapers in India for her curricular and extra-curricular activities – e.g. https://www.telegraphindia.com/education/you-scholarship/cid/1441077 Social Impact/Volunteering: – As a Google Women Techmakers (WTM) Ambassador and a diversity enthusiast, she is passionate about bridging the gender gap in STEM through a myriad of voluntary activities with different women in STEM networks like Female Tech Leaders (FTL), Women Who Code (WWC), Women in CS at TUM (IFF), Anita Borg’s Indian Women in Computing (IWiC) etc. – Speaker at top conferences such as the Pycon Portugal 2022 (upcoming in Sept 2022), WeAreDevelopers 2022 in Berlin, European Women in Technology Conference 2022, in Amsterdam, Women Who Code (WWC) Connect Recharge 2022 & BlockDataPy 2022, Google Developers’ Students Club (ETH Zurich) etc. – Invited as a panelist at the following events: – Anita Borg’s Indian Women in Computing (IWiC) event in July 2022 to talk about volunteering – a way of giving back to the community – Anita Borg’s Indian Women in Computing (IWiC) event: “Passport to Europe on Student visa” in July 2021 – to talk about her journey to Europe – Nokia, Our Greenhouse, Munich 2018: to speak about under-representation of women in tech at Nokia’s exclusive annual Greenhouse event in Munich, Germany. Was the youngest and only student in the panel. – Invited to record podcasts, instagram lives, conduct technical workshops etc. to share her story with the community – She is also experienced in organising a variety of events (both in-person and virtual) focused on Women in Tech as a part of the Female Tech Leaders (FTL) hackathons team. – She mentored a female candidate to develop an application using Python as a part of the Learn IT Girl program and also served as the Chairperson of the ACM Students’ chapter of her institution for a handful of years, organising tech events, talks etc. – Ashmi has always been enthusiastic about tech and automating mundane activities using technology. She also shares her knowledge in tech with the community through her blogs. – Ashmi co-founded Arohann, during the second wave of the pandemic, to help provide relief during these unprecedented times by collating and maintaining a comprehensive pool of Covid-related leads and resources, as well as to provide voluntary assistance in verifying and connecting to those leads. She developed the website for the same and hosted it here: Arohann | Home (arohann-f7c68.firebaseapp.com). – She also worked as a part time teacher for the under-privileged children of the red-light area workers of Kolkata through S.B. Devi Charity Home, an NGO based in Kolkata, India. She taught them Math, Science, English and Social Sciences to children in primary school. When not sitting in front of her computer, she can be found either travelling or training to be a triathlete. You can find more information about her here: https://ashmibanerjee.com/