hackNY is excited to present: the Fall 2017 hackathon judges

Our fall 2017 student hackathon is a week away and we're excited to announce the judges who will be evaluating this fall's hacks! Check out our Devpost for more information on the hackathon!

Becky CaseVP of Engineering @ Birchbox About hackNY:"HackNY will always have a special place in my heart for the work they do – not only in creating an amazing program for interns, but also in their support for female engineers. Plus my favorite interns from the past five years have come from HackNY!"
Becky is the VP of Engineering, overseeing global technology, at Bonobos and OpenSky, as well as the multi-million­-dollar­-per-­day Zappos.com (and has a shoe collection that proves it!).

	Courteney ErvinSoftware Developer @ the NYPL About hackNY:"I love seeing what people create when they care passionately about the problems they’re solving."
Courteney Ervin works in the space where open source meets social good. She’s a developer at the New York Public Library, where she supports accessible literacy in the city and beyond.

Deborah EstrinProfessor of Computer Science @ Cornell Tech Deborah Estrin is a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech in New York City. She is founder of the Health Tech Hub in the Jacobs Institute and directs the Small Data Lab at Cornell Tech. She holds The Robert V. Tishman Founder's Chair and has recently taken on a leadership role as Associate Dean. Her current research focus is on mobile health and small data, leveraging the pervasiveness of mobile devices and digital interactions for health and life management (TEDMED). Estrin co-founded the non-profit startup, Open mHealth and sits on several scientific advisory boards for early stage mobile health startups.

Previously, Estrin was on the UCLA faculty where she was the Founding Director of the NSF Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), pioneering the development of mobile and wireless systems to collect and analyze real time data about the physical world. Her honors include: ACM Athena Lecture (2006), Anita Borg Institute's Women of Vision Award for Innovation (2007), The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007), The National Academy of Engineering (2009), The IEEE Internet Award (2017).

Jacqueline GaraventeInvestment Team @ Union Square Ventures About hackNY:“Hackathons serve as a reminder that many of the great projects in this sector are conceived without millions of dollars and hundreds of people. I'm looking forward to seeing what your brilliant ideas and coding skills will bring!”

Jacqueline Garavente joined Union Square Ventures in August 2016. She began her career in Artificial Intelligence at IBM Watson before moving to the NYC based startup, Dataminr. Her past areas of research include machine learning, application of open source data and the intersection of technology and economic development . She has been happily based in NYC with brief stints in Africa and LatAm. She graduated from New York University in 2013.

Shani OffenMachine Learning Chapter Lead @ Spotify About hackNY:“What struck me about my first hackathon was that it created a very intense community in a very short amount of time. It was fun and inspiring and I don't use those two words together in many contexts. It changed me in some way. It made me feel hopeful and excited about tech, and that feeling has helped me face the many things that are seriously messed up about the tech world, especially as a woman. I also loved the experience of getting so much done so quickly. It gave me a very gut-level understanding of what constitutes an mvp (minimum viable product), and how to build and iterate quickly, which has served me well ever since.”
Shani got her PhD in neuroscience from NYU in 2008, with a focus on computational vision. She has recently joined Spotify, where she leads a machine learning team in the quest to design a new era of awesome interactive audio ads. Before that, she served as director of data science at the online publisher About.com, where her team looked at data generated by O(10^9) sessions by O(10^8) visitors to O(10^6) articles on O(10^3) topics from O(10^2) countries over O(10^1) years. Her favorite algorithm is division, she is amused by superstitious pigeons, and she recommends fiction as a good way to expand your priors.

	Stephanie YangStaff Data Scientist @ Foursquare Stephanie is a mathematician and software developer with a passion for big data. She works on core location intelligence at Foursquare which connects mobile user experiences to the places people go. She joined Foursquare in 2014 after four years of quantitative finance where she wrote automated algorithms that traded futures contracts.
Before moving to New York, Stephanie earned her Ph.D in mathematics at Harvard and was a NSF Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Michigan. She worked for several years at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and she taught several classes in both English and Swedish. Stephanie spends her free time as a technical scuba diver and telemark skier.

Thank you again to all our wonderful judges. We're excited to see you all next weekend!
If you're curious about who else has judged our hackathons in the past, take a look at these posts from Spring 2017, Fall 2016, Spring 2016, and Fall 2015 (part 1 and part 2)