From Ada Lovelace to Grace Hopper to thousands of Googlers, we're proud of the contributions women in technology have made across our industry. And we're excited by the contributions women continue to make today. Google supports and celebrates women in technology through numerous initiatives. International Women's Day is an important moment to recognize how women have influenced the tech industry and beyond.

Join us 10th March to celebrate International Women Day in a special Women Techmakers Event. 

Women Techmakers is Google's global program and brand for women in technology. Led by a global team of Googlers who are passionate about empowering women in technology through increased visibility, community, and resources.

We launched Women Techmakers in Galway September 2015 powered by Google Developers Group and we are proud to introduce a great list of speakers for the event:

Dr Vania Dimitrova is Associate Professor at the University of Leeds UK where she is a member of the Artificial Intelligence theme at the School of Computing, and Co-Director of the Leeds Research Centre in Digital Learning. Her research is in user-aware intelligent systems, focusing on knowledge-enriched user modelling and adaptation, crowd-wisdom, interactive data exploration, knowledge capture and ontological modelling. She has led research activities in several projects developing user-aware intelligent systems to augment human intellect, involving interdisciplinary partnerships with researchers from Education, Business, Psychology, Engineering and end users from industries (e.g. Ordnance Survey, Rolls Royce, SNCF, various SMEs) and charities (via LeedsACTS!). She has chaired premier international conferences on user modelling and intelligent learning environments, and has served as a member of the editorial boards of major journals in these areas (IEEE TLT, UMIAI, IJAIED).

Gosia Sokolowska is Site Reliability Engineer at Google.  She studied CS and also Control Engineering and Robotics in Poland then moved to Ireland after graduation. She has been at Google for almost 6 years now, on several teams: AdSense Policy, Search Quality and now as a Site Reliability Engineer on Spanner - Google's planet-scale distributed database system. She is also actively engaged in Google's diversity/inclusiveness efforts. Privately, a fitness enthusiast and a lacemaker.

Maricka Burke Keogh is Head of Digital Marketing at Altocloud and founder of OMIG, a business network for the West of Ireland. She was the winner of JCI Galway 'The Outstanding Young Person of the Year Award’ in 2013. She has also previously held positions with ad agency Atomic, IMS Marketing and Google. Over the years, Maricka has worked with large corporate brands ranging from GlaxoSmithKline, PaddyPower, Ladbrokes, and Unilever to working with organisations such as Fine Gael and Leinster Rugby. Based now in Galway, she is responsible for the Digital Marketing Strategy for Altocloud. Maricka's digital marketing specialities lie within the B2B sector for Medical Device, Engineering and ICTs (SaaS based models) sectors. 

Tracy Keogh is Programme Manager at Bank of Ireland's first incubator, Startlab. She is on the board of the Irish Internet Association and runs a number of startup events including co-founding Startup Hiking. 

Mary Loftus is firstly a learner. She spent the last 4 and-a-half years as an IT manager with Stiefel-GSK where she oversaw a €2m IT upgrade of a manufacturing facility. She has been a facilitator and developer of online learning with NUI Galway for the past 9 years, a mentor at CoderDojo Sligo the past 3 years. She is the mother of school-going children and has just completed a term a Primary School Board of Management. She's interested in creating spaces for learning and creativity where learners of all ages can access their deepest and truest potential for growth. She's also interested in spaces where women in IT can make connections and find ways to improve the culture in the industry for all.

All ladies are welcome for 3 hours of inspiring talks, great stories, useful career advice, networking, food and beverages.

Note: Men are welcome as +1's :)