Inspiring future health innovators: Girls Go Circular program

For its 4th edition, the Girls Go Circular program of this year focused on women in AI : Driving Empowerment and Innovation.   

As a sponsor of the event under the framework of its upskilling partnership with AWS, the WorkInHealth Foundation traveled to Budapest on October 10th to participate in the event. As a representative, our Program Manager Urška Bux had the opportunity to present WorkInHealth and its activities to an audience of interested and motivated young women, highlighting programs such as the FutureHealthHERo initiative, where we are tackling the image, talent and skills gap in healthcare, inviting women to join in, too.  

From its start, the aim of the Girls Go Circular program via the EIT initiative has been to encourage young women across Europe to develop skills in the digital and circular economy. Sadly, still under-represented in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Girls Go Circular aims to promote gender equality in these sectors. The main idea is to empower girls to develop digital & entrepreneurial skills. Through its actions and program, Girls Go Circular has enabled more than 40,000 schoolgirls aged 14 to 19 across Europe to acquire digital and entrepreneurial skills in just 3 years.  

Women Got Talent  

This year, the finale and the winnHER reveal of the Girls Go Circular Student Challenge 2024 was held during the event. The aim of this year’s challenge was to develop participants’ knowledge of AI, push their creativity to the limit and boost their problem-solving skills. For this challenge, the participants were asked to come up with an idea for an AI tool to help reduce inequalities between men and women in the field of their choice (education, employment, science, etc.) and to present it in front of a jury and the previous years’ winner of the challenge : Antonia Ciappara from the Rocky CO2 team.  
We can congratulate Sophie and Ikran of the Finland and Italy team, for their project “On Her Care” which won the challenge.  
Their project started from a simple observation: women, especially ones of racial and ethnic minority, are 20 to 30 percent more likely to be misdiagnosed. They both imagine an AI tool capable of centralizing the information needed to understand or treat a diagnosis through: Only focusing on women’s specificities, combining existing, similar test results, diagnosing by recognizing the pattern of symptoms, and by continuously updating the app with new medical research. 

WiH and AWS: Proud Sponsor of the Audience Choice Award  

During the event, we also had the opportunity to present the Audience Choice Award, decided by more than 7,400 voters. Thanks to this award, we encouraged girls to transform from dreamers into do-ers by bringing their ideas into reality. The winner was gifted 6000 USD Cloud Credits sponsored by Amazon Web Services (AWS). A special thank you to the AWS team for working with us on this project.  

This collaboration has created greater synergy and enabled the amplification of the impact that we can achieve together.  
We can congratulate the winning team Equalife, and their members: Teodora Radičev, Staša Aleksić and Majda Mandić from Serbia, who have also created an AI tool capable of making a diagnosis by understating the symptoms without taking gender into account.  
The teams in 2nd and 3rd place were also awarded 2000 USD in Cloud Credits each. 

Our Partnership  

This event was also an opportunity for us to officially present our new partnership with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform for the first time. This collaboration was set up to combine our resources, strengths, and ultimately, close the gap between available talent and the expectations of the medical sector. Thanks to AWS, you can have access for free to more than 400 courses on different subjects for beginners.  
You can find more information about our partnership in our new press release !  

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