Shannon is passionate about equity in tech, both from the technical and the societal perspectives. She has a background in Natural Language Processing (M.S.Computational Linguistics, University of Washington, Seattle) and Education (M.A. Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, California State University, Los Angeles). She has taught K-12 English Language Learners, built low-resource language Machine Translation systems for a DARPA-funded project, created an open-source Machine Translation pipeline as an Innovation Fellow with the NYC Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer, and founded a company focused on reducing gender bias in NLP training datasets through data augmentation.
Shannon’s work at CFA is centered around making systemic changes to the tech industry to increase equity. She is dedicated to building programs that support underrepresented students and connect them to quality jobs in technology, thereby creating a more diverse workforce that can design better technology solutions to serve everyone.