My Week at TechEX: Lucrecia Kim-Boswell from Stanford University

Kim-Boswell: Gosh, it’s hard to limit to a single session or speaker. I have so much respect and admiration for other speakers in the Cloud Technology track. 

I am interested in hearing what the amazing Kari Robertson (along with James Monek, Damian Doyle, and Bob Flynn) has to say at Where in the Cloud Are We? A Facilitated Discussion About the State of Cloud in Research and Education at 2:40 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 11. I’ll also sit in to see Ben Rota and Al Paceco from Harvard University present Migrating Cloud-Resistant Workloads at 10:20 a.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 10.

Additionally, I look forward to hearing from speakers that I have not met or heard from. For example, Eric Person’s talk, Navigating the Cloud: Aligning Essential Roles for Successful Data Center Exit at UCOP, at 2:40 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 10, is especially interesting since that is the world I live in now.

Kim-Boswell: I am intrigued by the idea that there will be other topics outside of my own area of expertise that I will be available to attend. 

I will likely pop in on one of Heather Flanagan’s two sessions on the Identity & Access Management track — Looking Past the Person: Non-Human Identities in Academia at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 10, and Navigating the Future of Browser-Mediated Federated Identity at 8 a.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 11. 

Most of it will go over my head, but Heather has a special way of translating “geek” to human. Heather is someone that I worked with early in my career and was a great mentor and influencer to me. It will be great to see her again after all these years. 

Kim-Boswell: AI, of course! I signed up right away for the Azure Open AI workshop (opens in a new window) during registration.

In my role at Stanford, my team helps the campus community access services from our cloud service providers. We have seen a large uptick in requests for Azure and the use of Azure OpenAI.

I am looking to learn more about using Azure Open AI to support the Stanford community. I also plan on attending the other AI sessions in the Cloud Technology track — Artificial Intelligence as a Service and Generative AI for All: An Open Source GenAI Platform for Your Campus Community on Dec. 11 — and the poster session Democratizing AI in Education: Vocareum’s LLM Gateway on Dec. 11.

Kim-Boswell: I’m really looking forward to the 5K Walk/Run at 6:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 11. Being from California, I hopefully won’t turn into an icicle and will be dressed appropriately for doing a 5K run in Boston in December.