Barbara Judith Baena Zuniga           

Barbara Baena is an engineer in Computer Sciences. She works at Chief Information Office on IBM Mexico organization; as a manager, she is focusing on Scaling Artificial Intelligence with Watson services and other machine learning methodologies. Making sure her teams ALWAYS include female developers, data scientists, and architects on her teams. Defining a process to develop technical skills and soft skills on an accelerated path, making sure women can catch up with different expected skills on technical jobs (English, programming languages, leadership skills, soft skills).

Barbara transformed and led a group of women; called Diversity Network Group for IBM Mexico starting in 2008, during 2 years she created a network focusing on Career development, Woman health, and Work-life integration. With more than 6 initiatives Barbara inspire a group of women leaders to continue a grow the network to 800+ women in the company and the region.

Between 2012-2013; when Barbara collaborated on the Information Technology chamber in her state. She made a strategy to talk with IT companies at Guadalajara city to adopt best practices on Gender Equity (Equal pay, Lactancy room, work-life integration practices were the talking points); she was a key influencer between industry and government. Now Jalisco government has an equity department based on the collaboration with all chambers through the network that Barbara with other women built.

She led IBM Mexico Technical Community from 2015-2018 transforming into a collaborative team focused on generating Technical eminence on its members. She was appointed as an IBM Academy of Technology member in 2015 (She was the 2nd Mexican to get this recognition).

She is the Co-Funder Smart Cities Innovation Center with the University of Guadalajara in Nov 2011. The primary focus was to develop technical skills on women and men at the Ph.D. level with projects related to Mobile, Cloud, and analytics. Currently, Barbara is studying for her Information Technology Ph.D. at that Center.
Ph.D. site: http://dti.cucea.udg.mx/en/about%20us/mision-y-vision
Lab: http://cici.cucea.udg.mx/en/general-information

Her collaboration with academia started as a speaker and organizer of congresses. She has participated and shared her expertise with universities such as the University of Guadalajara, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara & Universidad del Valle de Atemajac to list the most representative Academia organizations in her region. In 2018 she also had a small collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

On a yearly basis, she continues to participate as a speaker, mentor, judge, coach on events as Talent Land, Digital Economy Show, Hackathons, Laboratoria.la, Tech Quiero.

For her future she visualizes herself leading an Artificial Intelligence lab in her company, opening the Guadalajara chapter on women-in-tech.org where we can be stronger by networking between the local organizations to develop women's technical skills, IEEE and Women In tech org.

She loves to travel around Mexico with her family. She enjoys walking in the forest and swimming.