Thank You Alliance Members

We would like to thank NEW North for their ongoing support as an Executive Level investor, as well as Secura for their support as a Strategic Level investor. To learn more about NEW North or Secura, click on their names. 

Alliance News:

Happy May! The weather is finally turning warmer, the days are growing longer, and the leaves are starting to spring out on the trees.

May is also the start of graduation season. So, we’d like to congratulate all high school seniors and college students who are graduating this month and next. One college senior in particular is our NEW Digital Alliance intern, Madi Hilmershausen. Madi joined the Alliance in October of 2020 as our Digital Communication, PR, and Marketing Intern. In addition to managing social media and PR, she’s done all our graphic design work over the past two years, mentored our high school intern, and so much more. THANK YOU, Madi for all of your help! We wish you the best of luck as you enter the job market following graduation.

In addition to preparing for graduation, many high school students are busy taking their AP exams during the month of May. These exams allow high school students to earn college credit for coursework completed while in high school. The exams are a couple of hours in length, and for certain courses may be broken into two parts taken over the course of a couple of days. Thank you to all the teachers who have helped prepare the students for the exams, and good luck to everyone taking an AP exam.

On May 4, the Alliance held our regional NEW CS Advisory Board meeting. We had a great turn out of schools and local business leaders who joined us to learn about AI (Artificial Intelligence) and what school districts should be thinking about to prepare students to work alongside this technology. Our guest speaker, Fred Barrionuevo, Emerging Technology and AI Lead at Impact Networking shared his thoughts on the topic. While we set aside 30 minutes for the presentation and 30 minutes for discussion, we needed to stop the dialogue after a little over an hour so we could wrap up the meeting! As a result, Fred was unable to complete his presentation so we may need to invite him back. Fred covered the skills he thinks are most critical for working with data – being able to read data, work with data, analyze data, and argue with data. Depending on a person’s role in the organization will determine the level of data skills they will needed, but everyone will need some level of data understanding. He then shared how data feeds into artificial intelligence systems that local organizations are using. AI is being used more and more in companies, including in manufacturing where it is being leveraged to help determine when to take a machine down for maintenance. Teachers and district leaders walked away with a good idea of the skills they need to teach, industries using AI, and some of the jobs that develop and maintain AI, as well as the higher education programs and requirements to get into those roles.

Dates to know

May 7: World Password Day

May 13: Day of AI (https://www.dayofai.org/)

May 24: Northeast Wisconsin Computer Science Celebration

June 16: Cybersecurity Roundtable

We look forward to sharing the positive impact we are making in the year to come.

Join us to help make a difference in Northeast Wisconsin.