Carole Bourassa, a sexagenarian in tech who turns to artificial intelligence
Have you ever heard of a woman in tech with a career spanning over 50 years?
If you read this blog, you know that women in technology are few and far between. But you probably also know that twice as many women leave the industry as men. That’s why it’s rare to find a woman in the industry with 30 years’ experience. It’s very, very rare. That’s why I was all the happier to meet Carole Bourassa, a pioneer of Quebec’s technology industry, who after many years working in the industry doesn’t see herself hanging up her keyboard at all. Quite the contrary, in fact!
Carole Bourassa has always loved mathematics. As far back as I can remember, maths has always interested me. I don’t know where I got it from, probably a little from my father, an excellent accountant, but also from my mother, who had a flair for business.”
Her passion for the subject did not disappear in her teens, as she obtained a record mark of 100% in her mathematics exams in her final year of high school. By the 70s, her path was clear: she was off to the Université de Montréal!
In her third year of university, short of money, Carole finds herself having to find a full-time job. “I’ll go to work for a little while and then I’ll go back to school”, she thought, but she didn’t even need to put her courses on hold, a miracle happened. A professor, noticing her passion for mathematics, offered her a job at what was then known as the Centre de Calcul de l’Université de Montréal, and her tuition fees were covered. She was hired as a programmer analyst. She had no idea what the job entailed, and had never worked in computers before. You’ll do fine,” she is told.
“It was crazy for over seven years working and studying at the same time. I often slept in her cubicle because I finished very late and started my work very early. It was an extraordinary experience,” she recalls. With her bachelor’s degrees in computer science, mathematics and physics, she found herself teaching computer science at university for a while. Then IBM offered her a job, which she turned down to go and work for the then Ministry of Social Affairs, which was looking to deploy a computer network throughout Quebec. She put into practice everything she had learned at university.
The years go by and so do the jobs, sometimes salaried and sometimes entrepreneurial, but always in IT, yet her love of mathematics has never really left her. It’s 2018 and Carole has been observing for some time a technological field that has changed all our lives: artificial intelligence (AI). On closer inspection, she realizes that the basis of AI is mathematics. So she decided to take a course at Mila, Montreal’s artificial intelligence institute. She met Yoshua Bengio, who suggested she continue her learning by reading the book he co-wrote, Deep Learning. Two months later, she finished it and decided to enroll at Stanford University to obtain a certificate in deep learning.
Today, Carole has become a consultant specializing in artificial intelligence. She wants to work on applications to help companies with their human resources, business development and other challenges.
At the end of our conversation, I ask her if she’s thinking of retiring at some point. She replies: “What’s retirement? Is that a real word? [laughs] Why should I retire? My brain’s working perfectly and I’m having fun. Why should I stop doing that?
Photo credit: Mikael Theimer at Gsoft
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