E15 - Asma Trabelsi at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise

On our 15^th episode of our Women in Tech spin-off series, our Infrastructure & Cloud Consultant, Francesca Denoon was joined by Asma Trabelsi, Data Scientist at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. At Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, Asma focuses solely on Artificial Intelligence. When Asma’s not doing her day-to-day, she is a tutor who encourages young women to pursue a career in the technology space. Asma is a mother of 1 and is expecting her second very soon. She talks to us about how anything is possible if you have the determination and motivation to do it.

In 2018, Asma finished 8 years of higher education learning including a PhD in Computer Science and Machine Learning. In 2019, she had an interview with Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise and felt excited to work for a company with a century history of innovation. She got the job as a Data Scientist and has been with them ever since.

With such a huge background in education, it’s safe to say that it helped her tremendously to get where she is today. She took her bachelor’s degree in business computing. Being at the top of her class, lead her to the higher institute of management in Tunisia. She succeeded in her master’s degree and then finished her PhD in 2018. She published several scientific papers and travelled to different countries to present her papers and contributions at conferences. For Asma, public speaking was interesting for her because it allowed her to speak with the public to get new information and get critiques of other work.

Being a woman in the Networking space…

Being a woman in the industry isn’t a problem that has ever crossed her mind. She has always thought with hard work there is no reason someone can’t do the same as a man or even better. Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise is acknowledging and working with the teams to tackle gender equality. There is no discrimination regarding gender in their workplace and she personally has never felt or witnessed it there. They take gender equality very seriously and voice this through webinars and conferences.

Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise…

She is currently working on several Artificial Intelligence projects, for example, they have developed a chatbot for their HR team. This enables their employees to get and obtain answers to their questions anytime they need. Another project she is working on is adding a transcription to a collaboration tool to enable them to chat during video conferences, share screens and documents etc. She also supervises interns and promotes their work through publications at national and international conferences.

Her plans for the future are set into short-term and long-term goals. In the short term, she wants to get on learning new things and medium to long term wants to take on more managerial responsibilities with projects and teams.

To those young women who are considering a career in Networking, Asma says nothing will stop you from progressing in your career if you’re innovative enough and if you like what you do. She is a mother of one and is expecting another one soon and it never stopped her from succeeding in her career.

Tune in to this inspiring episode now!