Francesca Bay

HERE'S TO STRONG WOMEN MAY WE KNOW THEM MAY WE BE THEM MAY WE PRAISE THEM See you in 2018 for more fascinating interviews with amazing women in the San Francisco Bay Area!

On the pastoral campus of the University of California Santa Cruz, Professor Marilyn Walker is a force behind the burgeoning major of Artificial Intelligence. In fact her face, thirty feet tall, graces the wall of the International boarding terminal at San Jose International Airport as she screen writes formulas. It also dots areas around the campus itself. Clearly, there’s a new Marilyn in town. By Kimberly Wainscoat Professor Marilyn Walker We spoke at her picturesque home on the campus, where she is a tenured, Ivy and Stanford educated professor. As an early pioneer in Palo Alto technology companies such as Hewlett Packard and AT&T Bell Labs, Marilyn is also a sought after consultant in the booming area of Artificial Intelligence. Her body of work includes statistical methods for dialog optimization and expressive generation for dialog. To the layperson, think Alexa, Siri or Ok Google. Simply put, she is helping to lead the way for informative human-computer conversat...

It's summer! We are home with the kids! But more fascinating women coming this way soon!

Onstage , Brazilian jazz musician Claudia Villela is not just brave, she is well known for her willingness to go anywhere with her voice. Based in the Bay Area, Claudia lights up stages all over the country and abroad. We caught up with her at Kuumbwa Jazz in Santa Cruz and had the honor of toasting her brilliant talent with her very first dry martini. FrancescaBay: Claudia, the New York Times has described your voice as “Remarkable, beautiful, towering,” the Boston Globe has described you as “An extraordinary singer in any context,” Jazz Times has described you as, “A female Bobby McFerrin." Stylistically, your voice encompasses samba, bossa nova, jazz, scat and beyond. It is one of the most original voices in Brazilian Jazz. Where did you get this voice? CLAUDIA: My father gave me a pianola when I was one year old and my mother was always singing. My father played the harmonica, too. I went to piano lessons when I was five years old and I didn’t last long at al...

Wati Grossman The San Francisco Fashion Designer dishes on life, millennials, motherhood, and modern fashion In its heyday,  Wati Design  could be found in children’s boutiques around the globe. It was one of the few American brands that matched the stunning collections of European children’s clothing, with its rich pigments and beautiful silks and velvets trimmed with intricate embroidery. Mothers lamented that Wati did not design for them, that their girls would soon grow out of the lavish outfits, many of which have been passed along to siblings, cousins and friends. After ten years and her own children nearly grown, Wati has shuttered her children’s line and, much to our excitement, has launched a women’s capsule collection. Wati was brought up by intellectual Indonesian émigrés in Melbourne, Australia, where she and her identical twin sister Yanti attended law school before following their dreams. For Wati, that meant leaving behind the security of a law ca...