Join us for a special Cup of Joe conversation featuring Oscar Aguilar, founder of Novel Minds, a Wisconsin-based technology consulting firm focused on innovation, strategic leadership, and custom technology solutions. Oscar will share his entrepreneurial journey—from building a business around problem-solving and technology to helping organizations turn ideas into action. We'll explore the challenges, lessons learned, pivotal decisions, and opportunities that have shaped his path. As always, Cup of Joe is an authentic conversation between entrepreneurs—no presentations, no scripts, just real stories from the trenches.
As a woman with over 10 years of experience in the highly male-dominated engineering world, I wish to share insights that have helped me stay. This field is, at times, unwelcoming or even outright hostile. A key to my success has been developing business acumen, sometimes learned through entrepreneurial events including Forward Fest! Key topics:
• Why gender bias is so sticky in fields like engineering and law, and why we can't expect to solve this problem with more pipeline
• How to get past broken rungs in the corporate ladder by thinking of yourself as if you were a one-person business
• Develop your personal brand to bounce back from setbacks such as non-inclusive workspaces, gatekeepers, or reframe inappropriate attention.
Today’s workforce is more diverse than ever before, with six generations working side by side, each bringing unique perspectives, experiences, and relationships with technology. While this diversity creates incredible opportunities for innovation and growth, it also introduces real challenges, especially when organizations are implementing new tools, systems, or digital strategies.
Bridging Generations at Work is a dynamic, beginner-friendly session designed to help leaders, entrepreneurs, and professionals successfully navigate generational differences while driving meaningful progress through technology. This session will explore how communication styles, expectations, and comfort with technology vary across generations, and how these differences can either hinder or accelerate success.
Attendees will gain practical strategies for leading multigenerational teams, fostering collaboration, and implementing technology initiatives in a way that brings people together rather than creating friction. We’ll also explore the power of mentorship (including reverse mentorship), inclusive leadership, and cross-generational collaboration as key drivers of innovation.
Whether you're leading a startup, scaling a business, or managing a growing team, this session will equip you with actionable tools to strengthen your workforce, improve adoption of new ideas, and unlock the full potential of your team.
Agentic AI UW is a new club founded just this April. The purpose of the club is that there's a missing opportunity on campus. There are a lot of engineering clubs on campus that focuses on a single project where a team of engineers work together. However, UW-Madison lacks that kind of project-based clubs for CS students. We're at a turning point in history where three things converge into one, the massive amount of GPUs for compute, the massive amount of image/text data on the internet, and the innovational Transformer architecture. With the help of the Large Language Model (LLM) and Vision Language Model (VLM), the possibilities of AI becomes tremendous. AI agents is able to use tools inside your browser and inside your OS to help you complete the most boring/redundant tasks. Come here to learn about how Agentic AI is catalyzing in UW-Madison and what this club has done over the summer and is planning to do starting in the Fall.
