Lovelace Colloquium 2016

This year's Lovelace Colloquium was held at Sheffield Hallam University, last week (March 31st). Sheffield Hallam proved to be a great venue. It's convenient for most people in the UK to get to, with a smart building right by the train station, providing a large poster-exhibiting hall, a modern lecture theatre and a cafeteria, all next to each other.

Every year the Lovelace is an inspiring event. I've now been (and blogged) in 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015 and it gets bigger and better each year. I'm particularly impressed by the first year undergraduates who are up there presenting posters alongside everyone else, talking to employers and thinking about their future careers.

I didn't get to attend many of the talks this year because I spent more time on the desk and doing organisational jobs (and fixing my posters-numbering error, oops!). But there were some really strong posters covering a wide range of computer science topics, including several with live Arduino demos. The end of the day panel session featured questions and advice on where the field is going in the future, the pros and cos of a career in industry vs academia, the challenges of running your own business and questions about recruitment.

This year I was also impressed to chat to many interesting people during the evening social, for example Claire and Emily from Relish Learning. After graduating from uni they worked for others until deciding one day that they could do it themselves. They set up their own business in Sheffield, and now provide digital e-learning, for a wide range of topics. They described how they've been recently training people in the Army on how to change the wheel on a tank (imagine animations of the components required, and the order in which to remove parts, etc). They are now keen to help others to succeed, to encourage them to believe that they can and to talk to others about how they did it.

If you are not recommending this event to your women undergrads in computer science, then they are missing out. Poster presenters get expenses refunded and may come away with a prize, thanks to all the sponsors. Employers are keen to meet them, so they will also come away with contacts to help them apply for a job or placement. The photos of the event give a great impression of what it's really like if anyone needs any further reassurance.

Other summaries of the day:

• Sue Beckingham's Storify,
• Hannah Pretswel from Scott Logic's blog

Ada Lovelace Colloquium 2013

Dr Julie Greensmith introduces the 2013 Lovelace Colloquium in Nottingham

Yesterday I attended the 2013 Lovelace Colloquium. This a conference aimed at women undergraduates and MSc students in computing, and judging by the quality of the posters made by the attendees we certainly have a lot of fantastic women computing undergraduates in the UK.

When I was at school I was the only female in all of my A-level classes except Computing, where I was one of 2. On my undergrad degree, there was one other woman in my year group. I ended up deliberately joining an aerobics class in an attempt to meet other women. Throughout my computing career, women have been in a substantial minority. So how refreshing it is to go to Lovelace, and find so many enthusiastic technical women, all in one place. And how amazing it is that they are undergraduates, and will be going on to do great things in the future.

The conference is sponsored by several companies and organisations (Google, FDM, CA, EMC, HEA) who all recognise the opportunity of chatting to these students, and want to suggest their companies as career options. 

There were talks about ontologies, careers, artificial immune systems, computer vision and what it's like to work as a developer at Google. And there were plenty of networking opportunities, and the students clearly made the most of them. The support is good too - for example, when one student described her poor industrial year experience with a company that gave her secretarial work while the male placement students got the technical work, the whole audience was able to reassure her that this wasn't normal or right and she shouldn't let it put her off trying again for a computing career. But the highlight of the day is the poster session, which is where the students get to show off their work and enthusiasm, and win prizes of up to £500.

If you haven't yet been to this conference, as a student, an IT professional, an academic member of staff, a self employed consultant, or someone thinking about changing their career to computing, then I can't recommend it highly enough. The positive feeling you get from being part of it is huge.

See also blog posts by:

• student Charlotte Godley
• chair Hannah Dee
• poster judge Amy Guy, who's attended many times
• student Tracey Binnie

Ada Lovelace Colloquium 2012

On 12th April, I went to the BCS Women Ada Lovelace Colloquium for the first time, which is a yearly national event for women undergraduate and masters students in computing. This year's event was held at the University of Bath. Before I went, I'd chatted to one of our male members of staff. I described where I was going and he'd said "Isn't that a bit sexist?" If only! If only it were a level playing field for women in computer science. Most undergrad compsci courses in the UK run at about 10% females, 90% males. If I go to a compsci conference my gender will be hugely in the minority, at or below 10%. At this year's Turing Centenary Conference only 1 out of the 19 invited speakers will be women. The Lovelace Colloquium reverses that gender ratio - there were men in attendance, and they were welcomed, but they were the ones in the minority. And all the speakers were female.

But other than the gender ratio, it looked and felt just like any other academic conference and the standard of work was very high. There were a mix of motivational talks and technical talks, and an excellent poster session. I was one of the judges for the masters poster competition and it was a really difficult decision. Each of the poster presenters was able to tell us in enthusiastic detail about their work and ideas, and several of them had brought along demos. We eventually awarded that prize to a poster from Wuraola Jinadu from Robert Gordon Uni in Aberdeen who was creating an iPad app for designing UML diagrams.