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A couple of weeks ago I featured on the Suffrage Science podcast. This was my first podcast (yay!). It was put together by Kat Arney, who is a science communicator and general all-round awesome storytelling scientific person. Kat interviewed me remotely then somehow managed to edit the hour of audio down to a shorter 30 minute podcast that even sounded like I was making sense. If the embed has worked, you should be able to listen to the podcast here: or you can find it on Apple/podbean/wherever else you get your pods from. Here’s podbean: https://suffragescience.podbean.com/e/hannah-dee/ I always find the technical side of things quiteRead More →

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Since Christmas I’ve read two books by Eugenia Cheng and have hugely enjoyed them both. Cheng is a mathematician, author, concert pianist and writer (and, it would appear, all-round awesome human). The first book was called “How to Bake Pi“, and combined a general introduction to category theory with a bunch of cookery tips and recipes. It was a lot more entertaining than that one-sentence description implies, honest. Upon finishing it I immediately ordered a copy for my brother-in-law, who also likes maths a lot (and cake, but who doesn’t). x+y is billed as “A mathematician’s manifesto for rethinking gender”. I have read a lotRead More →

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Usually we organise a couple of socials each term for the women students in our department. These involve meeting up for a coffee or some drinks, and provide an informal way to support women students as it can be a little odd being in a minority. As Wales went into a “firebreak” lockdown, a friend suggested we do some kind of online social to entertain the students. This is a difficult year for everyone in education but I think students must find it particularly hard – it is frustrating being locked down in a house, I can’t imagine being locked down in a student accommodation.Read More →

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For Ada Lovelace Day (8th Oct this year) I was invited to talk at Glasgow University, and so I arranged myself a little Scottish tour taking in a visit to an auntie in Dundee, a day in Stirling catching up with Carron and delivering my Ada Lovelace talk there too. It was a busy couple of days, with meetings to discuss the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium (in both Stirling and Glasgow), a fascinating seminar on scientific culture from Katerina Pia Günter (Uppsala Uni) in Stirling, and talks from Sharon Moore (IBM/BCSWomen) and Sofiat Olaosebikan (Glasgow) in Glasgow. My talk The talk I gave was “Why AdaRead More →

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On April 17th, we held the 12th BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium (The Lovelace) at the University of Salford. Regular readers of this blog will know that this is a conference for women undergraduate and taught MSc students studying computing and related subjects, and that I started the conference in 2008 handing it over to The Awesome Doctor Helen Miles in year 10; now she’s the conference chair and I’m the deputy. What this means in practice is that Helen and I have a very busy couple of weeks in the run up to the event – students don’t have funds to travel to conferences, generally, andRead More →

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This week I went to Birmingham for the Advance HE STEM conference. This is a conference for people who teach STEM subjects in the UK, and also for people who are supporters of STEM research and teaching. It’s a two day conference and I think there were probably about 200 people there (although there might have been more). I went to a bunch of talks and workshops over the two days, mostly looking at inclusion. I’ll summarise a few of my favourite workshops in this blog post. If you’re interested I have a PDF which includes more detailed (but more scrappy) notes covering all theRead More →

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A week ago I went to London to borrow a piece of scientific jewelery for a couple of years. It’s a delightful, rather bonkers scheme by the MRC called Suffrage Science, whereby they chose 6 women computer scientists to receive a brooch 2 years ago, and last week they handed the brooch onto the next woman. In just under two years time I get to hand it on to the next person, and that way it passes from scientist to scientist. I was given the brooch by the excellent Professor Carron Shankland from the University of Stirling. The event was good fun – here’s meRead More →

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On July 7th Aberystwyth University hosted the first summer conference for Women in Tech Cymru, a new group which looks to support and network women working in tech in Wales. We were lucky to get the Vice Chancellor of Aberystwyth University to come down and open the event and welcome everyone to the uni, and then we had a keynote from Phillipa Davies. I’m afraid I can’t say much about the keynote as I was out on the registration desk for that slot though. The event was an “Unconference“, which means that largely speaking the attendees made up the conference on the fly by pitchingRead More →

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The 11th BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium was held just before Easter, at the University of Sheffield with support from Sheffield Hallam University. Regular followers of this blog will know that the day has a well-defined format, with student posters, speakers, a panel on computing careers, and a social at the end of the day. We also have a cake sponsor, so we also have too much cake. This was the first colloquium since I started the conference in 2008 where I wasn’t in some sense the conference chair. Cardiff, in 2010, was chaired by Miki Burgess (and I didn’t even make it to the event), butRead More →

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BCSWomen Chair Sarah Burnett has had a fab idea, which is to hold a series of webinars that talk about AI and how it is changing the world. In BCSWomen we do a lot of stuff about the women, and a lot of stuff to support women, but we also do a lot of stuff that is useful for tech people in general. The AI Accelerator falls into this category; the idea is that tech is changing and AI is driving that change, so we’re going to try and provide a background and overview of AI to help people get to grips with this. OnceRead More →