On April 4th, we held the 17th BCSWomen Lovelace. I’ve been running or co-running this conference for longer than I’ve been running this blog… so it’s time for an event report. There’s a few missing in my event report sequence as I started this blog in 2009 (after the first Lovelace), I didn’t make it to #3 in Cardiff 2010 (I was working in France at the time), and it seems like 2021 Lovelace didn’t get an event report on this blog even though it definitely happened (online).
- BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium 2023 (Sheffield)
- BCSWomen Lovelace 2022 (Online)
- The one that happened, and I was in the chair, but I forgot to blog about it
- Behind the scenes at Lovelace 2020 (Online)
- BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium #12 – Salford
- BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium 2018 (Shefffield with Sheffield Hallam)
- The BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium 2017 (Aberystwyth)
- Lovelace 2016 (Sheffield Hallam with Shefffield)
- The BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium 2015 (Edinburgh)
- The 2014 BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium (Reading)
- The BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium 2013 (Nottingham)
- BCSWomen Lovelace 2012 – event report (Bath)
- BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium 2011 (Birmingham)
- The one I didn’t go to (Cardiff)
- The BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium 2009 (Leeds)
- The one I didn’t blog about as I didn’t have a blog yet (Leeds)
A well-run conference involves more work in the run-up than anyone could possibly think, and the Lovelace is no different. I am now student chair (or deputy chair, or more acccurately, both). This means the “student posters” side of the thing is my job and as a student conference this is still a pretty big job.
- Call for abstracts
- Publicity
- Reviewer-abstract allocation (we had about 40 reviewers, and nobody can review from their own uni)
- Decisions (we look again at anything we might reject)
- Invitation to present for the successful ones
- Coordinate an abstract book pdf (this basically involves sending the data to Heidi who did it once and I’ve been leaning on her ever since).
This year we had 215-ish abstracts and we accepted 165-ish: for the first time ever, we rejected abstracts which were really good. This is sad, but I guess shows we are a successful event.
Once we have the final list of accepted students, the detail starts. Which for me involves talking to all the students, sorting out accommodation for those who need it, and making sure they all get there on time. Students ask many many questions. “Can I bring my brother?” Has he registered? “Do I have to check in with my name?” Well it could help. “Is the water drinkable?” It’s Liverpool, the water’s great, they stole it from Wales. This year, one left her poster on the train so it even involved walking to the city centre Ryman’s and doing some last minute printing.
The Aberystwyth crew was pretty big this year. We had 10 finalists in the student contest, and four members of staff went to help (me, Amanda Clare who’s speaker chair, Praboda Rajapaksha who spoke on the panel, and Edel Sherrat who helped out with posters and bag stuffing and so on). The staff shared an airbnb with Safia Barikzai (event chair from LSBU) and Claire Knights (one of the panelists); it’s become a bit of a tradition that there’s a “helper house” as it saves quite a bit of money and it’s useful to have some of us on the ground a few days early. This year the house was an ex-student rental and was basic but functional, at £670 for 3 nights pretty cheap for 6 of us.
The night before I ran a pub quiz which is a nice way of providing a bit of focus: with 100+ students in a new town it’s good to give them something to do. We laid on some food, too (gluten free cheesy chips/vegan wraps/halal chicken burgers to cover as many dietary reqs as possible).
This was my only time on stage during the entire event which suits me just fine.
On the day, we had some great talks (Carron Shankland on AI bias and image generation was a fab keynote) and I actually got to go to most of them. I think this is the first year I’ve seen all the talks for …not sure. A long time. I even got to ask a question.
We had over 300 people registered, and I’m not entirely sure how many turned up: certainly a few people failed to make it (train strikes :-( ) and a few extras came along. It was without any doubt the biggest Lovelace ever. We’d initially planned for accepting 130 posters and having about 120 in a big room, but we ended up accepting over 160 and reorganising so about a third were in the atrium. This worked OK, but the big room was crowded. We’d rather have all the posters there though, so crowded we will have to put up with.
Topic-wise it will be unsurprising to read that the big theme this year was AI:
- what new techniques do we have? (new types of AI)
- how can it solve our problems? (novel uses of existing AI)
- can it solve our problems? (areas where it works well or badly)
- and are there any problems with it? (bias, in particular)
There was also a lot of cybersecurity, robotics, and algorithms. One thing is certain: 150+ student posters from across the UK makes for A LOT of interesting reading. We’ve put images of the winning posters on our website: https://bcswomenlovelace.bcs.org/?page_id=743
Getting a group shot is always hard but we did our best.
The parts of the event I missed this year was the panel and the prizegiving. People tell me the panel was great, though, and the prizes are always good fun. Here’s a photo of Jasmine from Aberystwyth getting people’s choice; I really like this pic as it features some absolutely key Lovelace 2024 characters who are all wonderful, AND one of our super Aber students:
Now as the event is in the past there are a few more student queries to deal with – there’s a sense in which the conference is a training conference, and lots of them haven’t done expenses before, or been to an external event, so things like access to photos and claim forms are still filling my email. It’s worth it though, here’s a preliminary graph of some of the event feedback:
It being Liverpool, and me being fractionally a scouse-Irish-Catholic if not practically any kind of Catholic, I had to make one trip to my favourite ecclesiastical building and light a candle for me Nana. You can pay for your votive candles with contactless now. Technology!
