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The 10th BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium was held on April 12th, at Aberystwyth University. Around 200 attendees enjoyed a day of inspiring talks, fascinating student posters, careers advice, employers fair, lots of networking and too much cake. Our headline sponsor this year was Google, who covered loads of the student travel and also sent a speaker along. As we pay for travel for all the poster contest finalists and as we were in Aberystwyth this year, we paid for 2 nights for everyone. This enabled us to have a social the night before, with Scott Logic providing a hackathon activity which got people talking and codingRead More →

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The BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium is a one-day conference for women undergrad and masters students in computing. The centrepiece of the day is a poster contest, and to enter the contest all students need do is write a short abstract (250 words). I started this conference, back in 2008, and run it every year in different universities around the UK. Last year we had just over 150 attendees, and this year we’re hoping to beat that. SO in March this year we’ll be at Sheffield Hallam Uni, with support from the University of Sheffield, and we’ve got a great speaker lineup coming together – I’ll probablyRead More →

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Employers who want to change the gender ratio within their workforce have some difficult problems to solve. First amongst these problems is the size of the pool you’re fishing from: there just aren’t that many computer science women to choose from, so finding women who come ready for the workforce can be hard. Obviously you can look outside of the computing grad population – either look for non-grads and apprentices, or look for a broader range of degree subjects – but being a computer science lecturer I’m pretty convinced of the value of a computing degree. And many of the employers we talk to likeRead More →

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My friend Cate Huston has written a post about tech conferences, and the thorny question of who pays for speakers to attend. You can find it here: Uncomfortable Conversations About Money. I was going to write a comment on it, but then realised I had a bit more to say, so here’s a post instead. I’ve only spoken at a couple of “mainstream” tech conferences, and they’ve either been local (so travel wasn’t an issue) or they’ve paid my travel. Which is nice. It is also a very unusual experience for me — very very rarely do academic computing conferences pay your travel, fee, orRead More →

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On Saturday 13 June, at 30 sites across the UK, people gathered to learn how to make simple Android apps. The workshop we used was my Android programming family fun day, and we decided to make the first hour of the workshop the actual record attempt. It turns out that the Guinness World Records (GWR) people take it all reassuringly seriously. So each site needed the following: Two witnesses, independent of BCSWomen and the host organisation (in this case, Aberystwyth University – we had Rachel Seabrook, who I met at Science Cafe, and Moya Neale, who I met at my dance class) Two independent stewardsRead More →

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On Saturday, across the UK, people are going to learn how to code simple Android apps using MIT AppInventor. The day is being coordinated by BCSWomen and you can sign up here. Signups close tomorrow (Tuesday). There are many reasons behind BCSWomen doing this kind of thing. Firstly, each site will be led by a woman, so we’re putting technical women on the stage. The day is open to kids and families, so we’re helping to show kids that coding is creative and can be something they can do. We’re hoping for a bit of publicity for us (women in tech, the BCS, etc.) too.Read More →

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This year the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium was in Edinburgh, on April 9th. This little conference, which I started in Leeds in 2008, has grown quite big now; we had about 150 attendees, and about 75 poster contest entrants. This year the local organiser was the amazing Amy Guy, who came to the conference as an undergraduate back in 2009, and has come back every year to help out. Which is nice:) Edinburgh is a handsome city and it certainly put on a good show for us; the sky was blue, the University was a superb venue, and all the people we met were friendly. IRead More →

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I have a bunch of things I meant to blog about but didn’t get round to – so I’m catching up by blogging once a day till I’m back at “now”. This would probably have been 2 or 3 blog posts had I done them at the time!… Way back in 2012 I did an invited talk in Wolverhampton, on women in tech. This year they invited me back, so obviously, I needed a slightly different talk. At around the same time I was invited to talk to the University of Warwick Computer Science department, and as I was going to be in Edinburgh forRead More →

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In 2015, an IEEE sponsored conference is going to have an ex-playboy centrefold as their guest star. Yes, you read that right. The committee of ICIP – coincidentally, almost entirely made up of guys – think it’s a good idea to have Lena do the prizegiving. Who’s Lena? In a nutshell: Back in 1973, some people wanted a test image One of them had bought some porn to work (wat?) So they said (hur hur) let’s scan that (wat?) And then released it to the “vision community” who’ve been using it ever since… (If you want to find out more about the background to Lena,Read More →

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I started this blog for Ada Lovelace Day in 2009 so this is my 5th ALD post. The idea is to write about a women in science that you admire, and this year, I’ve chosen Cate Huston. When I met her in April (she spoke at the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium) she was a Google Engineer who’s talk I missed, but I knew it got super feedback from our attending students, and we had a chat, and that was nice. Since then we’ve tweeted and emailed and met at conferences, and I’ve grown to respect her opinion hugely on matters from software testing to corporate culture. She’sRead More →