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Ada Lovelace |
Last week I was privileged to both attend and present at the 9th BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium hosted this year by Sheffield Hallam University. You can follow @bcs_lovelace on Twitter. The chief organiser and founder of this annual initiative is Hannah Dee and this year Deborah Adshead pulled out all the stops to make sure the event at SHU was a great success.
This is a national one-day conference for women students of computing and related disciplines. The aim of the event is to bring women students from around the UK together for networking, talks, and career development advice from successful women in computing. There are speakers from both industry and academia, and a poster contest for the students to show off and talk about their own work.
If you have never organised a conference it is hard to imagine the hours of work that goes into the planning and delivery of a big event. The team included academic staff and students who were involved throughout. Below is a photo of the students from Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) who presented or helped. They are members of the student led SHU Women in IT group. A big thanks also goes to every single student or member of staff that contributed to the day.
Deborah Adshead and Students
Sheffield Hallam Uni
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Women in IT at Sheffield Hallam |
There are more photos on Flickr and Hannah Dee has blogged a brilliant summary of the day. This includes the list of student poster presentation winners and I include them below. There were so many good posters it made the judging very difficult!
Here’s the full list of student winners
The first year contest, sponsored by JP Morgan, had the following winners:
- First place (£300) went to Ruth Sartain of Sheffield Hallam with a poster entitled “Could programmers become the next Bach?”
- Second place (£200) went to Mollie Coleman and Hollie Baker, of Bath University with a poster entitled “How the Arduino inspires creativity in Computer Science”
The second year contest (also open to students on a year in industry, or in their third year of a four year degree) was sponsored by GE, and had the following winners:
- First place (£300) went to Margaret Carlin of Queens University Belfast, with a poster entitled “Time critical applications in the healthcare industry”
- Second place (£200) went to Olivia Ruston of Bath University, with a poster about “The future of wearables”
The final year contest (also open to students in the penultimate year of integrated Masters, e.g. an MEng course) was sponsored by EMC, and had the following winners:
- First place (£300) went to Jessica Lettall of Liverpool University with a poster entitled “An app to promote resilience in home carers”
- Second place (£200) went to Imogen Gough of Manchester University, with a poster about “Models for Neurons and Neuronal Networks”
The contest for MSc students (or students in the fourth year of an integrated Masters, e.g. an MEng course) was sponsored by SAP, and the winners were:
- First place (£300) went to Rachmawaty Sudirman of Manchester University, with a poster about “Mobile expert system for Cacao pests and disease diagnosis”
- Second place (£200) went to Preethi Jayaraj of Hertfordshire University, with a poster entitled “Software Testing – a myth or a priority?”
All attendees are asked to vote for the people’s choice award by selecting their two favourite posters. These votes are tallied up and the top two or three get awards, sponsored this year by TigerFace games. This year there was a tie so we have three winners, each getting £50.
- Jane Parker of the University of Bath with “The creativity in computer science”
- Leah Clarke of Durham University with “Detecting hidden data in images: Steganalysis vs Steganography
- Didi Gradinarska of Aberystwyth University with “Can Hololens be the industry’s augmented reality game changer?”
Programme
The programme included 4 slots for invited speakers, plenty of time allocated to the poster presentations so everyone had the opportunity to get around them all and talk to the presenters. And there was lots of cake!
- 09.30 Registration
- 10.00 Welcome
- 10.20 Keynote: Sarah Winmill, Director of IT services, UCL
- 11.20 Coffee break, with posters going up
- 11.40 Open Source Intelligence: A Double Edged Sword, Shahrzad Zargari and Sue Beckingham, Sheffield Hallam
- 12.10 Lunch - Poster judging happens over lunch
- 14.15 Technology for Social Good, Carolyn Johnson, J.P. Morgan
- 14.45 Brain Computer Interfaces. Mahnaz Arvaneh, University of Sheffield
- 15.15 Coffee break, posters coming down
15.45 Employer Panel session on Computing Careers
- 16.30 Close & Prizes
- 17.15 Social - in the Phoenix Bar, the Hub, Sheffield Hallam Students Union
Presentations
I presented with my colleague Shahrzad Zargari on Open Source Intelligence: A double edged sword. We used Emaze to create this so I've been able to grab the embed code to add to this post. You can see our presentation below.
Storify of the #BCSLL16 Tweets
Finally here is a curation of the tweets brought together using Storify. This captures all tweets that included the event hashtag #BCLL16. There are some great photos and interactions shared aobut the event as it unfolded. You can also find a summary of the day on the BCS Women website.