A more complete chronological photographic record of the day

High resolution and in some cases print quality versions of these images are available: please email hannah@comp.leeds.ac.uk if you want copies. As you can probably guess, the photos of the poster session are from a professional photographer, the rest are taken by computer scientists!

Hannah Dee

Getting ready for the women to arrive, we get the name badges out and alphabetical, next to a big stack of Google pens. At this stage we had coffee and tea for 60 people and three BCSWomen committee members wondering if anyone would turn up...

And they did! Delegates arrived in waves, as Leeds has a free city bus that circles via the station and the University, so each time the free bus passed the Uni another 10 women arrived at our registration desk. Photos show people drinking coffee and checking out their delegate packs and chatting to each other, something that seems natural to female computer scientists.

The morning talks:

Professor Roger Boyle, head of Computing at Leeds, looking slightly nervous as he faces an auditorium full of women (for the first time in his life) to welcome them to Leeds.

Dr Karen Petrie, BCSWomen chair, showing off an ipod shuffle from the prize draw before introducing BCSWomen. Dr Sue Black, BCSWomen founder, spoke about why she set up the group and the history of BCSWomen, but unfortunately we didn't manage to get any photos.

BCS President Rachel Burnett delivering an excellent keynote talk, and the audience she was facing.

Me introducing Professor Anne DeRoeck (whilst it looks as though we were doing some kind of standup comedy routine, this was not the case).

Anne spoke about the difficulties of Natural Language Processing in languages with a more complicated morphology than English (Dutch, German, Arabic...), and taught as all a very useful Dutch word (tentententoonstelling ; tentoonstelling is an exhibition, and tentententoonstelling is an exhibition of tents. Honest. Google it to check!).

Professor Susan Stepney talked about the Grand Challenges in computing, and specifically Journeys in non-classical computation. Computers made from slime mould? Wow!

The poster session:

The quality and variety of student posters was awesome. We had posters on nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, software engineering, usability engineering, hardware, the future of technology, and women in computing. Design quality was generally very high although a few people fell into the trap of having very small fonts, which is always a problem at poster sessions. Imaginative ways to present information were very much in evidence, and a special mention has to go to Aneeqa Umar of Leeds who had a clock embedded in her poster!

Womenintechnology.co.uk had a stall which was very very pink and which clearly caught our photographer's eye; student posters went up and people grabbed lunch. The next few hours were spent lunching and discussing students' work at their posters. This part of the day was held in the School of Computing -- bemused members of staff occasionally emerged from their offices to see what all the fuss was about and to marvel at the sight of a department full of women. ("It would be much quieter if they were all men", said one lecturer in an admiring tone...)

3 staff members: Barbara Smith (Leeds), Paula Sturdy (Huddersfield), Jana Urban (Google).

Students discuss their posters

The afternoon talks

Jana Urban of Google spoke about the next 10 years of search research, and Beth Hutchison of IBM spoke about event processing, both excellent technical talks. The speakers all rose to the challenge of talking about challenging technical material to a general undergraduate audience, and I hope the student attendees learned as much as I did over the course of the day.

Prizes for the poster contests

Google provided the prize money and we had two student poster contests. One contest was called original project work for people presenting on their own work such as final year projects (mostly made up of final year students), and the other was called open choice for people presenting on general computing topics that they found interesting (mostly made up of students from lower years). We were to have a first prize (£100) in each and a people's choice prize (£25) in each. The judging was terribly difficult as the poster quality was amazing. We had allocated 5 minutes to decide, and it took 35, and we decided that we had to institute a second prize (£50) for the original project work contest because the decision was so very difficult. Next year, we'll have longer for the judges to deliberate, and we'll have second prizes in both -- as this is the first year I'm allowed to make a few mistakes!

People's choice: Sarahann Hudgell, University of Leeds (original project work), Josephine Stenlake, Durham University (open choice).

Open choice first prize winner; Catherine Harris from Birmingham University.

Original project work prize winners; 1st prize Stacey Humphries, 2nd Prize Yasmeen Ahmad, both from the Univesrity of Dundee.

Panel session

The panel session featured (left to right) Vicky Greaves from Google UK's University Programmes; Dr Sue Black, head of department, University of Westminster; Dr Jana Urban, Google Zurich; and Dr Karen Petrie, University of Oxford. Each spoke for 5 minutes (except Karen who entertained us for slightly longer:-) on how they got to where they are now, and then the panel took questions from the audience on careers related matters. This session worked really well, I think, with two very important messages getting through loud and clear. Message one - You can be a woman in computing and be really successful; message two - You don't have to make all your decisions at 22.

The social:

At the end of the day, those who didn't have to dash for trains, planes or buses stayed for a social in the students' union building, where we had an area of one of the bars set aside for us. With cake. Pink cake.

The cake was pink, and the barstaff were friendly

I might have to crop this photo for the official report -- whilst we might all love Pimms, I'm not sure it's the message we want to get across!!!

Thanks and hope to see some people back next year,

Hannah Dee.