The 2009 Lovelace Colloquium was held at the University of Leeds on 16 April 2009. Around 75 people attended, representing over 25 different universities (and a few companies).
The day began with a brief introduction by Alan Pollard, BCS President, who emphasised the importance of women in computing and young women in particular. His message was clear: the students present at this event are going to be vital to the future of the IT profession.
This was followed by our keynote speaker, Gillian Arnold of IBM. Gillian gave an excellent talk on "Your sparkling career", and the audience were captivated. The emphasis of this talk was how you can progress in IT and how it can be truly a great career for women. Gillian also highlighted some pitfalls to be aware of and some advantages to exploit.
This was followed by academic talks, the first from Cornelia Boldyreff of Lincoln University, who talked about collaborative development and the XO laptop. Cornelia also talked about integrating students into development through internships and the importance of open source. Julie Greensmith ("Dr Thrill") from Nottingham spoke about the applications of computer science to the design of interactive rollercoasters -- her research involves putting people on rollercoasters and measuring their response using electrodes and cameras and so on. Yes, she does have a fantastic job!
Over an extended lunch the poster contest entrants put up their posters and people strolled around talking to each other about their work. The standard of the posters was really very high, and the judges had a very hard job indeed. First prize in the Open Choice contest went to Alexa Alexandru of the University of Essex, and first prize in the Original Project work to Gemma Warnock of Aberdeen. We also had a "People's choice" award where everyone got to vote for their favourite: these went to Nuhzah Gooda Sahib of Queen Mary University of London for original project work, and Penny Broadhurst of the Open University for open choice. Some photos from the poster contest are shown below.
Eileen Brown of Microsoft spoke about "Unified Communications" complete with live demo, in which she videoconferenced with a colleague at Microsoft's Reading campus, and deleted emails using voice control on her mobile phone. And in the last of the formal talks, Karen Groenink of Google spoke about design principles and working on mobile youtube. Karen's talk was a high level look at the sort of patterns and principles one would use when designing within Google -- with an interesting look at the sort of constraints one has to juggle when working with users on one side and technical teams on the other.
The structured part of the day concluded with a panel session where students were able to ask any questions they liked - "Why choose industry?" "What are the advantages of doing a higher degree?" "Have you ever been treated differently because you're a woman?" "What about career breaks"... all sorts of questions were asked, and then we went to the bar for a well-deserved social at the end of the day.
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| Alan Pollard, BCS President | Gillian Arnold, Keynote speaker |
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| Cornelia Boldyreff, Lincoln | Julie Greensmith, Nottingham |
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| Eileen Brown, Microsoft | Karen Groenink, Google |
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