hannah dee

A week or so back I went to check out the venue for next year’s BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium, and to have a chat with the local organisers (James Anderson and Yota Dimitriadi). It was lovely to catch up with James (Yota wasn’t able to make it) and it was also really positive to discuss things like venue, lineup, and that kind of stuff. It makes it feel so much more concrete when you can picture the space. So I thought I’d do a blog post so you, dear reader, can picture the space too.

I did a post-doc once on a project joint with Reading, and I have to say my model of Reading campus was a bit like the 1980s TV show “A Very Peculiar Practice”; largely concrete and functional¹. Upon arrival at the London Road campus I was most pleasantly surprised by a space much more green and pleasant, with quads, and trees, and topiary.

The theatre we’re planning to use is large, and modern, with all projection facilities (PC/visualiser etc.). We might be able to record the talks, too, which would be fab.

The poster space is two rooms next to each other, one is kitted out as a drama studio most of the time, and the other is kitted out as a seminar room. But we can remove the partition and have one massive poster space. So, the following two little photos are two sides of the same room (partition in the middle, which we’d remove).

The social would be in the campus cafeteria/bar area, which is a large newly refurbished-looking space with booths, tables, and lots of room to move around. My guess is that we would probably put some of the social money behind the bar and then let people fend for themselves once that runs out (or something similar). It’s a nice bar, anyway. Comfortable, full range of drinks and teas and coffees and snacks.

On leaving I was rather taken with this handsome tree. A generally handsome campus, Reading’s London Road one.

¹Although I never once saw a bin-diving nun in Reading.

Yesterday I went to Swansea and saw Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of c++ talk. I wrote pretty much my entire PhD in c++ so it’s a topic I’m fairly close to, and the talk didn’t disappoint at all. Stroustrup was talking about c++11, the new version, and now I really want to get coding again and try out some of the new features of the language. It definitely looks simpler to use (one of the refrains of the talk was make the simple things simple) and it’s got some cool new features like lambda functions which could really simplify some of what I do.

Stroustrup (right) and a very important man from Swansea whose name I have completely forgotten

One of the great things about the talk was the way Stroustrup started by explaining where c++ came from – the tension between wanting to program precisely, and close to the machine (as in C, or assembler) but also wanting to take advantage of abstractions like OO. He also talked about the way c++ is different things to different people, and the tension between advancing the language, and supporting older systems and legacy code. Apparently with the new c++11, all of the old c++ is still there, so your old code should still just work.

c++ is different things to different people

For the founder of a language, Stroustrup had little time for what I think of as software extremism. Attacking people who say “this is the perfect language” he responded “Anyone who says they have a perfect language is either a fool, or a salesman”; and to those who claim that they’re programming in pure object orientation he responded “Are you also proud of eating only with a knife, and not a fork?”. Pragmatic, technical, approachable and funny. The perfect talk.

The sixth BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium was held at the University of Nottingham, on the 4th April 2013. I can hardly believe that we’re already on number 6! The day featured talks from industry and from academia, a panel session on careers, a poster session of student work, a social, and of course lots of time for networking.

The audience filing in at the start of the day

The talks

We had more talks than usual this year, as the original schedule featured a 1h keynote, but our speaker had to pull out due to family reasons. So Joolz & Gillian stepped in at short notice to do a short talk each, which were both great. This meant the program was really very packed indeed, but I quite like that – if the main complaint on the feedback forms is that there was too much interesting stuff going on, I think we’re doing something right!

• Natasha Alechina of Nottingham talked about ontologies; how we can formalise a domain, and how we can work out if there are bugs in our formalisation
• Jemma Chambers of CISCO spoke on her career; what it’s like working in a big company on their graduate program, and talked a lot about why we have to sit at the table
• Julie Greensmith (also the host!) spoke about artificial immune systems (AIS), and how interdisciplinary work can really pay benefits if you do it properly. Julie came up with the Dendritic Cell Algorithm in AIS; now loads of other people are researching that too. Go Joolz!
• The last talk before lunch was Gillian Arnold, BCSWomen chair. She spoke about the way tech careers can be really rewarding; she’d asked around her contacts for “the best moment in your career so far”, which ranged from earning LOADS of cash, to getting an MBE, to helping out in developing countries… there are loads of different ways to have an excellent career in tech.
• After lunch, I spoke about my research into computer vision for plant imaging. I’ve never spoken about my own research at the Lovelace before, as I’m the chair… but as I’d invited Joolz to speak when I ran the Lovelace in Leeds in 2009 she returned the favour and invited me back this year. It was super exciting to be on stage as a researcher as well as in my capacity as a women in computing activist.
• And finally, the last official talk of the day was given by Milena Nikolic of Google, who talked about how she got into Google, what it’s like to work there, and what she’s worked on so far – search, mobile, Google Play…

In all, a busy schedule with a huge variety of topics. I enjoyed every single talk – even my own:-)

The Poster contest

This year the poster contest was amazingly strong. A lot of the sponsors helped get involved this year, too, which was great – Google speaker Milena Nikolic helped judge the best first year contest, EMC staff helped judge best final year, and Madeleine Field from FDM helped judge the MSc student prize. I’m particularly pleased by this – it gives me a real boost seeing actual recruiters from industry not only supporting the event with sponsorship (which is in itself great), but also engaging with the students and their work. It also confirms what I’ve thought for a few years now – the poster contest standard is amazing: discussing it afterwards with the industrial contacts, they were as impressed as I was with the work. Not just the work, too - students stand by their posters and chat with judges as part of the session, and it’s super impressive meeting so many knowledgeable and eloquent young women who are into computing and technology.

The Google Excellence Award for Best First Year (£500, sponsored by Google, but I expect you’ve guessed that) went to:

• Roseanna McMahon, of the University of Bath

The second year student poster award, sponsored by the HEA, was so difficult to judge we gave two equal second place awards.

• First prize (£300) went to Carys Williams of the University of Bath
• Joint second prize awards (£100 each) went to Heidi Howard of the University of Cambridge, and Jo Dowdall of the University of Dundee

The best final year student poster award was sponsored by EMC, and went to

• First place (£300): Sia Xin Yun Suzannah of University of Edinburgh
• Second prize (£200): Dung Kim Hoang Tran of the University of Bath

The best Masters student poster award, sponsored by FDM, was also exceptionally difficult to judge. I can personally confirm that this was very difficult, as it was judged by myself, Amanda Clare, and Maddy from FDM; we spoke with all of the entrants, narrowed it down to four, then to three, then to two… and finally… We decided to split the prize and give two first place awards of £150 each to:

• Blessing Mbipom of Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen
• Maraim Masoud of University of Southampton

And finally the people’s choice award for best poster as voted for by the attendees (£150, sponsored by Interface3) went to Alexandra Kearney, of the University of Edinburgh

If these women are the future of technology, we’re in safe hands!

The Panel

I didn’t actually get to sit in the panel (although I did choose the lineup). The aim of the panel – and indeed a lot of the aim on the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium – is to show women students that there are loads of different ways to be a successful woman in computing. So on the panel this year we had Lucy Hunt, an independent contractor who arranges her work so she gets 2 months holiday every year (YAY HOLIDAYS!); Gillian Arnold who’s spent 20 years in IBM and who now runs her own company; Jemma Chambers who’s in CISCO and has a young son; and Dr Amanda Clare a lecturer from Aberystwyth. This way, if students are thinking of an academic career, a big company, contracting, or entrepreneurship there’s someone on the panel who’s got experience of that and can provide advice. Whilst the panel was going on I was outside doing the poster contest admin so I can’t really write much about this part, but they were still debating when I got back into the room with the certificates, so it was probably good:-)

Social

The day finished off with a social in the Computer Science Atrium in Nottingham. The social was sponsored by CA Technologies; CA had been with us all day in the employer zone (just by the food) and generally networking with attendees. As people relaxed after the hectic day with a well-deserved glass of wine or juice (and cake, we have to have cake) the atmosphere began to calm down, CA reps chatted with students about their career plans, people got together to take photographs with new friends and old, and Joolz & I agreed it was an most excellent Lovelace.

Dr Joolz & Dr Dee, local chair, speaker, chair and speaker (yes we both spoke) agreeing that it was a most excellent Lovelace whilst grinning like loons.

Thanks

I’d like to thank loads of people…

• Firstly, without the generous input from Google, who sponsored a student prize and student travel (we pay the fares and if necessary accommodation of all presenting students) we’d not be able to run the event: they’ve been great, sponsoring every colloquium since the first and sending a speaker every year too.
• Prize sponsors this year were FDM, EMC, The HEA, and Interface3.
• CA Technologies sponsored the social and had a stall in our Employer Zone
• VMWare brought a stall to our employer zone
• Our speakers were all fab (even me:-). Natasha Alechina, Jemma Chambers from CISCO, Gillian Arnold of BCSWomen and Tectre, Julie Greensmith, and Milena Nikolic from Google. Milena Radenkovic from Notts kindly helped keep us all to time and managed the questions.
• Our panel members featured Jemma and Gillian (who’d spoke earlier) and also Amanda Clare from Aberystwyth, and Lucy Hunt; thanks to all for joining in
• And finally we had an absolutely brilliant local team this year. Dr Joolz aka Julie Greensmith was our local chair, and she not only helped with lineup, organisation, and just about everything else… she also stepped up to give a talk too at short notice. Thank you Dr Joolz! Dipa Patel was an administrative and organisational superhero, and Maryam Marchenko went above and beyond the call of duty in helping out with all aspects of the day, from stuffing bags to dealing with tesco deliveries of booze for the social.

Thanks!

Yesterday I arranged a tour of Aberystwyth University for a group of local schoolteachers, as part of the GOWS (Get On With Science) project. I’m a “Science Champion” (Champion, I tell you) on this project, which involves working with a cluster of schools looking at science, women in science, and transition from primary to secondary. The schools I’m working with are Ysgol Bro Ddyfi, the secondary school in Machynlleth, and that school’s feeder primaries; yesterday’s visit had Tomi from Ysgol Bro Ddyfi, Alwyn from Ysgol Gynradd Machynlleth, Llinos from Ysgol Gynradd Glantwymyn, and Sarah from Ysgol Llanbrynmair.

First off, we met Jordi Freixenet from the University of Girona in Spain, who’s going to be visiting Aberystwyth for four or five months, and who’s really interested in how we can get kids excited about the creative side of computing. Jordi was in the UK just for a few days sorting out details for his longer visit so it was really lucky we overlapped – hopefully we can sort out more detailed interaction when he gets back. A surprising connection is that coming from Catalonia, Jordi is used to the idea of bilingual education.

Next up we met with Reyer Zwiggelaar, who spoke about the contribution that computer science is making to medical imaging, with particular reference to cancer research. Reyer described work in breast cancer imaging, both in the detection of problems, and in risk assessment – working out if there’s a bigger future chance of problems, before people show signs of cancer. He also described work in prostate imaging, and brain imaging.

We then moved to Aberystwyth Computer Science’s “ISL” or Intelligent Systems Laboratory; there was an undergraduate practical going on where students were learning how to get robots to build a map of their environment. Lots of students, lots of little robots. The robots are Pioneers, which are little wheeled robots about the size of a dog, with sonar sensors.

Also in the ISL we met up with Patricia Shaw who’s working with the iCub. The iCub is a super cute humanoid robot (which cost more than my house did!). Patricia’s research involves getting the robot to learn through play – by moving objects and working out how its actions affect its senses, the idea is that iCub learns in the same way that human children do.

Next we drove to the Gogerddan campus to meet some colleagues from IBERS - Aberystywth’s biology department. This involved a new game called “How many schoolteachers can you fit in my Yaris?”, the answer to which is “4, but Alwyn wants to go in the front”.

At Gogerddan we first met with John Doonan and Fiona Corke who showed us the UK’s National Plant Phenomics Centre – this is a brand new (so brand new it is not quite finished working yet) automated glasshouse. The phenomics centre is the first of its kind in the UK and a really major scientific resource – it lets biological scientists control and measure pretty much every aspect of a plant. There are conveyer belts which move plants around, each plant has a unique identifier, watering and nutrients are totally controlled, and there’s measurement facilities for pretty much everything you can see about a plant. When it’s completely finished there will be 800 plants moving around in this massive robotic greenhouse – right now there are a few test plants but you can see the imaging and the watering and the movement of the plants, and get a real feel for the sheer scale of the science that’s about to happen.

Next up was Jane Powell from organic centre Wales, who looked at the ideas of food security, food miles, biodiversity and people’s perception of resource use. Jane set up a map of the local area in the foyer of the IBERS new building, and we all gathered round to work out where we lived, shopped, worked, and more interestingly consumed from. Jane described going into schools, and getting the kids working out questionnaires about food sources to give to the school cook, and their parents, and to local farmers. I really like idea of working with farmers - sometimes getting them into schools – and looking at what was produced how far away, and getting kids to think about where things come from.

Elaine Jensen was next up; Elaine works with Miscanthus. We had a bit of a hiccup at the start of this as we were keen to pop out and actually see the miscanthus fields; miscanthus started in the UK as an ornamental plant, but is now being researched as a fast growing biofuel, and the field visit would have been great. But my car was too small and we failed to find the pool car in the carpark so we visited a bunch of glasshouses instead.

And having visited the glasshouse we moved on to the BEACON lab, where Elaine explained that environmentally speaking, Welsh businesses could really benefit from working with the BEACON project – we were shown plastic cups made from plant fibres, as well as polymers and alcohols.

Next up, it was time for lunch. Writing up the day I realise that we got through quite a lot by lunch! But before we actually sat down to eat we met up with Pippa Moore who talked to us about the planned Aberystwyth Campus Bioblitz; this is a 24 hour period where every possible type of biodiversity on campus is recorded. It’ll be on 11th May, and all are welcome – starting with bat watching at 00:01am.

After lunch we headed down to IMAPS (Institute of Maths and Physics) to meet with Huw Morgan, who spoke about Solar physics and the IMAPS Welsh Language program; I couldn’t really follow much of this as Huw spoke in Welsh; the teachers seemed to follow it fine though.

Daniel Burgarth was up next talking about Quantum computation and the future of quantum computing; he showed us his 9 Qubit chip, which works only when cooled down to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero (so it wasn’t doing anything in the coffee room of IMAPS!). It’s quite amazing to see something so rare.

Over to the Llanbadarn campus next, to see the big robots, one teacher down (Sarah had a rugby match to attend, in Edinburgh). Robot boats were introduced to us by Paul Miller, a naval architect at the US Naval Academy who’s visiting Aberystwyth; Paul was busy varnishing a boat though so didn’t have a huge amount of time to chat…

So Mark Neal took over, describing work using robot boats in Greenland to do ice mapping. He also talked for a while about the importance of power management with robot sailing boats – you need to determine how much energy you have left, and then work out if you can afford to move the rudder or set the sail.

Fred Labrosse was next, who works with Idris, one of our larger robots. Idris is a 400 kilogram robot, about the size of a mini, that can do about 10kmph. So it’s a fairly major piece of kit. Quite often it’s used as a mule, getting equipment from place to place and providing a test platform for other science; for example it’s been used by Mars projects, but you’d never send something the size of Idris to Mars.

The last robot of the day was the Argo, Mike Clarke‘s PhD platform. Mike’s PhD involves using this skid-steer amphibious tank to do science, but we have a long and illustrious history of making it fail spectacularly during demos. Last time I brought a visitor down to see the Argo, it drove into a hedge. This time, it sped across the field, failed to pass the GPS points it was supposed to, and then stopped dead. But hey, it moved and didn’t hit anything. Nice work!

Finally we made it back to Penglais campus, where Roger Boyle of Computing at School and Ben Ashwell of Technocamps did a session on s4a, which I understand is scratch for Arduino.

All in all a hectic, fun, science packed day with loads of lovely Aberystwyth people helping out and talking about their work.

A couple of weeks ago I went to the second Machynlleth Raspberry Jam, and ended up being interviewed for Science Cafe on BBC Radio Wales. You can listen again at that link (for a bit). The program also includes my friend Tom Crick from Cardiff Met, who visited the raspberry pi factory; the bit with the Machynlleth Raspberry Jam is towards the end about 21:30 so you can skip to that bit if you want to.

The Raspberry Jam was great fun, one of the highlights for me was winning an auction of a raspberry pi case, handmade by Robert (one of the Machynlleth Raspberry Jam organisers), and signed by Eben Upton of the raspberry pi foundation. It cost me £10, but it’s going to be a collector’s item I tell you. Here’s Robert holding up one of the cases:

If you listen to the radio program linked above you’ll hear Fergus, aged six and three-quarters, being interviewed about the things he’s done with his raspberry pi. I’m not going to put pictures of 6-year-olds on my blog (not without their parents’ permission) but here’s a sneaky shot of Fergus being interviewed by the BBC.

And finally one of the cool things about raspberry jams is that they’re the only time I ever feel that it’s OK to eat jam sandwiches. For some reason I never eat them normally, and it’s a rare treat.

The BCSWomen Android programming family fun day we held in Leeds a couple of weeks ago was a resounding success, and I’ve been spending my spare time between then and now turning the materials into a “Workshop in a box”. The idea is that anyone can take the workshop, and run it, with minimal effort; I’ve provided slides, a handout for attendees, a downloadable pack of assets (sounds and pictures that people can use in apps) and a detailed presenter’s guide which has running order, kit list, room requirements, and tips for making the day go smoothly. It also features lots of cute pictures of androids, which I had a lot of fun drawing using gimp.

I’ve decided to release the materials under Creative Commons, specifically their attribution share-alike unported license. This means you can take the materials and use them, including developing and remixing the materials, but only if you credit me and BCSWomen as authors, and make any version you build out of my workshop available under a share-alike license. Hopefully this will encourage people to make a bit more of the stuff – it took quite a while to put the workshop together and I really like the idea of other people running it and developing it themselves, and releasing new versions for other people to build upon in the same way.

http://www.hannahdee.eu/appinventor/ is the link you need to download the materials – they’re available as PDF (if you just want to use them) and as OpenOffice (if you want to take them and develop them yourself). There’s also an FAQ.

I’ve also made a little video here, which shows you what the people got up to in Leeds. However if you choose to run the event yourself, it’ll be different as one of the cool things about the day is that people build the apps they want to. It’s worth taking a look at the vid though – I don’t think any of the participants had done any programming for mobile devices before, and they made some really cool stuff in just a couple of hours. The video is less than four minutes long, and has some sound (mostly the sound of 40 telephones going “Meow” at the same time).

I’m in Nottingham at the moment checking out the venue we’ve got booked for this year’s BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium. The poster contest is still open to entries – deadline this coming Friday, 15th Feb, online abstract submission here. We’ve booked enough space to have about 50 posters, I think, and there’s an extra room we can book if we need. The poster space currently looks like this:

It’s a lovely big room, very near the lecture theatre (where we’ll be having the talks).

I couldn’t get a good photo of the lecture theatre as there was a lecture about to start (I think it’d freak me out if i were getting ready to give a lecture, and someone snuck in at the back to take pictures). But it’s a big theatre, very swish and new, seats about 300. If you look at the photos below the strange curvy concrete part is the theatres, and we’ve booked the big one at the top.

For the social we’ve booked the computer science atrium, which is a big space where we can have a wind down at the end of the day, current plan is we’ll provide a couple of glasses of wine or juice and some nibbles. Our sponsor CA will do something with ipads, too, I think, so this part of the day should be nice and interactive.

And out the front there’s a lake; so if the weather’s nice we can sit out watching the ducks:)

It’s been really good to come over and check in with the local team, Joolz, Dipa and Louise, who’re doing a fantastic job of organising all the details that need to be organised, and answering questions about how the mechanics of the day will fit together. We’ll put some of the further flung students in halls on the campus, as it’ll be hard for all of the attendees to get to the event without overnighting; we’re discussing lunches and poster boards and parking and all those little conference details that need to be finalised. Coming together now, and I’m starting to get excited about the plans!

On Saturday, I ran an Appinventor based “family fun day” in Leeds, the idea was to do a day’s workshop getting started with AppInventor, but to do it with mixed groups. I’d run a similar workshop for BCSWomen before, and I’d run one with schoolkids, but I’d never tried to do all together with kids and grownups in the same room.

So we (BCSWomen) got together with BCS West Yorkshire, and decided to run it as a joint event. We booked the HEART centre in Headingley, and 70 people signed up (we actually had to close registrations as that was the max for the room). On the day, weather got the best of many people and only about 45 managed to get there, but we’d have been very full if all 70 had come along so that’s fine by me!

The Headingley Enterprise & Arts Centre, in the snow

The range of people who came was huge. I think the youngest was 6 and the oldest was 60 (although I didn’t ask everyone their age, that would have been weird). One of the things I love about appinventor is the way it demystifies the process of coding for mobile phones – getting people of 6 (or 60) to code something, then install it on a telephone, then play with it, then change it, then build something else, all in a day… Great.

The general structure of the day was fairly basic, and fairly obvious to anyone who’s run an appinventor workshop before:

• Start by installing appinventor (this was chaos)
• Make the meow app (where you tap a picture of a cat, and the phone goes meow): this gets people coding by following instructions
• Edit this to use shaking & vibrating as input and output, and dogs and woofs as content: this introduces people to the idea of editing code
• Then… do whatever you want, in small groups. This was the high risk stage: I started by showing a bunch of apps people might like to build, showing the blocks and explaining how they fitted together; this gave everyone a feel for what was possible. I also gave everyone a bunch of drum sounds and a bunch of farmyard sounds, so the “drum machine”/”name that farmyard animal” apps were clearly an option. But the ideas people actually came up with were more imaginative than that; from the young lad who wanted to do Djembe drums (rather than the traditional drumkit) to the family who built a drawing app which had random colour selection.

I really enjoyed the day, and it was certainly more fun than any of the straightforward schools workshops I’d worked on. Having family groups worked very well – a couple of parents, uncles and aunties came up to me at the end to say how nice it had been to have the opportunity to do something like that as a family; appinventor is far from perfect, but it is definitely fun and creative, which went down very well with all ages. A couple of people said they’d got ideas for activities to do at home, too, which was nice.

As a workshop it was quite labour intensive. I had three excellent helpers in Gillian Arnold, Louise Brown, and Philippa Conmy, and I do think that when we run it again we need to have similar levels of support. Other things to do differently include remembering more multi-plug adaptors, and trying to work out some way of getting appinventor installed on everyone’s laptop, before the workshop starts.

The feedback forms were pretty much all positive – a bunch of 8, 9 and 10 scores, lots of “yes do it again”, and so on. This was my favourite form though:

My favourite feedback form

Hopefully I’ll put together a video to show how it went, and highlight some of the apps people put together – currently I’m waiting for video permission, as I forgot to get it on the day, oops!

When I get the time I’ll be editing the slides and notes, and releasing it as a workshop in a box, for anyone to take on and run – watch this space:-)

Back in December, I spoke at the Aberystwyth Science Café (that link goes to their Facebook page, and they do most of their organising via FB). Science Café meetings are places where you can hear a talk about science and discuss it in an informal atmosphere, and happen all over the world (you can find a map on the cafe scientifique website here: map of worldwide cafés). I’ve been going to Science Café events intermittently for years now, they actually started in Leeds where I used to live, so I’ve got quite a history as an attendee but before December 2012 had never performed at one.

My talk was on CCTV and Artificial Intelligence, and was loosely based upon a lecture I gave to last year’s first year on research and ethics. I won’t put the slides up here, as they are fairly word-light and image-heavy. For a public talk I try to make the slides less like lecture slides and more entertaining, which means they’re less useful after the event but hopefully a bit more fun whilst the talk is going on.

The aim was to introduce some statistics about current CCTV and surveillance, with plenty of anecdotes about the control rooms I’ve visited over the years, giving a backdrop to an overview of surveillance research within computer vision. Computer vision is perhaps understandably obsessed with surveillance – the task of working out what is going on in video streams is basically the computer vision task, and if you’re looking at streams of video, the most interesting streams of video feature images of people. There’s also a funding motivation; CCTV and security are probably easier to get funding for than more blue sky/less applied areas of computer vision. I discussed the nature of crowd and scene analysis, behaviour understanding, and face recognition (which naturally feeds into ideas of identity). I think I succeeded in showing some progress that’s been made in this area, and also managed to get people to think about the ethics of research – would you be happy working on automated behaviour analysis?

Feedback on the talk was really positive – I found it a scary audience to talk to (60 members of the general public are for some reason much more frightening than 200 first year students) but the people who’ve talked to me about it afterwards have all been lovely. Which is nice. In particular I met up with Anne & Richard Marggraf-Turley who were giving a talk on surveillance and romantic poetry in Germany couple of weeks after my science café talk – hopefully the technical background I provided was useful:-) You can read Richard’s blog about the romantic hackers talk here.

Yesterday I spoke at BCS Wolverhampton, presenting a similar talk to the ones I’ve done at BCS Birmingham and EMF camp; the title and the abstract were the same, but the slides have been gradually evolving each time I give the talk. Having presented to quite a few people (about 30?) at Birmingham, and to about 120 at EMF, I thought I had the talk nailed; it takes about 45-50 minutes with time for questions, and there are often a lot of questions. But last night’s performance suggested to me that maybe this confidence in my timing was misplaced; there were so many comments and questions and debates that it took about an hour and a half to get through the slides!

Before I go into more detail about the debates and the questions, here are a bunch of links so the people who came to the talk can follow stuff up if they want:

• My slides in PDF (about 2mb)
• computingplusplus.org who are the organisation linking coders & IT professionals with local schools
• BCSWomen, Girl Geek Dinners and womenintechnology; all great places for women to look for support and networking
• Scratch, a great programming environment/playground for younger kids; AppInventor a system for coding apps for android phones, that’s really good fun and easy, probably OK for aged 9-10 up; and Greenfoot, a clever set of tools & an IDE introducing Java to kids, probably OK for 13+

The audience this time was small – about 15 people – and I think the size of the audience might have contributed to the interactive nature of the presentation. I think I was 5 or 6 slides in when I got my first question, and then the floodgates had opened. It was huge fun and very good natured, with my assumptions and statements being challenged at every step, and the audience supporting or disagreeing with me and each other, allegiances changing from slide to slide. I think nearly everyone in the room contributed to the talk and the debate at one point, which made the session much less like a talk and more like a roundtable or a seminar. I certainly didn’t win the entire audience over to my side, but I expect that I managed to get people thinking.

One point that really made me think was about monocultures. I have always thought (and asserted!) that monocultures are not pleasant environments to work in; basically, that an all male workplace is bad for the guys as well as the gals (and vice versa). Some research backs this up, particularly the research into sex-role spillover (male nurses take more sick leave, that kind of thing). But that doesn’t necessarily apply to technology: various discussions I’ve had lately have led me to believe that tech is more of a meritocracy than many other fields, and what matters is whether your colleagues can do the job. So men in all male technical teams are fine, as long as the other guys are competent. Another point raised in the discussion was that for some people, monocultures can be comforting places.

Now, anecdotally, a lot of the students I’ve spoken with about this (guys) have expressed displeasure about the gender ratio (they’d like more gals around); there’s a possible sampling bias here (well they’re talking to me, aren’t they, and my opinions are not exactly hidden on this topic), and there’s a possible ulterior motive (hur hur hur).

I don’t know of any systematic or scientific investigation of this though, and I’m not really sure how I would go about studying it. I think a study of what men-in-tech think about the lack of women-in-tech would be a fascinating thing to do, though, and I’m now sat here on the train wondering how I’d go about it and what the problems would be (sampling bias being the big one; if you ask for questionnaire responses, you get lots respondents who’ve got a strong opinion on the subject). Hmm. Food for thought, anyway – thanks, Wolverhampton!

If anyone reading this has any ideas about how to go about doing this study, or even wants to collaborate on putting it together, do leave a comment or get in touch:)