hannah dee

Yesterday we held a Technocamps event on the prom at Aberystwyth – we took over the bandstand, and had various cool things on the prom, in the bandstand, and on the beach. I’m 20% on Technocamps, which runs computing workshops with schoolkids, and the beach lab was a kind of outreach thing. We can’t count it towards our targets¹, but it’s still fun to show off what we’re doing and spread the word.

One of the coolest things on the day was a young lad who’d been to a technocamp session and who’d really gotten into it – having done a bit of robots and a bit of programming in the workshops with us, he went home and has built himself an arduino powered boat. Here he is with his boat (wearing my arduino powered hat).

We run a workshop on AI – Artificial Intelligence – with chatbots. Chatbots are computer programs you can hold a conversation with, and here’s Mathew manning the chatbot stand. One of the reasons we’re keen to do the AI/chatbot stuff is that it lets you talk about the Turing test, which is (in my opinion) one of the most interesting and enduring ideas from philosophical computer science. It’s also the Turing centenary this year (as I mentioned in my last post).

Here’s Nikolai and Jonathan with some of the smaller robots – some of these were student projects, and some of these are technocamps robots. The technocamps robots were called Demo-bots as they’re designed to demonstrate key robotic concepts, but after a typo by one of the technocamps team they’re now called demon bots. I’m not sure this is an improvement…

The next picture features Rokas with a modified G-Wiz electric car. It’s been modified by Rokas, as his dissertation project, and now is an autonomous vehicle that can drive itself. That’s some final year project.

Throughout the day, Idris (one of the larger robots) was on the beach, drawing pictures in the sand. Here it is drawing a flower:

Here’s another smaller robot having a go on the beach:

Back indoors we had Minty 2, a robotic boat which is designed to do survey work on glaciers. This picture has Mark explaining Minty 2 to Lucy, a friend who was visiting for the weekend and who got roped into helping out all day. I am fairly sure she enjoyed it though.

The workshop we’ve run most often with local schoolkids involves programming little robots called Pioneers – these are wheeled robots about the size of a dog. There’s a system called AberBots which simplifies a lot of the robot control issues, and we’ve run AberBots + Pioneer sessions with over 500 schoolkids now, aged from 11-19. The next picture shows Dom explaining what’s going on in a robot safety zone (they’re not actually that dangerous, but you know, health and safety…).

The stall I was on was the wearable computing stall. This had various lilypad arduino bits and pieces, including a fab light-chase piece constructed and embroidered by Claire Sauzé. Very nice work, and shows what you can do with craft skills and computing skills.

In all it was a fun and exhausting day. We had nearly 600 people through, looking at what we do and playing with technology and robots. Things I didn’t get pictures of include: a K9 robot, some kite flying with live aerial camera feed to inside the bandstand, a raspberry pi (yes they do exist), some physics buskers, lots of robot boats and lots of other smaller robots. Fun.

¹We’re targeting 11-19 year olds in the EU convergence area of Wales, and in order to count someone towards our quota we have to have done 3h+ of workshops with a particular young person on two separate occasions… We’ve got special sub-targets for women and NEETS (people not in employment education or training). So a day on the beach is fun, but it’s not the main aim of the project.

Here in Aberystwyth computer science we have a pair of Turing Sunflowers. They’re just seedlings right now. The idea is that Alan Turing did some research into sunflowers, so there’s a big group science experiment going on this year (as part of the Turing Centenary) to grow sunflowers and finish off the work. You can read more about the experiment here: http://www.turingsunflowers.com/.

As we’re a computer science department, we do of course have to give our sunflowers geeky names. So Amanda Clare has set up a poll here to name the Aberystwyth Sunflowers – if you’ve got any good ideas, or just want to vote for one of the existing ideas, go ahead.

For my interactive web programming module, I set the task of writing a game in HTML5/JavaScript. The brief was to write a game to teach basic Welsh, but I’m kinda laid back about content so if students wanted to do something creative on another topic I was fine with that. Here are the best 6.

• Block Dodger from Matt Ball – nice clean simple HTML5 graphics, falling blocks game, particularly like “Shrinkers” (shrink your paddle).
• Goblin Grabber from Jethro Dew – chase the goblins, avoid the baddies, smooth game with on-screen controls for those on touchpad devices. Auto-posts to twitter if you authenticate (nice way to check I was doing my marking, Jethro:-)
• RunnerMan from Matt Harrison-Jones the platform game of DOOM – clean design, smooth game mechanics, even has a debug mode
• Dragons at Dawn by Josh Jordan fly your dragon! shoot fireballs!
• Learn Welsh Quickly by Nick Maher an excellently designed teach-yourself-welsh site with several games – hangman, drag and drop vocab builders and more
• Ministar Galactica by Matt Robbins a space shooter which even has friendly ships that come and fight alongside you.

We had an in-class vote today to choose a favourite; the online poll suffered a bit from vote rigging though.

Final choice was decided by a show of hands. What’s your favourite?

On Thursday 12th April about 110 people descended on the University of Bath for the 5th BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium. The Lovelace is one of the biggest events in the BCSWomen calendar and the aim of the day is to bring together women students of computing and related subjects from across the UK for a day of inspiring talks, networking, and careers advice. We also have a poster contest for students to talk about and display their own work. The day is run by a team of local organisers (this year headed up by John Power at Bath) and by BCSWomen volunteers (headed up by me).

This year we accepted 45 posters in the contests, making it the biggest yet, and the quality of student work was amazing. Topics ranged from quantum computing through to ipad applications for editing UML diagrams. The poster contest judges had a terribly difficult job trying to decide winners, but after much deliberation the prizes went to the following people:

• Google Excellence award for best poster by a first year (£500): Laura Deeley, University of Bath “AI in physical and emotional support for the elderly”
• Thoughtworks best open choice poster, first prize (£300) Eleanor Mitchell, University of Bath “Quantum Computing: What is achievable?”; second prize (£200) to Catherine de Roure & Sophie Drake, also of Bath, for “Computational Computation”
• Bloomberg best project work poster, first prize (£300) Francesca Day of Cambridge University for “The fidelity of the Ising model”; second prize (£200) to Zoe Benedict of Bath for “The analysis of public perception towards users Facebook profiles”
• FDM Group best Masters student (£200): Wuraola Jinadu, Robert Gordon University (Aberdeen) “iPad UML Class diagram application”

We also have a people’s choice award where attendees vote for their favourite poster, this year sponsored by Interface3 (£100). This went to Sarah Murfett of Sheffield Hallam university for “UK/US Extradition treaties: who owns the internet?”.

Photo credit Claire Sauze – who has some more (great) photos here: on her flickr

The keynote talk was presented by Gillian Arnold, BCSWomen chair, who gave an inspiring presentation about the wealth of careers open to women in computing, and the reasons why it’s important for women to go into IT careers. The McKinsey report on women in boards (and how companies with diverse boards perform better) made quite a few of the audience sit up and listen; women aren’t important in computing just for political reasons – we’re also important for the bottom line.

The other speakers were made up of two from industry, two from academia – we like to present the students with a range of role models and the speakers are an important part of this. Joanna Smith of Takeda R&D spoke about her career doing IT management within the pharmaceutical industry, and what it is like managing large interntational IT systems, and Monica Podsiadlo of Google spoke about text-to-speech synthesis. Amanda Clare of Aberystwyth University talked about DNA matching and computational biology, and Julie McCann from Imperial College London talked about wireless sensor networks and algorithms for coordinating hundreds of tiny computers.

The day finished with a networking social, featuring smoothies & cake (can’t have a BCSWomen do without cake) and then we all went our own way back to our home universities and towns, a little bit tired, a little more enthusiastic and a little more confident about women in computing. If the poster presenters are representative of the future of women in computing, then we’re going to be fine – they’re brilliant.

On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week I was stuck in the Arts Centre with about 20 kids, some nice people called Sophie & Rain, a load of Lilypad Arduinos and a bunch of electronics components. The plan? 3 days of fun with soft circuits, for schoolkids, for Technocamps.

Rain and Sophie put the program together, and it was brilliant – we went from basic circuits through programming, to serial vs parallel, to switches, right up to sensors using light dependent resistors to do things with LEDS. For the whole three days I can honestly say that all of the kids were entirely engaged all day. (I’ve run quite a few schools workshops and that’s not normal – even with the most keen students and a bunch of robots you end up losing their attention at some point.) It’s hard stuff, too: you’re putting together components and you’re programming in C and you’ve got to get both parts working at the same time. But they all managed it.

For the first two days we were using breadboards (an electronics platform that helps you put together circuits more easily) and crocodile clips, but on day 3 we took it off the board and onto cloth, making soft circuits and truly wearable computing. You do this with conductive thread and you can either get special Lilypad sewable LEDs, or you can use normal LEDs and resistors after mutilating them a bit…

Those who know me will be super-impressed that on day three I successfully threaded 16 needles for various kids. Sewing was not my forté at school, but I guess I must have learned something. Here’s an example of the kinds of things the kids ended up making:

We had about 80% girls in this group, which was brilliant, and proves that young women can handle serious tech (and can get into it – we had difficulty getting some of the lassies to go for lunch on the last day, they were so keen). In all a hugely fun three days. We’ll be revising the workshop materials and will be releasing them under creative commons – kit list, slides, teacher notes, handouts and cheat sheet – so others can do the same thing.

The BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium 2012 is coming up fast – it’s on April 12th 2012 and it’s at Bath. It’s going to be a great day with some great speakers and student posters; we’ve got about 40 poster presenters from across the UK and about 50 other people registered so far (including some recruiters and industry people looking for interns, so if you’re an undergrad looking for work it might be a good idea to come along).

Registration is here – https://events.bcs.org/book/250/ – and the day is completely free for students and others involved in education (including lunch & social). If you’re interested in coming along but you’re not a student, schoolkid, teacher, lecturer or parent… do sign up. But we’re paying for the lunches out of sponsorship, so we ask you to bring a sandwich rather than take the food from the starving students.

Here’s that registration link again – https://events.bcs.org/book/250/ – go on you know it makes sense. Good company, good speakers, good posters, free lunch… what more could you ask for from an event? :-)

I’ve just finished reading John Lanchester’s account of the credit crunch, the excellently titled “Whoops!”. I’m not particularly up to date with finance, banking or economics but I now understand a lot more about what has happened, why it happened, and why it’ll probably happen again. (In the epilogue, Lanchester sticks his neck out and makes a prediction: within the next 5-10 years, due to either a collapse of the eurozone, automated trading failure, or a bubble bursting in China.)

I really enjoyed reading Whoops! and now understand a bit more about sub-prime, credit default swaps, and international banking reguations. The real genius of the book, for me, is not just the in-depth understanding he manages to convey but also the wonderfully erudite style. There aren’t that many writers who can compare global financial instruments to post-modernism and get way with it. The way he manages to get across the kinds of risk – and the kinds of models of risk – that the banking industry deal with is also remarkably clear. It’s also laugh-out-loud funny in places, particularly if you like that dry, sarcastic humour he does so well. A top book; if you’d like to get a handle on what’s happened, I can’t recommend it enough.

Last Wednesday BCS Mid Wales held our first “Show and Tell” event. This was the brainchild of Jonathan Roscoe and the basic idea was that people got an opportunity to show off and talk about their half-baked nerdy ideas and projects.

These included a robotic glockenspiel…

And an arduino driven robot tank… (this is Jonathan the organiser, BTW:)

And a talk about the resurrection of the WWLUG (West Wales Linux User Group) complete with obligatory picture of you-know-who…

About 60 people turned up, I think, which is really not bad going for west Wales. And the projects were all interesting – ranging from lots of Arduino powered stuff to HTML5 canvas games, Kinect hacks, and 3D filesystem viewers. It reminded me just how much fun you can have if you let people talk about the stuff that really interests them. I’m already looking forward to the next one:)

“The whole question of what Britain is best at, in global terms, is an interesting one. There are four sectors in which Britain is world-class: finance, arms manufacturing, the creative arts, and higher education. Of these, the first receives strong government support, the second lavish investment and strong support, the third is largely left to mind its own business and the fourth has been gradually run down, with three decades of consistent discouragement and underfunding. What would Britain look like today if instead of the arms industry or the City it had been our Russell Group universities which had been the subject of attempts to achieve world supremacy?“

John Lanchester, “Whoops! Why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay”, Penguin, 2010, p172.

I’m the programme chair for the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium, a one-day conference for women students of computing. We’re coming up to the deadline for undergrads to enter the poster contest, so this blog is by way of a plug for the event. Hopefully it’ll help you, dear reader, to encourage any undergraduate or taught masters women students you happen to know.

1. It’s the only event for women computing undergrads in the UK, with speakers from industry, careers advice, recruiters, and networking opportunities. A unique event.
2. The centrepiece of the day is a poster contest for women students, with real prizes (as an example – the best poster on a general computing topic, from a student in their first or second year, will win £300, thanks to sponsorship from ThoughtWorks).
3. To enter the poster contest, all we ask for is a 250 word abstract. Anyone can write 250 words! Final year students can do a poster on their project; students from lower years can do a poster on any computing topic that interests them.
4. Google sponsorship means we’re able to re-fund the travel costs of all poster contest finalists; this means that the best 40 abstracts win a completely free trip to Bath (and they’ll get to put “Google travel bursary winner” on their CV).
5. Loads of companies are interested in the event – paying for travel, sponsoring prizes, coming along, even just sending stuff to go in the goodie bags (everyone loves a free pen). If you’re looking for a job – there will be people at the colloquium looking for employees. Women undergrads are a sought-after group.
6. Students get to talk to women studying similar subjects in different places; this is actually very rare for undergraduates. It’s really interesting to see what other universities offer for final year projects, for example.
7. There’s a free lunch.
8. The speaker lineup (which I will be able to confirm very soon) is looking brilliant. A fascinating range of women, doing really interesting stuff.
9. If you don’t get in the poster contest, or don’t want to enter, you can come along anyway. It’s still free (including lunch), but we’re not able to refund your train fare.

The poster contest entries close on 29/2, and you can find the form here: http://bit.ly/bath_lovelace. If you’re near a university computer science department do consider printing a couple of posters http://bit.ly/bath_lovelace_poster and sticking them where the undergrads can see them.