hannah dee

Today’s Ada Lovelace Day, a day when people across the world will be writing blog posts about women in technology that they admire. It also represents a year of this blog, as I started on Ada Lovelace Day last year with a post about Sue Black.

My choice for today’s celebration of women-in-tech is my friend Julie Greensmith. She’s a lecturer in computing at Nottingham, doing research into artificial immune systems and into the nature of thrill. This second research direction has her covering people in electrodes, pointing cameras at them, and sticking them on roller coasters. All in the name of science. When I last spoke with her she was talking about buying a bucking bronco for the lab. YAY SCIENCE!

I invited Julie up to give a talk at the 2009 BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium (that’s where the picture comes from), and she’s spoken at the Royal Institution for womenintechnology.co.uk, and I’ve heard nothing but praise for both talks. She’s a great person to invite if you want an inspiring woman speaker, and if you’re lucky, she’ll show some video of a journalist screaming on a rollercoaster.

She also juggles, snowboards, plays about three hundred different musical instruments, and is great company. And she’s been called “Dr Thrill” in the national press, which you have to agree is very cool indeed. So here’s to Jools and many years of inspiring women scientists to come.

I went to ITiCSE 09 last week in Paris, along with Karen Petrie from BCSWomen. Rog joined us for a day, which was great.

Our talk was on opinions of women in computing – we ran a survey on women at the Lovelace and Hopper events last year and tried to work out what it was about successful women in computing (i.e., those doing PhDs or degrees or similar) that made them interested. One great outcome of the conference is that we made contacts with people in Turkey and in the USA who thought our study was interesting enough to run in their countries – it’ll be fantastic if we can get some cross cultural attitude research going, as there is a fair bit of anecdotal evidence about the situation in Islamic countries being different.

You can read the paper here if you are so inclined: Link to paper download. The talk went well, I think – I’m getting better at this:-)

Other talks included interventions to support women students, distance learning software including a v. cool networking simulator thing for teaching network security. One woman spoke about a programme for 7 people, being paid 10-15 hours a week to work on computing stuff with kids… which is probably not a solution that is going to scale, even if the 7 undergrads did get a lot out of it!!

A real stand-out talk for me was Paul Curzon from QMUL, who spoke about teaching computing with real physical objects – he does work through CS4FN (computer science for fun, in case you didn’t get it:-) – going into schools and so on. One example he gave concerned emergent behaviour, or the way in which simple rules acting independently can bring about higher level patterns. As demonstrated in the following video:

The conference venue also enabled people to have their after lunch coffee overlooking the Seine, which we took advantage of…

The conference organisation was somewhat lacking – nothing started on time, and the conference dinner was a shambles. However, that was the evening that Rog made it over, so we just left the conference delegates waiting for the boat with the banquet and found a restaurant. Which was nice. (Those who waited for the banquet apparently waited for over an hour, on the banks of the Seine, getting hungrier and hungrier whilst being bitten by mosquitos…)

I’ll leave you with a few shots of Parisian stuff…

A poster in the metro, uncovered by renovations:

A building on campus:

Yesterday I was in London for W-tech, the UK’s biggest ever event for women in technology. It was fantastic. The day had a mix of panel sessions, networking opportunities, displays, demos, recruiters, and of course talks. I was running around most of the day as I chaired 2 sessions, gave a talk in another, and even managed a quick G&T with the parents… But I still managed to soak up a lot of the atmosphere and chat to people from BCSWomen and all over. I was really pleased with my talk – I’m used to talking to academics and it was hard to pitch it to a general audience (who were probably a bit techy, but almost certainly not in my field). I got the feeling it was about right though, so maybe I am getting better at this speaking business. And I only stuttered once or twice.

Photos follow:

The BCS/BCSWomen stand, with Tina providing a friendly face

Eileen Brown and Kate Craig-Wood playing with a Microsoft Surface device. These women gave great talks – I know, as I had the very easy job of chairing them both!

The view from the Riverside room of the IET. Rather nice, innit?

Some of the BCSWomen Committee members at the reception in the evening. Arranged by height. I’m the shortarse front-left, the other vertically challenged member is Anne Workman from IBM. The two giants are Karen Petrie, soon to be a lecturer at Dundee uni (our chair), and Sarah Winmill, from the V&A. Lots of the committee were there at some point or another, but we didn’t ever manage to be in the same place!

For our upcoming ITiCSE talk (details and paper download here) we asked a bunch of women computer scientists a load of questions. At the end of the questionnaire we asked “What’s the best bit about computing?”, and “What’s the worst bit about computing?”.

I’ve collated all the answers to these questions and turned it into an animated gif, shown below:

I love the way that some things come out both best and worst (and it’s fascinating how many times “programming” comes up in both categories).

Because I am a proper geek, I made the gif by writing a hacky perl program. So if you have a unix system with ImageMagick convert and perl installed, you can make your own animation from a comma-separated list of statements using this perl hack.

I went to the London Hopper Colloquium on Tuesday. It’s a one-day event for women PhD students organised by QMUL & Women@CL, sponsored by IBM and with a lot of BCS support. I’m probably an unbiased reporter as I was an invited speaker this time (my first ever invited talk, whoo!) but I thought it’d be good to post about it so here goes.

There were 60-70 women there, mostly PhD students, doing research in computing. Many of these had entered the poster contest, which as a judge I found awesome. It was so hard to judge. There were posters on such a wide range of topics (Logic programming, networking, medical imaging for cancer, interface design, business systems, cognitive models of language, understanding equations, computational modelling of the vision of the honeybee, project management, the conflict between telecoms and internet industries, … ). The standard was brilliant. It was such a positive experience to see so many clever women doing great computing research, all at the cutting edge of their fields.

The speakers were me talking about behaviour modelling and CCTV, Nobuko Yoshida from Imperial talking about modelling interactions in computer networks, and Holly Cummins of IBM talking about garbage collection (in java – and nobody made any jokes about tidying up being women’s work). The panel session at the end of the day had some fascinating discussions on how to handle difficult questions when you’re giving a talk, and how to balance children with an academic career, and imposter syndrome (I bought that one up after the recent BCSWomen discussion).

And the lunch had some reeaally great cakes.

All round, a fine day out, (and I think my talk went OK! :-)

Inspired by Wendy Tan White’s post about how she got into tech, this is my story:

At school I was keen on maths and science, and had a great maths teacher (Miss Lolley – truly inspirational). I was (and still am) also a big reader – both my parents have been English teachers at some point in their careers and they transmitted their love of literature early on and it’s stuck. William Gibson’s Neuromancer introduced me to the idea of artificial intelligence and I knew pretty much straight away that building clever systems was what I wanted to do.

And so when it came to university applications I went for courses in AI or cognitive science. At the interview days for AI courses I was the only woman, but at the interview for cognitive science (AI, psychology and philosophy) there were a few of us. I’d not done any computing at school other than word processing in my typing classes, I’d only ever programmed on the spectrum for fun, and the lads at these open days claimed they knew an awful lot. It’s kind of embarrassing to admit it now but they did put me off. I also rather liked the idea of keeping up the psychology from my A-levels and studying a bit of philosophy: if you’re going to try and build artificial intelligence there’s a good argument that understanding natural intelligence can help. So I went for the cognitive science course.

After the BSc, I did a masters in philosophy concentrating on the philosophy of AI, and then some years later managed to land myself a PhD place doing computer vision. I think building programs that can see and interpret images and video is one of most interesting sub-fields of AI, and that’s what I do now. It’s not just programming and inventing (although that’s the core of it), you also have to write up your work & publish, and do talks, so there is a fair bit of variety.

Good things about my job:

• I do interesting work – if it’s not new it’s not research!
• I sometimes get to play with cool toys (cameras and stuff)
• I work with a whole bunch of nice clever people.
• I get to do a lot of travel (going to conferences, giving talks).
• It’s truly international (in my lab there are about 35 people and more than 15 nationalities, and hey, I’m about to move to France myself).
• It’s flexible – working from home is easy, hours are up to you within reason.

I’d like to be a lecturer, eventually, as I really enjoy teaching. And I’d like a permanent contract (working on 3 year postdoc contracts is OK but it’d be nice not to be always looking for the next one). But these things should both be within reach after the next postdoc, so it’s all good.

The BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium was last week. This is a one-day event for women students of computing, and it’s open to students from across the UK. I’ll do a full report for the BCS website shortly, but I wanted to get a few ideas down quickly and to put out a request to attendees for more photos!

It was an amazing day for me – it’s so great to see an event come together and for all the effort to pay off. The posters were fantastic and the enthusiasm of the student presenters was contagious – and after all is said and done it’s the students that make the day.

The speakers – Gillian, Cornelia, Jools, Eileen, and Karen – were all fantastic. The BCS President Alan Pollard came up to lend his support (and judge the poster contest) and I think his presence was also really appreciated; the students went away knowing that they were valued by the BCS and not just its women:-)

Other blogs on the day:

• Christine Burns has produced a fantastic podcast on the day, as part of her “Just plain sense” equality and diversity podcast series. I’m blown away by how cool this is, and she managed to get the audio captured and edited and up within a day of the event. If you haven’t listened yet, do! Christine also captured a lot of video of speakers – you can find that linked from a page on her blog here.
• Eileen Brown from Microsoft speaks about her day – as one of our prestigious speakers it’s great to see her blogging about the day as well as contributing
• Kate Ho from Edinburgh Uni who was one of the many people who stayed at “Hotel Dee” (i.e. in my spare room:) before or after the event.

If you’ve got a blog or a set of photos or anything else on the day, please drop me an email so I can add your stuff to my list! And if you’ve got any decent photos, let me know, particularly if you don’t mind my using them on official publicity stuff.
Here are a few of my better snaps from the afternoon:

I met Sue Black for the first time on 9 February 2006. I’d entered the poster contest at the BCSWomen Grace Hopper Colloquium for women PhD students, and Sue introduced the day and judged the poster contest. It was my first women-in-computing event and to be honest I wasn’t sure what to expect. Working in computer vision I am quite used to being the only woman in the room at conferences and so on, which is odd, but you adapt. Would an all-women techy event be different? Geeky? Bitchy? Competitive?

It turned out that all-women techy events are none of the above. It was supportive, friendly and chatty, with much less of the competitive edge I’d come to expect from conferences. There’s much less willy-waving – presumably because there aren’t any willies to wave. At that day I met several women who I now count as friends (and who could have been the subject of this Ada Lovelace day post – Karen Petrie and Reena Pau in particular), and as a direct result of that day I’ve joined BCSWomen, become an activist, and now run a one-day event for undergrads along similar lines, the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium.

But of all the people I met that day Sue Black inspired me the most and continues to do so, so here you go:

As a mature student studying for her PhD at South Bank university Sue decided that there was a need for a women in computing group in the UK, and in 2001 BCSWomen was formed. It’s centered around an e-group on Yahoogroups, and now has around 1000 members. The group does all sorts of useful things to support women in computing – CV advice, mentoring, one-day events for particular groups, face-to-face networking meetings, research, journalism, talks in schools… and it was all started, supported and driven by Sue.

She’s a software engineer who does serious research into serious technical issues, too – she’s published around 30 peer-reviewed conference and journal articles on software engineering methodology and testing. She didn’t do it the easy way either, but as a mature student with kids, doing her undergrad and PhD at South Bank, visiting Kings College University, getting a lecturing position back at South Bank… And she’s now (less than a decade out of her PhD) head of Department at Westminster. Talk about a meteoric rise!

Last year Sue decided to scale back the BCSWomen activity (she is now head of Department, after all) and to concentrate on her other main passion – saving Bletchley Park. As the home of the UK codebreaking effort during the war, Bletchley was the birthplace of British computing, and really needs to be preserved for the nation. Thanks to Sue’s efforts in publicity and fundraising there have been some major grant successes, articles in the national press, and a real groundswell of support for Bletchley. The battle is far from over, but the outlook for this centre of national importance is improving almost daily, and that’s got a lot to do with Sue.

If you want to follow Sue, she’s on Twitter as @Dr_Black and she’s got a webpage at http://www.sueblack.co.uk/ and a Bletchley focussed blog at http://www.savingbletchleypark.org/. I’d recommend it – she’s got great energy and enthusiasm, and is one of those rare people who can really get things done.