Yesterday was the London Hopper one day conference for postgrad women in computing, and the inaugural BCS Karen Spärck Jones Lecture. A great day of talks and posters about computing research, all done by women. And free wine in the evening, which is always nice!
The poster contest at the Hopper described some fantastic work – cell tracking in video; hand-gesture analysis; human-robot interaction; finite-element textile modelling; noise reduction in audio recording… A really impressive array of topics. There were some excellent tech talks from Beth Massey of Lincoln, Julie McCann of Imperial and Mandy Chessell of IBM too.
The Karen Spärck Jones lecture was also good fun – given by the inimitable Fran Allen of IBM, it covered some early work in text processing. The question & answer sessions was particularly enlightening. Due to a health and safety scare at BCS Southampton Street involving large panes of glass falling in the atrium (!) this event had been moved to the IET on Savoy Place, a much more impressive venue, so we drank free wine on the balcony overlooking the Thames.
To finish the day off, it was up to Kings Cross for a Nepalese curry, with the poster contest winner Nikki Kerrison (who really needs to work on her website), Camden web manager and old friend Martin Black, and the director of Microsoft Research Europe Andrew Herbert. Rah!