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In: Computing at School, Wales
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Last week I went to an EU project meeting in Perugia, with Wayne from Aberystwyth Computer Science, and Tomi & Tegid from Ysgol Bro Hyddgen. Here’s Tomi about to leave Wales (Tomi drove to the airport, making the travel for the four of us actually fairly cheap, given cheap flights Bristol to Pisa then a lengthy but fun train journey across Italy). The aim of the project is to develop fun, playful coding activities for use in schools. We’re building a platform (playfulcoding.eu) where we’ll share activities written at all the sites, aimed at schoolteachers and people doing outreach in schools. This meeting centered aroundRead More →

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In: Computing at School
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For our summer holiday this year we went to Malawi. This is quite an exotic destination (for us), but R’s sister and her husband are out there doing a year volunteering on a farm which grows maize (inter alia) for Malawian farmers, and so we jumped at the opportunity to visit. During our visit we wanted to pop into some schools, and my sister-in-law Terri asked around and managed to make contact with Lisumbwe school, in Monkey Bay, and arranged for us to lead a morning’s class in computing. Here’s a google maps link, if you want to see it on a satellite, it’s quiteRead More →

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In: BCS, teaching, Women in Computing
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On Saturday 13 June, at 30 sites across the UK, people gathered to learn how to make simple Android apps. The workshop we used was my Android programming family fun day, and we decided to make the first hour of the workshop the actual record attempt. It turns out that the Guinness World Records (GWR) people take it all reassuringly seriously. So each site needed the following: Two witnesses, independent of BCSWomen and the host organisation (in this case, Aberystwyth University – we had Rachel Seabrook, who I met at Science Cafe, and Moya Neale, who I met at my dance class) Two independent stewardsRead More →

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In: BCS, Women in Computing
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On Saturday, across the UK, people are going to learn how to code simple Android apps using MIT AppInventor. The day is being coordinated by BCSWomen and you can sign up here. Signups close tomorrow (Tuesday). There are many reasons behind BCSWomen doing this kind of thing. Firstly, each site will be led by a woman, so we’re putting technical women on the stage. The day is open to kids and families, so we’re helping to show kids that coding is creative and can be something they can do. We’re hoping for a bit of publicity for us (women in tech, the BCS, etc.) too.Read More →

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In: BCS, Women in Computing
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This year the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium was in Edinburgh, on April 9th. This little conference, which I started in Leeds in 2008, has grown quite big now; we had about 150 attendees, and about 75 poster contest entrants. This year the local organiser was the amazing Amy Guy, who came to the conference as an undergraduate back in 2009, and has come back every year to help out. Which is nice:) Edinburgh is a handsome city and it certainly put on a good show for us; the sky was blue, the University was a superb venue, and all the people we met were friendly. IRead More →

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In: BCS, Computing at School, Women in Computing
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I have a bunch of things I meant to blog about but didn’t get round to – so I’m catching up by blogging once a day till I’m back at “now”. This would probably have been 2 or 3 blog posts had I done them at the time!… Way back in 2012 I did an invited talk in Wolverhampton, on women in tech. This year they invited me back, so obviously, I needed a slightly different talk. At around the same time I was invited to talk to the University of Warwick Computer Science department, and as I was going to be in Edinburgh forRead More →

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In: Computing at School
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I have been remiss in keeping up my blog, and realise I have about 8 things I should write about. So I am going to do a post a day, catching up with things chronologically. Today: an EU project, and a kick off meeting, only about 3 months late. A few years ago Jordi Freixenet visited Aberystwyth. He’s a computer vision guy, and he does lots of schools outreach, so we got along fairly well and decided to put in an EU grant to do schools stuff. This got knocked back, revised, resubmitted, … lather rinse repeat … and finally, this year, we got theRead More →

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In: Geekiness, Women in Computing
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In 2015, an IEEE sponsored conference is going to have an ex-playboy centrefold as their guest star. Yes, you read that right. The committee of ICIP – coincidentally, almost entirely made up of guys – think it’s a good idea to have Lena do the prizegiving. Who’s Lena? In a nutshell: Back in 1973, some people wanted a test image One of them had bought some porn to work (wat?) So they said (hur hur) let’s scan that (wat?) And then released it to the “vision community” who’ve been using it ever since… (If you want to find out more about the background to Lena,Read More →

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In: Women in Computing
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I started this blog for Ada Lovelace Day in 2009 so this is my 5th ALD post. The idea is to write about a women in science that you admire, and this year, I’ve chosen Cate Huston. When I met her in April (she spoke at the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium) she was a Google Engineer who’s talk I missed, but I knew it got super feedback from our attending students, and we had a chat, and that was nice. Since then we’ve tweeted and emailed and met at conferences, and I’ve grown to respect her opinion hugely on matters from software testing to corporate culture. She’sRead More →

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In: Geekiness, plants
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Right: input plants, left: colour based plant segmentation using Gaussian Mixture Models I’ve won a grant to investigate the dynamic modelling of plant growth using computer vision. The plan is that we’re going to grow a load of Arabidopsis (that’s the plant in the picture above), under time-lapse cameras, and work out where the leaves are, and which leaves cover up which other leaves. Essentially, we’ll use the time-series of images as the plant grows to infer the 3D structure of the plant. Cool, eh? If you might be interested in this kind of project, and you can do computing and machine learning, then getRead More →