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Last Thursday I went to London for the Computer Weekly women in IT awards. I was invited to speak at the event, as well as being shortlisted. I chose to talk about the undergraduate experience: the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium for women undergrads, why I set it up, and what it’s actually like for undergraduate women in UK universities right now. The culture of uni in general has got a lot more laddish in recent years, and social media doesn’t help that at all. I also drew heavily on the excellent book “Unlocking the clubhouse“, which came out over a decade ago, and which covers aRead More →

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The last couple of weeks have been a bit mental for me, particularly on the women in tech front… Normally this time of year I’d be blogging about the London Hopper. I went this year, and I was the MC again (introducing speakers, keeping everyone to time, being sarcastic). But I’ve not blogged about it as since then things have been fairly busy – if you want to read about the Hopper, check out Bedour Alshaigy’s post on Computer Weekly. Bedour won the poster contest last year so came to give the prize talk this year, and it was great. That evening was the KarenRead More →

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This post is a collection of all the blogs, photos and articles I’ve found about the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium 2014. If I’ve missed anything – leave a comment or drop me an email and I’ll add it. Photos! The photos from the day are now available on Flickr. Check them out, Silvia took some great pictures. Students have been blogging about the day Michelle Brown from De Montfort wrote on her own blog but also had a guest post on Computer Weekly Charlotte Godley from Hull Uni (also a prizewinner) wrote a post on her own site and on Computer Weekly Polina Stoyanova from GreenwichRead More →

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On Wednesday 16th, I was in Reading for the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium. This is a national one-day conference for women undergraduates, which I started back in 2008 and which is now in its 7th year. This long and rambling blog post with pictures is my brain-dump report of the day. Hope you find it interesting in some way – I thought the day itself was AMAZING (but then again I would say that). As ever on “BCSWomen Lovelace Day” I woke up stupidly early, and the moment I realised the date I was wide awake. So I did a bit of work, then went forRead More →

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For the last few months, my writing here has been slow, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing. Actually, I’ve had articles published on a couple of other blogs, which probably have a slightly higher readership than this one… On computer weekly The BCSWomen Lovelace is a conference I set up and have been running for 7 years. This coming event has a super lineup, so I have done a post introducing our awesome speakers at the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium And a general overview of the colloquium which describes the background, and also why it is great. Still spaces (Reading Uni, April 16th, signRead More →

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Last week we went out data collecting with my PhD student Max. Max is working on an airborne robot which can be used in navigation – floating above (say) a robot boat, and giving a top down view of surrounds. Out at Clarach bay, it was a bit misty. The plan was that I would play the role of the robot boat, whilst sat in the Aberystwyth University Robotics Group Kayak (yes it does exist) paddling back and forth. We’d then test the ability of the vision system to detect targets on the boat, and the control systems to do stuff with the motors. UnloadedRead More →

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Last week I was invited – by the lovely Graham Lee – to talk about mobile code at the QCon London conference. I said that the most interesting thing I’d been doing in the mobile sphere was my AppInventor workshop for kids (the BCSWomen App Inventor Family Fun Day) and so I talked about that, with the title Creating Apps with 6-Year Old Girls (and their Dads) (BTW slides are available from that last link). I’ve done loads of conference speaking in the past, but the vast majority of it has been at computer vision conferences, or at women in tech gigs. Mainstream technology conferences,Read More →

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For International Women’s Day, the Athena Swan team at Aberystwyth put on a series of events over the course of the preceding week. I was off to London for a conference so helped organise an event on the Monday before jetsetting off to The Smoke (if you can call travelling via Arriva Trains Wales “jetsetting”). Thanks to all the speakers, to my co-organiser Carina Fearnley (who did most of the hard organisational work) and to Computer Science in Aberystwyth for sponsoring the evening (paying for amplification and tech setup). We had about 70 people there, I think, and there were a few more watching onRead More →

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This is a quick writeup of some work in progress that might never actually progress any further… so I thought I’d put it out here just in case it’s interesting to anyone. If you think of colour as computer people do, you probably think of it as red, green and blue values. In digital images, colours go from 0 to 255 in the red, green and blue channels, with 0,0,0 being black, and 255,255,255 being white. 255,0,0 is bright red. 255,255,0 is yellow. And so on. We can think of colour this way making up the colour cube: here’s a video I have put togetherRead More →

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Yesterday was 5/12/13 – numbers which make up a Pythagorean triple – the sides of a right-angled triangle. A guy called Marco Matosic spotted this quirk of the date system and decided to put on an event at the Ceredigion museum, involving various people from around aber. During the day about 150 pupils from local schools came through to stroll around the exhibits and learn a bit about Pythagoras. I was there helping to run the computer installation, with Anne Marggraf-Turley from Coleg Ceredigion and Amanda Clare from aber uni (like me). Amanda and I setting up before the day began Our activity was basedRead More →