Browse: Home / Lovelace Colloquium 2021

Lovelace Colloquium 2021

The BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium is a free, one day conference for women undergraduates and taught masters students.

2021 was our 14th event and it was online, hosted by Lancaster University on Tuesday March 30th.

BCSWomen Lovelace 2021 Group Shot

Images taken from our “introduce yourself” channel (and from publicity pages for the speakers)

Thanks to Saggezza, we held a social the night before in gather.town just for the poster presenters, sponsors and helpers. This had random quiz teams and some silly activities which helped students get to know a few more people before the day.

Our supporters: The event wouldn’t be possible without support from various employers, companies and charities.

The local team in Lancaster and at the BCS have been superb in helping our 2021 event run smoothly, so we also have to thank

  • Lucy Hunt at Lancaster
  • Miriam Sturdee at Lancaster
  • Paul Rayson at Lancaster
  • Olivia Wolfheart at the BCS
  • Mandy Bauer at the BCS

Lancaster Duck, designed by Lucy Hunt

Talks and panel

The day was started off by a keynote from Professor Dame Sue Black, who’s a world renowned forensic anthropologist. Sue spoke about her work with imaging and the identification of people from their hands: fascinating stuff, and really impactful work. This talk was presented live on Teams.

As we were online this year we decided to have the rest of talks shared online in advance to allow attendees flexibility in managing their day. This has the advantage that the talks are archived, too! We had live q&a in our Discord server on the day to provide real-time interaction for attendees. The three main talks were:

The skills and careers buffet is a new idea for us: normally we have four talks as we are constrained by time and rooms. As we are online we decided to take advantage of the flexibility and offer a set of talks on the loose theme of skills and careers. These are all shorter talks (5-15 minutes) and attendees can pick and choose which ones they want to watch.

To conclude with, we held a panel where students are able to ask any questions they like. This was live on Teams again, with four panelists (Miriam Sturdee of Lancaster University, Sarah Foxley of STFC, Safia Barikzai of London South Bank University and Anna Gautier, a PhD student from Oxford University). Lucy Hunt in the chair fielded the questions and kept conversation flowing.

During the breaks we encouraged attendees to visit the employer stands, talk to poster presenters, and mingle – Discord as a platform really helps with this as it puts conversations rather than videos in the foreground. We also encouraged attendees to take time to look after themselves, and provided a short Pilates video https://youtu.be/i37RfBAegek from Rachel Hubbard, designed to help people who’re spending a lot of time at the computer.

8 Bit Ada, designed by Alex Stanhope

Prizes

The centrepiece of the day was a poster contest featuring student work. You can view the abstract book as a PDF online here:

BCSWomen Lovelace abstract book 2021

The full list of winners is below, and you can see the winning posters on this page too just under the list of winners.

First year contest sponsored by WCIT charity

  • Second place goes to Karolina Kowalska of Durham for “Digital Ladies and Their Creator Goddesses: Representation of Women in the Video Game Industry”
  • First place goes to Purvi Harwani of Edinburgh for “Hey Siri, I don’t feel too good!”

Second year contest sponsored by Amazon UK

  • Second place goes to Marta Adamska of Lancaster for “The art of programming”
  • First place goes to Molly Ives of Bath for “Could a robot commit the perfect murder?”

Final year contest sponsored by JP Morgan

  • Second place goes to Alexandra Stanhope of Lancaster University for “Ringy Stardust”
  • First place goes to Emilia Szynkowska of Southampton for “Procedural Generation and Adaptive Difficulty in Video Games”

MSc contest, sponsored by Oxford University’s AIMS CDT

  • Second place goes to Nadeen Habaybeh of York for “Deceive the deceivers and learn from them: Implementing a Deception-Enhanced Intrusion Detection System (IDS) with Machine Learning”
  • First place goes to Molly Hayward of Durham for “Bio-Electra: A deep neural language model for Biomedical Question-Answering”

The judges also highlighted the following three posters as particularly good, so we awarded 1 year’s BCS membership to these people too:

  • Highly commended: Laura Wilkinson Aberystwyth University for Virtual Online Shopping – Exploring Ecommerce from a wider angle
  • Highly commended: Alisha Qazi Durham for Will designer babies be the new fashion statement?
  • Highly commended: Natalie Sharp and Yashvi Pravinkant Kingston for Ethical issues of biased datasets in facial recognition.

People’s choice award is voted upon by all the attendees:

  • Second place in the People’s Choice, sponsored by STFC goes to Linda Scoon of Bangor for “Household Recycle Sorting Bin Design”
  • First place in the People’s Choice, sponsored by STFC goes to Elisabet Tammjarv of Glasgow for “Your social media bubble: Who has control?”

We also had a design award this year, for the posters with the best layout/design. This was awarded and judged by Lancaster helpers Miriam and Kasia:

  • 1st place to Noorafsha Manga London South Bank for Experiential Learning: Educational Robotics
  • 2nd place to Sapphire Williams Bangor for Developing Images Through Robotic Arm
  • 3rd place to Christina Moir Abertay for Unifying Games and Education in an Increasingly Online World

Hannah Dee (event chair) and Safia Barikzai (deputy chair), March 31st 2021

 

If you have any other questions, first check out our FAQs and if we haven’t already answered it, email us on bcswomenlovelace@gmail.com