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Inspired by an infographic showing that all of the current education ministers went to private schools, I have just spent 10 mins on Wikipedia investigating the Higher Education experiences of the current department for education: Nicky Morgan is 41, so didn’t pay uni fees for her Jurisprudence degree from Oxford. Nick Boles is 48, so didn’t pay uni fees for his PPE degree from Oxford. Nick Gibb is 53, so didn’t pay uni fees for his Law degree from Durham. Lord Nash is 65, so didn’t pay uni fees for his Law degree from Oxford. David Laws is 48, so didn’t pay uni fees forRead More →

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The International Workshop on Image Analysis Methods for the Plant Sciences will be held this year in Aberystwyth. The workshop is aimed at computer vision and image processing people working in the plant sciences, and plant science people doing work with images. I’m the co-chair, along with Marie Neal from the National Plant Phenomics Centre, Andrew French from Nottingham Computer Science and Susie Lydon from Nottingham’s Centre for Plant Integrative Biology. Key facts Abstract submission 1 Aug. Abstracts should be 2 pages max, PDF, submitted via CMT the conference submission site. Registration deadline 1 Sep. You can register online via EventBrite. Conference dates 15-16 Sep.Read More →

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For the last two weeks I’ve had a work experience student in working on AppInventor stuff. When she started, she’d never done any coding before, so I set her off on updating the materials for the AppInventor Family Fun Day. … and the materials are now ready Check the Family Fun Day page for fully updated materials, ready for AppInventor 2. Free, creative commons licensed one-day android programming workshop, now fully up to date again. AND she got an app on Google Play Check out PieSplat! A custard pie app where you can change the target image, and play either Whack-a-mole style or by flingingRead More →

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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 →