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For our upcoming ITiCSE talk (details and paper download here) we asked a bunch of women computer scientists a load of questions. At the end of the questionnaire we asked “What’s the best bit about computing?”, and “What’s the worst bit about computing?”. I’ve collated all the answers to these questions and turned it into an animated gif, shown below: I love the way that some things come out both best and worst (and it’s fascinating how many times “programming” comes up in both categories). Because I am a proper geek, I made the gif by writing a hacky perl program. So if you haveRead More →

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I went to the London Hopper Colloquium on Tuesday. It’s a one-day event for women PhD students organised by QMUL & Women@CL, sponsored by IBM and with a lot of BCS support. I’m probably an unbiased reporter as I was an invited speaker this time (my first ever invited talk, whoo!) but I thought it’d be good to post about it so here goes. There were 60-70 women there, mostly PhD students, doing research in computing. Many of these had entered the poster contest, which as a judge I found awesome. It was so hard to judge. There were posters on such a wide rangeRead More →

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Inspired by Wendy Tan White’s post about how she got into tech, this is my story: At school I was keen on maths and science, and had a great maths teacher (Miss Lolley – truly inspirational). I was (and still am) also a big reader – both my parents have been English teachers at some point in their careers and they transmitted their love of literature early on and it’s stuck. William Gibson’s Neuromancer introduced me to the idea of artificial intelligence and I knew pretty much straight away that building clever systems was what I wanted to do. And so when it came toRead More →

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The BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium was last week. This is a one-day event for women students of computing, and it’s open to students from across the UK. I’ll do a full report for the BCS website shortly, but I wanted to get a few ideas down quickly and to put out a request to attendees for more photos! It was an amazing day for me – it’s so great to see an event come together and for all the effort to pay off. The posters were fantastic and the enthusiasm of the student presenters was contagious – and after all is said and done it’s theRead More →

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I met Sue Black for the first time on 9 February 2006. I’d entered the poster contest at the BCSWomen Grace Hopper Colloquium for women PhD students, and Sue introduced the day and judged the poster contest. It was my first women-in-computing event and to be honest I wasn’t sure what to expect. Working in computer vision I am quite used to being the only woman in the room at conferences and so on, which is odd, but you adapt. Would an all-women techy event be different? Geeky? Bitchy? Competitive? It turned out that all-women techy events are none of the above. It was supportive,Read More →