Lovelace Colloquium 2009

[Kate Ho]

I've just got back from the Lovelace Colloquium held at Leeds University organised by Hannah Dee. The colloquium is an event for all computing students within the UK and included a series of talks from Gillain Arnold (IBM), Cornelia Boldyreff (Lincoln University), Julie Greensmith a.k.a. Dr Thrill (Nottingham), Eileen Brown (Microsoft) and Karen Groenink (Google). Finally it was topped off with a panel session which included Vicky Greaves from Google (who initially told Hannah about the Edinburgh University Hoppers, and asked me to help out). I also got a chance to (finally) meet both Christine Burns (Just Plain Sense) and Maggie Smith (womenintechnology.co.uk) - two people that I've heard a lot about but yet meet. It was also great to see Allan Pollard - the current President of the BCS to be present for the entire day.

Christine actually took some videos of the talks over the day, and here are two that were uploaded by her already:

Allan Pollard - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swqN7cjBAjM
Gillian Arnold - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX_wgiZ-DMU

I made notes over the presentations and will post them up here when I've recovered from the day!

Encouragingly, there were quite a few of us from Scotland: Aberdeen, Dundee and Edinburgh Universities were all represented. There were two of us present from Edinburgh - myself and Tina Li. Tina's poster was on her final year project supervised by Michael Herrmann titled: Controlling a Prosthetic Hand: Model based analysis of myo-electric data. Tina explained that Michael encouraged her to submit a poster and helped her in writing it which is something that should be recongised and highly commended.

Next event coming up in the calendar is the London Hopper Colloquium on 5th May, and of course, W-Tech 2009 - which I hear is the place to be on 24th June.