I was excited to have the opportunity to attend the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium as a poster presenter this year. The Colloquium is an event for female and non-binary undergraduate and taught masters students. As a part-time MSc student whose day job involves a certain amount of writing about up-and-coming tech, for me it was a great opportunity to catch up with some of what's going on in the field.
The centrepiece of the day was the poster session. With over 150 posters, it wasn't possible to see them all, but it was fun asking people about their subject and getting a glimpse both into the huge variety of specific topics, and into some of the current main trends – for example, AI turns up everywhere these days and it's great to see the many potential medical applications. Support for women and other minorities in tech was another theme that appeared in several posters. My own poster was about modelling Scottish country dancing and I was pleased to find its spot was close to another dance-themed poster and a music-themed poster.
However, while the posters were fun, what I got the most from personally were actually the talks. In particular I was fascinated by Carron Shankland's keynote on representation of women in AI-generated images – including age profiles, Tafline James-Willam's role managing a technical team for Ocado pick robots, the panel session about life as a woman in tech, Gabriella Pizzuto's sketch of working with robots in a chemistry lab.
Update 2024-05-16: A few weeks after the colloquium, Tara Brendle's talk The Ubiquity of Braids established a link between braids, and Ocado warehouse robot picking (the topic of Tafline James-William's Lovelace talk): after all, the robots, just like my Scottish dancers, need to move around a space without crashing into one another, and there is a set of fixed "home bases" where they can (e.g.) recharge... ( 51 minutes into Tara Brendle's talk). Neat!