More than 200 female undergraduates and masters students gathered at the University of Salford in April this year for the 2019 BCS Women Lovelace Colloquium. The colloquium, now in its 12th year, is an annual one day conference for women studying computing and related subjects. Each year there are both formal talks and informal networking opportunities, where students have the opportunity to discuss their work via a poster competition. Anyone whose poster is accepted gets their accommodation, food and travel expenses covered.

Lancaster University was represented by two fantastic first year students, as well as two PhD researchers who were part of the poster judging panel.

The event started the night before with a social event and quiz hosted by Manchester digital, who also provided pizzas. The STEAM themed quiz consisted of 5 rounds, including and engineering challenge to build a model of the shard out of paper straws and post-its (fully recyclable :-) ) and a maths round of countdown, complete with clock and stress-inducing countdown music. The Lancaster crew were joined by some great students from St Andrews, who were extraordinarily excited to be able to buy alcohol at the supermarket after 10pm, and we came in a not too shabby 3rd out of 14ish.

The next day we rocked up at Salford University to set up the posters, along with a range of employers and sponsors including Google, Amazon, AND Digital, JP Morgan and GCHQ, to name but a few. Bloomberg deserve a special mention as they were the conference cake sponsors, a super-essential role.

The prestigious event was opened by Vice-Chancellor Professor Helen Marshall and inspirational talks were kicked off by Helen Leigh, author of The Crafty Kid’s Guide to DIY Electronics and inventor of the MINI-MU glove – a gesture controlled coded wearable instrument used by artists including Ariana Grande.

Other speakers included Natalia Miller, a software engineer at BBC Sport (MediaCityUK), Katerina Domenikou, Senior Software Developer at Bloomberg and Sana Belguith, a lecturer on the Cyber Security programme at the University of Salford. The posters were fascinating, and on a wide range of topics including ‘What would Avengers be like with Mr Bean as Thor - How can deepfakes disrupt the film industry?’ and ‘Could computer science cure cancer?’ Prizes were awarded in several categories; first year, second year, final year, MSc and a people’s choice award, and prizes consisted of cash and goody bags from the sponsors.

One of the Lancaster University undergraduate attendees said 'Meeting and hearing out the stories of women who have been in tech industry for such a long time was truly inspirational, as well as knowing that they were going through a lot to get where they are now. I could listen to them for a whole day, I have never felt so motivated in my entire life'

Next year’s conference is in Glasgow, and hopefully even more of our fantastic undergraduate and Master students will attend.

You can find out more about the conference here and also look at the book of abstracts.