Women in Computing Research

2008 London Hopper Colloquium - 1 May 2008

You are invited to the 2008 London Hopper Colloquium for women in computing research. This year's meeting has talks from Ann Light (Sheffield Hallam), Muffy Calder (Glasgow) and Irina Tuduce (Google), and a poster competition for new researchers.

The meeting is sponsored by Queen Mary University of London, Women@CL and the British Computer Society (BCS), and will be held at BCS London Office in 5 Southampton Street, London on the 1st of May 2008 (11:00am-4:00pm). The aim of the colloquium is to provide a forum for women computer science researchers to come together to exchange ideas, form new collaborations, and more simply, become aware of the network of women conducting research in computer science. Talks are aimed at Masters level up and will show the exciting research carried out by women, at all stages of their career, and from diverse backgrounds.

On this page:

• Posters
• Programme
• Registration and Venue
• Sponsors
• The Hopper Colloquia
• Abstracts and Biographies

POSTERS

In addition to talks and panel discussions, there will be a poster session where PhD and postdoctoral researchers will have an opportunity to present their work. Three prizes of £50 each, funded by Google, will be awarded for the best posters. Posters may cover any topic within the field of computer science and/or interdisciplinary studies connected to computer science. All submissions will be reviewed through a peer review process. If your poster is accepted, you will be notified by 17th April 2008, and a display area will be available to you on the day of the colloquium. The accepted abstracts will also be combined into a proceedings, to be distributed on the day of the Colloquium.

To submit a poster, please send an email to Louise Yahiaoui at louise@dcs.qmul.ac.uk by 10th April 2008, containing: your name, institution/affiliation, student/postdoc status, contact email address, poster title, PDF or plain text abstract describing your poster (500 words or less). Registration for the competition will be on a first come, first served basis and entrants are advised to submit their poster materials as soon as possible.

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PROGRAMME

11.00 - 11.30   Registration & Coffee

11.30 - 11.35   Welcome

11.35 - 11.40   Introduction to the day's events

11.40 - 12.15   Food Miles, Value Chains and Politics at the Interface

12.15 - 13.30   Buffet lunch, Networking opportunity, Poster judging and display

13.30 - 14.05   Computational thinking and interdisciplinary research

14.05 - 14.40   Not Enough Memory

14:40 - 15:00   Networking opportunity with speakers, Poster display

15.00 - 15.50   Panel session

15:50 - 16:00   Awarding of prizes for best posters

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REGISTRATION

The event is free, but places are limited. Please contact: hopper08@dcs.qmul.ac.uk to register.

THE VENUE

The colloquium will be held at BCS London Office in First Floor, 5 Southampton Street London WC2E 7HA. Directions are given in the PDF document:
http://www.epsg.org.uk/locations/SouthamptonStGuide.pdf .

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WOMEN@CL

Women@CL provides local, national and international activities for women engaged in computing research and academic leadership. It aims to support women in computing research, with a focus on interdisciplinary research, leadership and enterprise, through a programme of career development activities that include regional and national workshops, mentoring and networking. For more details see www.cl.cam.ac.uk/women. It is hosted by the Computer Science departments of the University of Cambridge and Queen Mary University of London.

BRITISH COMPUTER SOCIETY

Established in 1957, the British Computer Society (BCS), with a world-wide membership of over 50,000 members in over 100 countries, is the leading body for those working in IT. BCS is licensed by the Engineering Council to award Chartered Engineer status (CEng) and Incorporated Engineer status (IEng); and more recently by the Science Council to award Chartered Scientist status (CSci). For more details see http://www.bcs.org/ . The BCS is committed to inclusion in its activities of the whole membership and has established a new Forum on Women to drive part of this policy agenda.

GOOGLE

Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google's targeted advertising program, which is the largest and fastest growing in the industry, provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. For more details, visit www.google.com .

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THE HOPPER COLLOQUIA

The model for the colloquium is the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing held annually in North America, which encourages professional networks of women in computer science. These American meetings are held as a tribute to Admiral Grace Murray Hopper - pioneer of the computer business language COBOL - who inspired many young US Naval computing students during her heyday and still continues to inspire many computer scientists around the world many years after her death.

Organisers

Fiona Billingsley, Women@CL
Hanne Gottliebsen, Queen Mary University of London
Roger Law, Queen Mary University of london
Ursula Martin, Queen Mary University of London
Ella Rice, Queen Mary University of London
Caroline Wardle, Queen Mary University of London
Sue White, Queen Mary University of London
Louise Yahiaoui, Queen Mary University of London

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ABSTRACTS AND BIOGRAPHIES

Food Miles, Value Chains and Politics at the Interface: Anne Light

Abstract: The Fair Tracing project (http://www.fairtracing.org) aims to help bridge the digital divide between Global North consumers and Global South producers by using tracing technology to map the production chain. It has as its heart the representation of a socio-technical system with an emphasis on the social, economic and environmental aspects of food manufacture, taking as case studies the shade-grown coffee of Southern India and a wine-making collective in Chile. It seeks to blend expressive audio-visual and narrative materials that represent the communities at each stage in the chain with simple auto-identity technology for carrying information about each product's creation and journey. Key design questions include how to ensure that the system is usable in the field, is useful both to share information and to inform, and is used by the people it might benefit. To answer these questions, we have to evaluate specific interaction and interface choices as well as the wider social context into which these would fit. So, how do we deliver:

• Information customised to reflect consumers' priorities and tasks?
• Stories and facts, diagrams and narratives that work together?
• A flexible response to the changing face of environmentalism?
• A fit with sensitive commercial and cultural contexts of use?

Biography: Dr Ann Light is Reader in Interaction, Media and Communication in the Communication and Computing Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University, and a Senior Research Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. She is interested in the social impact of technology and the politics of participation in design, explored in a range of current projects including Democratising Technology (DemTech: www.demtech.qmul.ac.uk), Fair Tracing, and Practical Design for Social Action (www.technologyandsocialaction.org). She helps run a charity using ICT for cultural exchange between Africa and Europe (www.fiankoma.org) and works a day a week in a user-centred design company (www.flowinteractive.com). Until last year, she also ran UsabilityNews for the BCS' Interaction Group.

Ann publishes in the areas of human computer interaction, usability, interactive media and design, with a focus upon meaning-making and experience of interactive technology, begun in studies of websites and online discussion lists in 1995 and now turned upon mobile and ubiquitous contexts of use. She has a BA in English, a PGCE in Drama, an MSC in Knowledge Based Systems, and a DPhil in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence.

Computational thinking and interdisciplinary research: Muffy Calder

Abstract: A most important aspect of Computer Science is computational thinking. This means thinking clearly and precisely about what a system does and how it does it, what are the right abstractions (what can you leave out, what must be considered) and the best representations, what is the power and/or constraints of the underlying machinery, what are the interfaces, who or what uses them and what are the conditions for operation. The great thing about computational thinking is that it doesn't just apply to computer or IT systems, it can bring insight into systems in nearly every aspect of our lives. Muffy will discuss the nature of computational thinking and how it has influenced her own interdisciplinary research in systems biology.

Biography: Dr. Muffy Calder is Professor of Computing Science in the Department of Computing Science at University of Glasgow. She was Head of Department for four years until recently and is currently on sabbatical. Her research is in modelling and reasoning about the behaviour of complex software and biochemical systems using computer science, mathematics and automated reasoning tools. Her main research interests are in concurrent systems, process algebras and model checking. Recently she has become involved in computational biology, working with researchers from cardiovascular medicine and Cancer Research UK. She has long-standing industrial collaborations with many world-leading IT companies and in the distant past has been a research fellow at BT Laboratories and DEC in California.

Muffy has a PhD in Computational Science from the University of St. Andrews and a BSc in Computing Science from the University of Stirling. She was on the Scottish Science Advisory Committee for 5 years, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the British Computer Society and the Institution of Engineering and Technology.

Not Enough Memory: Irina Tuduce

Abstract: Over the last four decades, computer technology has improved each year. Occasionally technological breakthroughs have occurred and sometimes development has stalled, but both processor and memory technology have improved performance at a constant rate. The typical trend line is canonized by Moore's law that circuits-per-chip increases by a factor of four every three years. In other words, memories get four times larger every three years.

Although the amount of main memory has increased significantly over the past decades, application developers have even more aggressively increased their demands. Many of today's computer applications require large amounts of system memory. This is especially true with very large and complex applications that provide hundreds of functionalities and handle large amounts of data, e.g., computer-aided design systems, search engines and databases. Research addressing some of these challenges will be presented in this talk.

Biography: Dr. Irina Tuduce joined Google in January 2006. Her interest areas are: computer systems with a focus on system design, high performance computing, system and cluster performance analysis. Irina has been working on infrastructure related projects, following her projects through the entire life-cycle, from performance benchmarking, system design and implementation, to performance improvement and production readiness. She is currently working on cluster performance and visualization.

Irina obtained an Engineering Degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania in 1999, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH, in 2005. She is based in Google's Zurich office, Switzerland.

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