Women in Computing Research
2009 London Hopper Colloquium, 5th. May at BCS HQ, London
2009 pictures and write up available now.
You are invited to the 2009 London Hopper Colloquium for women in computing research. This year's meeting features talks from Holly Cummins (IBM), Hannah Dee (University of Leeds) and Nobuko Yoshida (Imperial College London), and a poster competition for new researchers.
The meeting is supported by Queen Mary, University of London; Women@CL; the British Computer Society (BCS) and IBM. It will be held at the BCS London Office in 5 Southampton Street, London on Tuesday, 5th of May 2009 (10:30am-4pm). 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.
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On this page:
- Programme
- Posters
- Registration
- Venue
- Supporters
- The Hopper Colloquia
- Organisers
- Abstracts and Biographies
PROGRAMME
10.30 - 11.00 Registration & Coffee
11.00 - 11.05 Welcome
Ursula Martin, Professor of Computer Science & Vice Principal for Science and Engineering, Queen Mary, University of London; & Director of Women@CL project.
Jan Peters, Managing Director of Katalytik; & Consultant, BCS Forum on Women.
11.05 - 11.10 Introduction to the day's events
Lourdes Agapito, Senior Lecturer of Computer Science, Queen Mary, University of London.
11.10 - 11.45 Understanding People and Places through Video
11.45 - 12.20 Safe Interactive Conversations through Mobile Process Theory
12.20 - 14.00 Buffet lunch, Networking Opportunity, Poster Judging and Display
14.00 - 14.35 Garbage Collection - Not Just Garbage
14:35 - 15:00 Networking Opportunity, Poster Display
15.00 - 15.50 Panel session with Speakers
15:50 - 16:00 Awarding of prizes for best posters
The programme was updated on 10 March, 2009 to reflect a change of speaker from IBM.
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 research work. Three prizes of £50 each, provided by IBM, 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.
The deadline for registration for the poster competition is Tuesday, 21 April. For instructions and guidelines go to Hopperposters.
REGISTRATION
The event is free, but places are limited. To register please go to Hopperregistration.
THE VENUE
The colloquium will be held at BCS London Office in First Floor, 5 Southampton Street London WC2E 7HA.
First Floor
The Davidson Building,
5 Southampton Street
London, WC2E 7HA
Tel: +44 (0)845 300 4417
Fax: +44 (0)1793 417669
QUEEN MARY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
Queen Mary, University of London is one of London and the UK's leading research-focused higher education institutions. Amongst the largest of the colleges of the University of London, Queen Mary's 3,000 staff deliver world class degree programmes and research across a wide range of subjects in Humanities, Social Sciences and Laws, in Medicine and Dentistry and in Science and Engineering.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 http://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
The British Computer Society (BCS) is the Chartered industry body for IT professionals, the Chartered Engineering Institution for Information Technology and a Chartered Science Institution. With its rapidly growing membership, BCS is playing an increasingly pivotal role in leading the development and implementation of world class standards for the IT profession through innovative products, services and support.
Through its specific “Professionalism in IT” programme, BCS is leading and building IT professionalism to levels which are currently only seen in more traditional long standing professions such as law, medicine, and accountancy but which will increasingly become the de facto standards for IT professionals.
IBM
IBM is a globally integrated enterprise operating in 170 countries. IBM United Kingdom's history began on November 19, 1951 and today IBM UK has around 20,000 employees, bringing innovative solutions to a diverse client base to help solve some of their toughest business challenges. In addition to being the world's largest IT and consulting services company, IBM is a global business and technology leader, innovating in Research and Development to shape the future of society at large. IBM's prized research, development and technical talent around the world partner with governments, corporations, thinkers and doers on ground breaking real world challenges to help make the world work better and build a smarter planet.
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: QUEEN MARY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
Lourdes Agapito, Karen Finesilver, Ursula Martin, Claire Revell, Caroline Wardle and Sue White.
ABSTRACTS AND BIOGRAPHIES
Garbage Collection - Not Just Garbage
Holly Cummins
Abstract: Garbage collection is well-understood, ubiquitous in modern runtimes, and very low-level in the context of a modern software stack. However, this doesn't mean there's nothing new to say or learn about garbage collection. Holly's talk will focus on garbage collection as a test case to explore the tension between high level and low level programming. Under what circumstances is it better to do things the 'hard way', and to what extent can the limitations of the 'easy way' be altered? Far from being a straightforward programming convenience, garbage collection is a rich research area with some intriguing paradoxes.
Biography: Holly Cummins is a performance tooling developer within the IBM Java Technology Centre. She leads development on IBM Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools for Java™ - Health Center and was the author of the GC and Memory Visualizer tool. Holly joined IBM in 2001. Before joining IBM, she completed a doctorate in Quantum Computation at the University of Oxford. Holly has also researched the use of magnetic resonance imaging in breast cancer detection. She has been an invited speaker at a variety of industrial events including Devoxx, JavaZone, The ServerSide Java Symposium, and The Great Indian Developer Summit.
Understanding People and Places through Video
Hannah Dee
Abstract: Computer Vision is the area of artificial intelligence concerned with the analysis and interpretation of images and video. Within artificial intelligence there is a constant tension between approaches that are seen as "top down" and theory driven, and those that are seen as "bottom up" and data driven. This talk will outline work on behaviour analysis (vision systems that try to answer the question "What is that person doing?") using cognitive models of navigation -- a system that is undoubtedly "top down". However it is impossible to work with cognitive models of navigation without having an understanding of the scene and the environment in which the agent is navigating. These scene models can be learned from data in a fundamentally "bottom up" fashion, and Hannah will describe new methods for doing this using unsupervised machine learning. Hannah will conclude with a consideration of broader issues and will try to place this type of research in the context of CCTV and social control.
Biography: Hannah Dee is a postdoctoral researcher in Computer Vision, working at the University of Leeds. Her main research interests are in machine learning and cognitive approaches to video analysis. Current projects include the automatic classification of surveillance cameras and webcams into semantic classes (road scene, indoor scene and so on), and the detection of cast shadows in video sequences. Hannah has worked at the University of Leeds, at the University of Kingston, and has been a visiting researcher at FEI Sao Paulo, Brazil. She is also Deputy Chair of BCSWomen, the British Computer Society's specialist group for women, and sits on the BCS Women's Forum strategic panel. This provides her with an extra research interest: investigating why there are so few women in computing.
Safe Interactive Conversations through Mobile Process Theory
Nobuko Yoshida
Abstract: Communication is becoming a fundamental element of applications development. Web applications increasingly combine the use of numerous distributed services, and corporate integration builds complex systems that communicate using standardised business and finance protocols. A frequent pattern in the communications programming involves processes interacting via some structured sequence of communications, which as a whole form a natural unit of conversation. Nobuko will give an introduction to a theory of mobile processes and its use for guaranteeing safe interactive conversations in Web Services and business protocols.
The theory of mobile processes was born in the U.K. around 1989, and since then has been actively studied all over the world. Recently the theory was applied to a description language for Web Services called choreography description language in The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Nobuko will discuss how a dialogue between industry and theory can not only benefit software developers but can also stimulate theoretical research.
Biography: Nobuko Yoshida is Reader in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London and an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow. She received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from Keio University in Japan. She then moved to the U.K., and started her life as a "mobile" researcher. She first studied concurrency theory in Manchester as a PhD student split between the University of Manchester and Keio University. She then moved to the University of Edinburgh to learn Game Semantics. After obtaining her PhD, Nobuko took a research assistant position in Sussex to study distributed mobile processes. Next she moved to the University of Leicester to take a lectureship. In 2002, she finally settled at Imperial College London as a lecturer.
Nobuko has been studying concurrency theory, type theory, logic, security, information flow analysis, functional and object-oriented programming. She is actively working on Web Services, business and finance protocols with industry collaborators. She is an official invited expert of the W3C WS-CDL working group and an adviser to the Pi4 Technologies.