The London Hopper Colloquium – here come the Girls

Falling numbers of women in computing is causing headscratching across the industry, but you wouldn’t think it judging by attendance at the recent Hopper Colloquium in London.

The annual Hopper Colloquium is named after Admiral Grace Murray Hopper - pioneer of the computer business language, COBOL – and aims 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. It is sponsored by Queen Mary University of London, Women@CL (Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge) and the British Computer Society (BCS), and routinely fields an impressive array of female talent both presenting and attending.

This year was no exception, with nearly 100 top-flight female researchers from industry and academia packed in to hear the speakers. UsabilityNews Advisor and Reader in Interaction, Media and Communication at Sheffield Hallam University, Ann Light, kicked off with a review of her work on the Fair Tracing project, which aims to support ethical trade by implementing IT tracking and tracing technologies in supply chains to provide consumers and producers with enhanced information. This will help bridge the digital divide between Northern consumers and Southern producers by using tracing technology to enhance the Fair Trade model of trade, and will enhance the value of such goods to consumers in the developed world seeking to make ethical purchasing choices. As Light explained, the project tackles deep ethical and political issues on a daily basis, reflecting the central importance of computing at all levels of the global economy now.

Thinking in a systematic and rigorous way – or ‘computational thinking’ - is a skill which can be applied to many important scientific disciplines, as the second speaker, Muffy Calder, Professor of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, so impressively demonstrated. Her work on the quantitative behaviour of systems has evolved from the computing lab into medical research and now focuses on signalling processes and pathways in cells, and especially cancer cells. It’s heartening evidence that technical knowledge is in high demand across many disciplines, with women particularly able to make interdisciplinary leaps.

Research goes on in industry too. Irina Tuduce, a Software Engineer at Google, is wrestling with the fundamental problem of computer memory – there’s never enough. She discussed the new pressures on search and the equally intense pressure on Google’s engineers to develop new algorithms to accommodate the astonishingly rapid growth of digital information. How long can it be before we’re routinely talking in terms of terabytes, petabytes – and even yottabytes?

The day concluded with a review of the many posters submitted by female computing students, which touched on areas as diverse as adaptive learning; augmented reality; data in biological networks; and advances in automatic software verification.

So while it's true that women's communication skills and working styles make them especially good in interdisciplinary and socio-technical areas, Hopper reveals there's plenty going on across the mainstream resarch areas affected by computing. Which is just about all of them.

Associated Link: The Hopper Colloquium

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