Clara shares their experience of their second BCS Women Lovelace Colloquium

What is the Lovelace Colloquium?

This year, two Edinburgh Napier Cyber Security students had their posters accepted to speak at BCS Women Lovelace Colloquium 2025 in Glasgow. The day consisted of industry speakers, poster-presenting sessions and sponsors’ stalls.

The Lovelace Colloquium was created by BCS Women in 2008 and is specifically for women and gender minorities in computing and related degree courses. The basis of the conference is to create a place for women and gender minorities in tech to come together and meet each other to present and discuss computing. There is a massive issue with the gender gap in computing (82% of computing students are male according to HESA data for 2022-23). Women and gender minorities face several barriers to thriving in their careers.

This conference brings women and gender minority students together, with a focus on the content we are learning, researching, or interested in. The conference partners with universities and aims to provide poster speakers the opportunity to attend, with as few barriers as possible. Travel and hotels, if needed, are covered by the conference or university. This year around 275 students attended.

My experience

This was my second year at the conference, so I knew a bit more about what to expect. Last year I had the most amazing time meeting so many interesting people and learning about a range of tech topics. This year, I presented on my dissertation, with a slight pivot to an area I didn’t get to fully explore in my dissertation. The poster is titled: Perceptual image hashing future in disinformation detection. I got to see so many posters and probably only saw a third of them in any depth. I learned some exciting things and talked to some people building off some incredible concepts.

I was able to attend the pre-conference social this year with my friend Joyee, who also presented a poster – Scroll, save, repeat: a digital hoarders’ game. We were able to talk to so many lovely people and also did a quiz on some historical gender equality facts. Did you know that, before 1975,  women weren’t allowed to open a bank account in solely their own name!

The speakers were so inspiring – Sharon Moore was the opening keynote and she talked about the importance of continually learning, keep learning about interesting things that you enjoy learning about. My favourite quote from her talk was “let go of confidence and find courage instead”. I strive for this in my life with my own mantra of ‘do it scared’. The second speaker was Bara Tirumasaletti, who looked at where and how technology and business strategy intersect. The third speaker was Carol Rennie Logan, who outlined why early career jobs that might be ‘boring’ can teach you an incredible amount and set you up with a strong foundation of skills. The final speaker was Dr Ilyana Hirskyj-Douglas who showed us her research into developing interactive computer systems for animals. Her research has so far shown that having for animals to have some autonomy over their lives and environment reduces stress behaviour. It also indicates that dogs do truly have best friends and a rich social network. I really enjoyed this talk especially at the end – it staved off my tiredness of the day and I got to see loads of cute dogs and parrots talking through a video call.

I read so many posters from improving digital literacy in the Deaf community, to a concept utilising Minecraft mods to teach physics and maths at Key Stage levels to using machine learning to identify financial fraud. See the abstract book for all the abstracts and speakers’ bios.

Why should you apply?

I strongly recommend to any women or gender minorities in computing or related at university to take advantage of this opportunity! Attending the colloquium both years allowed me to consolidate the network of people I met the previous year, exposed me to so many areas of research and the constant innovations happening in them. The speakers gave some sage advice on being yourself regardless of the work environment you find yourself in, and if something doesn’t work – then have the power to walk away.

There was employers from varying companies, organisations with the aim of assisting job applications/ CV building, and some universities promoting their postgraduate technology programmes. There was also a panel where we got to ask questions to a variety of people in academica, the industry and non-profits.

While this year, I did my poster on my dissertation, there are categories for each stage of university so you can apply at any stage of your university career. The networking opportunities, not just with employers but with other women and gender minorities in the field is invaluable. I left the conference feeling recharged and ready to tackle anything coming my way.

The conference has been steadily growing since 2008 so for the first time, next year’s conference in Bath will be two days long. I’m graduating this year so sadly won’t be able to attend as a poster presenter but I hope to attend as a general attendee.

By Clara O’Callaghan