Dare, always dare: Lovelace Colloquium 2025

With a variety of talks and over 150 female and non-binary students in attendance as well as academics and industry professionals, the event was filled to bursting.

Keynote: Sharon Moore

This year’s keynote address came from Sharon Moore MBE, Technical Director for IBM’s Technology Ecosystem. Sharon’s mission is transforming public services with technology and making a difference for the better, and she was awarded an MBE for her work for women in technology.

The heart of Sharon’s inspiring, warm address was ‘confidence is overrated; find courage instead’. She encouraged the audience to be brave in pursuing their goals even when they didn’t feel confident. ‘You’re already tenacious, imaginative, committed’, she said, ‘so let go of the confidence, find the courage instead.’ She further advised that the most important skills are adaptability and knowing both your potential and your limits so that you can expand yourself without overstretching. She discussed her career, fuelled by her passion for using data and technology to improve public services, and encouraged following joy, saying ‘a lot of the things I’ve done have just been because I’m curious and I want to make a difference.’

Sharon also discussed how her perspective on workplace sexism has changed throughout her career, saying ‘I used to think it was a good thing to be ‘one of the guys’, and now it frustrates me that I thought that [I needed to be].’ She advised attendees to always amplify each other’s voices.

Sharon summed up her message with the quote, ‘dare, always dare’. Uttered by the first woman to receive an honorary Master’s degree from the University of Oxford, Lilian Baylis.

Additional speakers

The second speaker was Bara Tirumasaletti, Head Of Process and Improvement at Ocado Technology. Her talk explored how technology and business strategy intersect. Bala also highlighted the importance of applying to firms where diversity is evident, because it’s a good indicator that you’ll be valued as an individual person. The third speaker was Carol Rennie Logan, Principal Engineer at Equator. She advised attendees to remember to improve soft skills as well as hard, to ignore impostor syndrome as much as possible, and not to skip the 'boring’ early career jobs because they teach you huge amounts.

The final speaker was Director of the Animal Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Glasgow, Dr Ilyana Hirskyj-Douglas, who develops interactive computer systems for animals to control their environment. Her research has so far shown that having some environmental autonomy improves stress behaviours. She hopes this research will help improve animal welfare.

Ending the day was a panel made up of Mariana Fonseca, Senior Robotics Research Engineer at Ocado Technology; Carron Shankland, Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow; Amy Muncer, Director, Youth Community at RS Group; and Jade Wright, Director of Student Experience at Rewriting the Code. The emergent themes were ensuring you’re always learning, networking with people in your field, and amplifying each other’s voices.

Speaking with the students

Joanna Jardine is in the first year of the Graduate Apprenticeship BSc for Software Engineering at the University of Glasgow, working as a software engineer at renewable energy company Smarter Grid Solutions.

‘We create software products that manage distributed, clean and flexible energy assets and are actively working towards a net-zero future’, Joanna explains. Asked what inspired the research behind her poster entitled How Digital Waste is Polluting our Planet, she says ‘it was an eye-opening experience to see the statistics on the excessive and unnecessary amount of digital waste and electricity usage within the technology industry… finding and providing solutions starts with awareness, so I wanted to bring this to the table.’ Despite admitting such a topic can make you feel pessimistic, Joanna says ‘what actually got me excited was discovering the many ways we can help, far beyond what I included on my poster.’ Asked what role she hopes to play in the future of STEM, she says ‘I hope that I can inspire other women to pursue their passion in the field and show them that it absolutely can be done.’

2025 final year finalist Madison Lardner’s poster was entitled Mind-Reading Artificial Intelligence. She is a returning prize winner, awarded for AI vs Dementia in 2024. Engaging and infectiously passionate, Madison tells me that what motivates her is the idea of using technology to benefit people in real ways. ‘People forget about the real applications of this technology because they get lost in the fun stuff like ChatGPT — I want to be involved in doing something really impactful that genuinely benefits the general public. There’s also specifically a lack of research on using AI with the brain, despite other applications, such as those used for breast cancer diagnosis, already reaching the stage of being tested in the NHS. So that’s what I’m interested in.’

Speaking about the gender imbalance in STEM, Madison remarks that it should never have happened in a field that was, in so many ways, founded by women — not least Ada Lovelace. She comments incredulously, ‘Look at this room full of 158 presenters, all wanting to do amazing stuff — and we just can’t sometimes because we get blocked [by this imbalance].’

Asked how being in STEM has changed her approach to other areas of life, Madison says ‘You get used to being turned away from things you want in a male dominated environment. That has taught me to be confident and that if you push through, then usually you can do it, and that’s helped me do and achieve so many things.’ Looking to the future, Madison is optimistic. ‘It’s evolving very rapidly; even at the university open days I work, there are a lot more girls than there were. I won’t say I want to be at the forefront of the movement, because it’s already happening, so I’ll just say I really want to be an active part of pushing it even further.’

The method behind the magic

An event like this doesn’t happen on its own, so I caught up with three key organisers: Event Chair Dr Safia Barikzai, Deputy Head, School of Computer Science and Digital Technologies at London South Bank University; Local Chair Dr Matthew Barr, Head of the Education and Practice (EAP) section in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow; and Deputy Chair Dr Hannah Dee, Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at Aberystwyth University and founder of the Lovelace Colloquium.

I speak to Safia in the downstairs Beer Bar — ironically the quietest spot as the Colloquium blazes upstairs. For Safia, one of the hidden rewards of the colloquium is how much it benefits not just the students, but the academics and industry professionals who also get to make new connections. ‘That’s what Lovelace is about — connecting people.’

Her most unexpected lesson from organising this year’s event has been that sometimes things happen for a reason. ‘We originally had a different Glasgow venue lined up, but for various reasons it didn’t work out, and so we ended up here in GUU — given the history of the building not allowing women until 1980, it’s amazing that we’re essentially occupying it 45 years later. So that spanner in the works actually made things better, and learning that has taught me to go with the flow a bit more.’

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Catching Matthew as he darts from one room to another, I ask him what people might not expect about the colloquium. ‘The sheer breadth of the topics covered in the research posters’, he says. ‘People have quite a narrow view of what computer science and technology is, but I’ve seen everything from robot fish to news aggregators that filter out bad news here. It’s incredible.’ As the only man in sight, I also ask him how it has felt to be in the minority. ‘I am never the minority in the room; I’m a white cis male with a beard and grey hair, I couldn’t get more average. It was actually exciting to experience, which is quite frightening and tells you how much needs to change. It wasn’t unpleasant because it was a novelty and it was for a good reason, but I can only imagine how that would feel as your constant experience.’

At the end of the day, Hannah makes time for a chat. For Hannah, the most rewarding part is seeing nervous students come out of their shells over the course of the event, and the most unexpected lesson has been how new travelling is to a lot of the attendees — some of whom are just 18. ‘I had one attendee a few years ago tell me they were excited because they’d never had a double bed to themselves before’, Hannah says. ‘It takes a lot of bravery to take on such a new experience and that can be quite transformational. The life experience is just as important as the academic one.’

She also says that one problem she would love to solve is long term sponsorship. ‘All our sponsors are absolutely fantastic and we’re so grateful to all of them for their funds, enthusiasm and involvement, but getting new funding every year is like a treadmill, so it would be really nice to have some long term sponsors.’

Finally, in light of it being the colloquium’s eighteenth birthday, I ask — what would its favourite drink be? Laughing, she says ‘A few years ago I would have said slightly warm white wine because that’s what we usually end up serving. But seriously, we’re the ‘Wokey McWokeface’ of conferences, we have been since the beginning; we have such a range of identities, backgrounds and belief systems, and so many people don’t drink, that I don’t think we can say that the Colloquium’s drink is booze — so something alcohol free.’ Here’s hoping we’ll see the Wokey McWokeface mocktail being served next year.

Prize winners 2025

The first place prize winners this year, from first year to MSc, were Rose Gowan, Durham University; Isabella Mullings Wong, University of Bath; Sakshi Paygude, Keele University; and Caitlin Haddow, University of Bath. The People’s Choice Award went to Saxon Partridge Smith, Nottingham Trent University. For a full list of prize winners and their projects please visit the BCS Lovelace Colloquium 2025 page.

The BCS Lovelace Colloquium 2026 will be hosted by the University of Bath on the 9th and 10th of April.