London Hopper Colloquium 2020

Featuring women speakers talking about their research, a spotlight competition open to postgraduate students, and opportunities to network with other new researchers in computing, this year’s event will be held online, via Go To Webinar.  We will hear from women about their work on logic, quantum theory and digital music.

Spotlight Competition Eligibility: Women* research masters students and PhD students, with a Computer Science focus, enrolled at UK universities.

Audience attendance is open to all.

*Please note that London Hopper uses an inclusive definition of “woman” and “female”, which means all individuals who identify fully or partly as women. We also welcome non-binary people to attend and present, and everyone is welcome to attend as an audience member.

Submission deadline is midnight, 1st of October 2020.

Research Spotlight competition 

The Research Spotlight competition focuses on female research Masters  and PhD students, providing them with a friendly forum for communicating the essence of their work. This will be via 3-5 minutes (depending on the number of accepted submissions) recorded presentations, broadcast during Hopper 2020. Presentation topics may be from any research area within the field of computing, and may encompass interdisciplinary studies connected to computing. There will be 10-12 spotlight presentations, split between two thirty-minute sessions. Prizes will be awarded for the best research spotlight presentations and each entrant will also receive a prize.

Programme

09:50 - 10:00 - Online Registration

10:00 - 10:05 - Welcome, Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh (UCL)

10:05 - 10:10 - London Hopper History, Caroline Wardle (UCL)

10:10 - 10:40 - First Speaker: Sharon Moore (IBM)

10:45 - 11:15 - Research Spotlight 1, Student Recorded Presentations

11:15 - 11:25 - Coffee Break

11:25 - 11:55 - Second Speaker: Professor Emine Yilmaz (UCL)

12:00 - 12:30 - Research Spotlight 2, Student Recorded Presentations

12:30 - 13:45 - Lunch break (Judges meet privately to choose the Spotlight winner)

13:45 - 14:15 - Third Speaker: Miriam Backens (Birmingham)

14:20 - 14:50 - Fourth Speaker: Beckie Steward (Imperial)

14:50 - 15:00 - Spotlight Prize

Prizes

Speaker Prizes: the following three prizes will be awarded:

Speaker prize (chosen by the judges):

• £150

• Invitation to be a speaker in the following year's London Hopper.

• 1-year membership of BCS

Runner up Prize (chosen by the judges)

• £150

People's Choice Prize (chosen by popular vote of the attendees)

• £150

Finalist Prizes: The following finalist prize* will be given to each finalist who makes a presentation but who does not win one of the 3 speaker prizes.

• £30


*The cash prizes and awards are provided by IBM; the 1-year membership of BCS is provided by BCSWomen.

How to enter the competition

When you register for London Hopper you will be asked to send in an abstract describing your proposed research topic. Submission deadline is midnight, 1st of October 2020.

These abstracts will be evaluated and the top 10-12 will be selected and placed on a finalist list. Other strong abstracts will be placed on a reserve list in rank order. You will receive notification of your acceptance by 8th of October 2020.

All finalists are then required to submit an acceptable set of four Powerpoint slides (no dynamic Powerpoint slides allowed) and a recording of their presentation, on their research topic, by 22nd of October 2020. When you register for the competition, you will be sent a Powerpoint presentation template and an example set of slides to guide you in preparing your own slides. We recommend that members of the reserve list also prepare their talks and slides in case they are invited to participate in the Research Spotlight at short notice. At London Hopper itself, the finalists’ recorded presentations and slides will be broadcasted by the person in charge.

Preparing your Spotlight slides

When you register for the Research Spotlight competition, we will provide you with a Powerpoint presentation template and an example set of slides to guide you in preparing your own slides. All finalists must submit an acceptable set of 4 slides (no dynamic Powerpoint slides allowed) for their presentation and a recording of it, by 22nd of October 2020.

Because of timing constraints, the number of spotlight entries is limited to 10-12 and a reserve list will be maintained. Finalists will be disqualified if they have not submitted an acceptable set of slides and a recording of their presentation by 22nd of October, 2020. If a presentation time slot becomes available, the top-ranked member of the reserve list will be invited to join the finalists and participate in the Research Spotlight.

Spotlight Presentations

Your recording will be stopped at the specified minute mark., you will not be allowed to over-run. You may not use props during your presentation; you are being judged on the quality of your recorded presentation, slides and written abstract.

Judging Criteria

For the Spotlight and Runner Up prizes, the judges will have read the abstracts beforehand but will also judge the competition on the quality of the presentations and slides. The criteria the judges will use in selecting winners are:

• Communication – How successful overall were you in explaining your research topic through the presentation, slides and abstract?

• Presentation – Did you present a clear story with the right amount of scientific and/or technical content?

• Slides – Were your slides well designed in terms of images, graphics and text? • Abstract – Did your abstract clearly describe the research topic?

For the People’s Choice Prize, each attendee at London Hopper will be provided with an entry to a voting system and will be invited to cast a single vote for the prize winner.

Points to note

1. In the event of a "tie" for the People’s Choice prize, the judges will choose a single winner from the tied entrants.

2. If you have already won a prize in an earlier London Hopper Colloquium Spotlight or Poster competition, you are not eligible to enter this year’s Research Spotlight competition.

3. The organisers reserve the right to reject a Hopper Research Spotlight submission if the content of the abstract or slides are deemed inappropriate.

Speakers

Sharon Moore MBE is CTO for Public Sector in IBM UK, building technical strategy through examining the direction of public service and the needs of citizens, and identifying how technology can support and accelerate that journey.

You’ll often find her on stage, and she’s shared stories at GovTech 2019, the Public Sector AI Summit, CogX 2019, and other events that provide insight as to the difference technology can make to public sector.

Sharon takes an active role in shaping technical thought leadership within the public sector; for example, in leading IBM’s contribution towards ‘The Cloud Playbook’ recently delivered as part of the One Government Cloud Strategy. She was key to the recently-signed MOU for IBM Cloud with Crown Commercial Services, the UK Cabinet Office executive agency and trading fund.

Sharon is also a board member of CENSIS, the Innovation Centre for Sensor and Imaging Systems. She was honoured with an MBE in the Queen’s birthday honours 2018 for Services to Women in Technology Based Industries and presented with the 'Inspirational Women in Leadership' award at the inaugural Scotland Women in Technology Awards 2017.

Sharon is Deputy Chair of BCSWomen, leads BCSWomen activity in Scotland, and is a board member of Scotland Women in Technology. She has found herself in the Computer Weekly Top 50 Women of Influence since 2016, rising to number 18 in 2019.

Title: When is Innovation not Innovation? How to make sure great tech gets great results.Abstract: AI, machine learning, blockchain, IoT... how often do feel tempted to play tech buzzword bingo at conferences like these? We can do some magnificent things with tech, that will make a real difference but is everything we try innovation? In this session Sharon will share examples of the potential for technology - particularly within the public sector - and explore how to make sure it gets results for everyone.

Professor Emine Yilmaz - I am a Professor and Turing Fellow at University College London, Department of Computer Science. I also work as an Amazon Scholar for Amazon. My research interests lie in the areas of information retrieval, data mining, and applications of machine learning, probability and statistics.

I am a recipient of the Early Career Fellowship from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). To this date, I have received approximately 1.5 million GBP external funding from funding agencies including European Union, EPSRC, Google, Elsevier and Bloomberg.

I have served in various senior roles, including co-editor-in-chief for the Information Retrieval Journal, a member of the editorial board for the AI Journal and an elected member of the executive committee for ACM SIGIR.

I am the recipient of Karen Sparck Jones 2015 Award for the contributions of my work to the information retrieval research. I am also one of the recipients of the Google Faculty Research Award in 2015 and the Bloomberg Data Science Research Award in 2018. 

Title: New Ways of Thinking about Search with New Devices Abstract: With the introduction of new types of devices in our everyday lives (e.g. smart phones, smart watches, smart glasses, etc.), the interfaces over which IR systems are used are becoming increasingly smaller, which limits the interactions users may have. Searching over devices with such small interfaces is not easy as it requires more effort to type and interact with such systems. Hence, building IR systems that can reduce the interactions needed with the device is highly critical. Design, optimisation and evaluation of retrieval systems has traditionally focused on identifying and retrieving documents relevant to a query submitted by the user. However, with the new devices over which search engines are used for, effort to find relevant information plays a significant role for user satisfaction. In this talk, I will first argue that effort to find relevant information in a document can have a significant impact on user satisfaction, arguing that more research should be put into devising retrieval methods that aim at minimising user effort, given a query. Ideally, a search engine should be able to understand the reason that caused the user to submit a query and it should help the user achieve the actual task by guiding her through the steps (or subtasks) that need to be completed. Devising such task based information retrieval systems have several challenges that have to be tackled. In the second part of this talk, I will focus on the problems that need to be solved when designing such systems, as well as the progress that we have made in these areas.

Dr Rebecca Stewart - Challenges and Opportunities in working with E-Textiles. Dr. Becky Stewart is a Lecturer in the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College London. Coming from a music technology background, Becky's research centres around body-centric computing.

Focusing on technologies such as binaural audio and e-textiles, she is interested in mediating embodied interactions with wearable computing without relying on screens or gadgets.

Title: Challenges and Opportunities in working with E-Textiles

Abstract: Electronic textiles (e-textiles) are conductive fabrics and threads that can be used to form circuitry which can be directly integrated into wearable garments or other soft furnishings like seat covers to facilitate wearable or ubiquitous computing.

This talk will present recent work showing how e-textile pressure and stretch sensors can perform tasks such as detecting body movement and even discriminating between social activities such as speaking and listening.

However, there are still significant challenges in prototyping with this technology and moving it to manufacturing environments. Inter- and trans-disciplinary expertise is required from a broad range of fields — from signal processing to clothing pattern cutting — in order to generate robust and reliable sensing systems.

Dr Miriam Backens  is working on quantum computation and interfaces between classical and quantum complexity.  Miriam Backens studied Physics and Mathematics at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, graduating with a BA (Hons) in Physics and an MMath.

They went on to do their PhD research in quantum computing at the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford. During a postdoc at the University of Bristol, Miriam became interested in algorithms and computational complexity beyond quantum computation, leading them to return to Oxford as a postdoc in the Theory and Algorithms group. In 2019, they became a Career Development Fellow in Computer Science at Balliol College, before moving to Birmingham as a Lecturer in Computer Science. 

Title: Classical complexity of counting problems via quantum computing

Abstract: Quantum computing research looks at how to exploit effects from quantum physics to solve certain computational problems more efficiently than would otherwise be possible. (Classical) computational complexity aims to classify broad families of computational problems according to how difficult they are to solve on a classical, i.e. non-quantum, computer.

In this talk, I will show how knowledge from quantum computing is nevertheless very useful in determinining the classical computational complexity of counting problems: computational problems that involve computing a weighted sum, such as the number of independent sets of some graph, or the total weight of independent sets where each set is weighted by its size.