on August 24, 2020
Running a Speaker Series is one of our favourite ways of supporting our mission to foster public awareness and understanding of computing as a science that works for the public good. We love introducing our members and followers to inspiring ideas through sharing cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs in the field of computer science. Through the webinars, we connect individuals working in the field of computing and encourage interdisciplinary and international research and cooperation.
Whilst running the ACM-W UK Webinar Series ‘Computing for Social Good’, we were fortunate to host amazing speakers and to provide a platform from which to share inspiring ideas and scientific research findings.
We would like to thank both our speakers and webinar attendees, as well as those of you who listened to the recorded talks published on the ACM-W UK Youtube channel. We hope you enjoyed the webinars as much as we did!
We would like to express our sincere appreciation to Dr. Poonam, ACM-W UK Chair and Lecturer (Assistant Professor), University of York, UK who organised and ran the webinars, to Anastasia Nazarova, ACM-W UK Communication and Project coordinator for advertising and co-hosting the webinars, and to the ACM-W UK team for suggesting the speakers and topics for the webinars and supporting the events through active participation.
During the period of four months from the middle of April until the end of July, ACM-W UK hosted 12 events, including nine webinars, two networking events, and one presentation.
Over 800 people attended events run by ACM W UK. Over 600 people watched videos of webinars published on the ACM W UK Youtube channel. The number of ACM-W UK active members increased from 120 to 300+ in 4 months. The members’ attendance retention rate has improved by 40%. The active involvement of volunteers was also significantly enhanced. We are planning to run a new speaker series, starting from the 11th of September. For information about it, please follow us on social media (Twitter, Linkedin, or Facebook).
You can listen to the recorded talks published on the ACM-W UK Youtube channel:
Title of Talk: “Building Code First: Girls – how we taught 10,000 women how to code”.
Biography: Amali de Alwis is currently UK Managing Director of Microsoft for Startups. She is a board member of Ada, the National College for Digital Skills, and the Institute of Coding
Title of Talk: Artificial Emotional Intelligence for Well-being.
Title of Talk: Listening to your health: Mobile Health Diagnostics through Audio Signals.
Biography: Prof. Cecilia Mascolo is a Full Professor of Mobile Systems in the Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge and part of the Systems Research Group
Title of Talk: “Performance in the age of cloud computing and edge computing”
Biography: Diana Andreea Popescu is a postdoctoral researcher working on IoT, edge computing, and data centre networking in the Systems Research Group at the University of Cambridge, Department of Computer Science and Technology.
Title of Talk: “Augmenting drug development and cardiology with computer science.”
Biography: Blanca Rodriguez is Professor of Computational Medicine and Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford
Speaker: Professor Elena Simperl.
Title of Talk: “The human face of AI: how collective and augmented intelligence can help solve societal problems”
Biography: Elena Simperl is a professor of computer science at King’s College London, a Fellow of the British Computer Society and former Turing fellow.
Dr. Kutoma J. Wakunuma
Title of Talk: “Critical Questions at the Intersection of Digitalisation, Development and Justice in the Global South”.
Biography: Dr. Kutoma Wakunuma is an Associate Professor at De Montfort University.