I really enjoyed talking to other students about their poster entries and learning about each of the different topics

"This year a group of us from Sheffield took part in the BCSWomen Ada Lovelace Colloquium, an annual conference and poster competition for female and non-binary students of Computing and related subjects. 

I heard about the event through Sheffield's Women in Computer Science Society (SWiCS), who hosted a really helpful information session about it in the first semester. To help us with our entries, SWiCS also organised an abstract-writing workshop to support our entries to the poster competition and coordinated the printing of the accepted posters with the Department of Computer Science; Dr Nafise Moosavi was also very supportive throughout this process. 

My poster entry focused on low-resource Natural Language Processing, exploring the growing disparities between NLP capabilities in English and lower-resourced languages and promising methods for improving NLP performance in low-resource contexts. I wanted to enter the competition because I knew that the conference would be a great place to meet other women studying computer science and to get advice and tips from experts in industry and academia. I was also tempted by the cash prizes on offer from BCSWomen for the best posters and from SWiCS for the best abstract from the Sheffield cohort!

I really enjoyed talking to other students about their poster entries and learning about each of the different topics, but the highlight of the day for me was a talk from Tafie James-William from Ocado Technology, who shared some fascinating insights into her work on Ocado's 3D storage grid system and her experience managing diverse teams and priorities. For anyone else considering entering or attending next year's event, I would wholeheartedly recommend it!"