Our June GIrl Geek Dinner is hosted by Oracle 

Weds June 22nd

The “Web of Data” is growing – we’re here to explain what it is, how it works, and shows the Girl Geeks how to be a part of it. This session will be 3 short presentations about 15 minutes long each, followed by a Q&A.

Jen Williams is Senior Software Developer at Networked Planet and builds Semantic Web tech to help organisations take control of their data. Jen will be introducing the evening and doing a short #101 talk about linked and open data on the web.

Martha King from Knowle West Media Centre will be telling us about Bristol’s “Citizen Sensing” project, which has seen artists and communities across Bristol exploring city issues that could be addressed using sensor technologies. The issue that has gained most momentum is tackling damp in homes.

Katherine Rooney from Bristol City Council’s ‘City Innovation team’ manages the Council’s Open Data work. With a background in community engagement, behaviour change, business development and innovation within the UK environmental charity sector, Katherine believes that Smart Cities are really all about people and not technology, and comes to the open data scene from quite a non-techy angle.

 

After the presentation and any questions we will open the floor up for a discussion,  if anyone feels like they would like to bring along any ppt’s or links that they want to share for discussion then please bring it along on a USB or mail the team with info and we can share this during the discussion period. Don’t forget – you don’t have to work in the industry or be a geek, this is a group for anyone with an interest in the subject!
Please sign up on our meetup page here MEETUP

Do come along for pre-presentation mingling as we will be there from 6.30pm. As always, we welcome men to our group, but to keep our audience predominantly female, we ask that all men are accompanied by a woman (just add a +1 on the meetup).

Where

Oracle Corporation UK Ltd

Tower Wharf

Cheese Lane

Bristol

BS2 0JJ

When

Wednesday 22nd  June 7  – 9pm

Oracle will be hosting us in their new offices on Wednesday the 22nd June and the subject is data – open & link and smart cities.  We’ll update with full details shortly but please save the date.

Just a reminder that it is the open data camp unconference link this weekend also in Bristol if there are any tickets left they will be here eventbrite

Our May Girl Geek Dinner is hosted by University of Bristol as part of Bristol Digital Week being organised by the BBC
Weds May 11th

We will introduce what Girl Geek Dinners are all about and hear from a range of our members – sharing stories of what they do, why they chose their careers and what their passions are. We will also share what we like about where we work, what we’d change, and whether we are where we thought we’d be. The intention is to give an idea of the breadth of experience of the girl geeks and why we come to the meetups.

The motto of Girl Geek Dinners is eat-drink-geek! We like to create a space to share interesting ideas, often over pizza, sometimes with wine. This Digital Bristol Week event hosted at the University of Bristol is a chance to meet Bristol’s Girl Geeks and find out where we’re from, what our passions are and what sort of work we do. Whether you’re studying, working or coming back from a career break, come and meet an interesting bunch of women working in a wide range of local companies. nb this event is open to women and men.

GGD#50 – Girl Geeks get Agile Sheep-dipped!*

Wednesday 20th April

Ever wondered what that ‘Agile’ stuff is all about? Seen a lot of Post-It notes on boards in your office and wondered what that was for? At a bit of a loose end and fancy finding out a bit more about Agile while eating free pizza to boot?

Then this months’ Girl Geek Dinner is for YOU!

Penny and Claire both think the best way to ‘learn’ about Agile is to experience it, so after a short introduction on the fundamentals, we’ll be diving straight in with some games to help you get to grips with the principles of Agile.  We aren’t giving too much away here, but expect audience participation and gratuitous use of children’s’ toys to help understand how Agile works.

Come and join us, no prior knowledge or experience is necessary.  Bloomberg are sponsoring pre workshop food and drink, you can network, play games without judgement and hopefully learn a bit about Agile in the process.

About our speakers

Claire is a Agile enthusiast with too much IT experience to fit in a paragraph; but she has worked for some big companies (Hewlett-Packard, Nokia, Microsoft) as well as some others that you might also have heard of (National Trust, MixRadio) and learnt quite a bit while doing that. During her time at MixRadio she has been on a massive Agile journey of her own, going from ITIL Release Manager to Technical Programme Management, and so she has quite a bit to say on Agile transformations (and other stuff too, probably best not to get her on the topic of ‘travel’ unless you have some time to kill) and due to the fact we couldn’t get anyone else/she was free on the night/she wanted to share some of that experience with you all, we are lucky enough to have her co-present this event.

Penny attended Leeds University to do a Mech Eng BSc; she was sponsored through university by Rolls Royce, Bristol. After graduating, she returned to Bristol to work with them. But this was the 80s. Not a great time to be female in engineering. Soft porn on the walls, wolf whistles in the factory, snide comments in the offices. She greatly admires the women who stuck it out and made a career there, but she decided to get out, to the relative civilisation of software development.

She started in FORTRAN (she doesn’t look that old, we must get her secret), moved to C then C++.

But in the early 2000s Penny realised she needed either to invest some considerable time updating her skill set, or she would have to move out of tech. With 2 small children at the time, working extra hours didn’t seem possible, so she edged slowly toward project management.

After living the lie of Gant charts and Big Upfront Planning for a few years she transitioned from PM to Scrum Master – and found a method of working with people to deliver great things.

*Please note: No actual immersion in liquid required for this event

After the presentation and any questions we will open the floor up for a discussion,  if anyone feels like they would like to bring along any ppt’s or links that they want to share for discussion then please bring it along on a USB or mail the team with info and we can share this during the discussion period. Don’t forget – you don’t have to work in the industry or be a geek, this is a group for anyone with an interest in the subject!
Please sign up on our meetup page here MEETUP
Do come along for pre-presentation mingling as we will be there from 6.30pm. As always, we welcome men to our group, but to keep our audience predominantly female, we ask that all men are accompanied by a woman (just add a +1 on the meetup).

Where

Bristol Marriott Hotel City Centre

2 Lower Castle Street, Old Market, Bristol BS1 3AD

 

Mrudula “At school, Maths was my favourite subject, because I could think more and write less! And I was fascinated by small electronic gaming consoles that had come out newly then (20 years ago!) I thought it would be great fun to develop these games and the opportunities that lie ahead; the plan then was to be a computer engineer.

My Engineering degree introduced me to electronics, digital design and algorithm development. Then I realised this is what I enjoy most. Fortunately I found work that let me play with my favourite subjects. Nearly two decades on, I am as excited about emerging technology as I was then.

At XMOS I work in silicon development, building a new breed of microprocessors with wide ranging applications including gaming, media processing and robotics! It is amazing how a bit of commonsense, a bit of maths, physics, chemistry can transform sand into machines that occupy all walks of our lives. Best bit about working in semiconductor industry, I’d say, is silently knowing that millions of people use little piece of silicon that I have contributed to.”

 

Machine intelligence has come a long way from first program that passed Turing test. We have machine learning integrated in our life more than we may realise. I plan to have a loose discussion about what has been done, what is coming up soon and what is ultimately possible, touching upon philosophical implications of a truly ‘thinking machine’.

 

 

 

 

After Mrudulas presentation and any questions we will open the floor up for a discussion,  if anyone feels like they would like to bring along any ppt’s or links that they want to share for discussion then please bring it along on a USB or mail the team with info and we can share this during the discussion period.  Don’t forget – you don’t have to work in the industry or be a geek, this is a group for anyone with an interest in the subject!
Please sign up on our meetup page here MEETUP
Do come along for pre-presentation mingling as we will be there from 6.30pm. As always, we welcome men to our group, but to keep our audience predominantly female, we ask that all men are accompanied by a woman (just add a +1 on the meetup).

 

The event is kindly sponsored by MixRadio (sadly their last time) and will be at their offices
Prudential Buildings, 11-19 Wine St., Bristol, BS1 2PH, Bristol, Bristol*
from 6:30pm for 7pm on Wednesday 16th March.

*Find the Tesco Express on Wine St, and go through the large double doors to the right (between Tesco and Reed). Go up to the 6th floor via the lifts Bristol

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Susanne Klein holds a Diploma in Physics and a PhD in Medical Physics from the University of Saarland. Since 1995 she has worked and lived in the UK, first as a Royal Society Research  Assistant at the University of Bristol and then as a member of HP Labs. She has worked on colloidal liquid crystals, colloids in liquid crystals and new materials for 3D printing and is now working on optical cryptography.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘The colour of glass’

3D-printing, along with other additive manufacturing (AM) and rapid prototyping (RP) techniques, involves building up structures in a layer-by-layer fashion based upon a computer design file.  Such techniques are well-suited to the production of one-off, complex structures that would often be difficult to produce using traditional manufacturing methods.  There has been rapid growth and interest in this field during recent years, and a range of techniques are now available which make use of many common materials such as plastic, metal, wood and ceramic. However, relatively little has been done to develop AM using glass.

Since glass was first made, thousands of years ago in Mesopotamia, it has been appreciated because of its vibrant colours. To allow a successful design and print of any glass object, these colours have to be captured and classified in such a way that they can be incorporated in the CAD design of the object and lead to the desired result in the print. The colours of architectural glass are often classified by RAL charts  or by BS4800:2100 colour codes. Both colour classification systems have been developed for paints and coatings, but are a good first approximation. What they cannot capture is, for example, that some glasses display different colours in reflection and transmission and/or the colour change occurring in glass when it is reheated. In 3D printed glass, gas inclusions are another source of colour changes. Scattering at the air/ gas interface leads to the addition of white to the underlying glass colour.

Using the CIE chromaticity coordinates, glass samples are characterized before and after processing. We used two different measurement methods to determine colour coordinates as a function of sample thickness and frit size to check how robust the results were as a function of the measurement method.

 

Details

After Suzannes presentation and any questions we will open the floor up for a discussion,  if anyone feels like they would like to bring along any ppt’s or links that they want to share for discussion then please bring it along on a USB or mail the team with info and we can share this during the discussion period.  Don’t forget – you don’t have to work in the industry or be a geek, this is a group for anyone with an interest in the subject!

Please sign up on our meetup page here MEETUP

Do come along for pre-presentation mingling as we will be there from 6.30pm. As always, we welcome men to our group, but to keep our audience predominantly female, we ask that all men are accompanied by a woman (just add a +1 on the meetup).

The food and hosting is kindly sponsored by regular GGD supporters HP, there is free parking and feel free to mail or comment on the meetup if you need a lift.

Directions to HP Lab: http://www.hpl.hp.com/downloads/HP_Labs_Bristol.pdf

Constance Fleuriot & Claire Morley will be talking about Bristol’s very own Grrrl Games, a meetup for Women working in Games, or who want to get into the Games industry. Constance is a regular Girl Geek DInner attendee who set up Grrrl Games to encourage more women to get involved with places like Bristol Games Hub.

Claire has been involved with Grrrl Games since it started, taught herself coding by creating an adventure game, and will showcase some of her latest projects.

We are hosted by ADP for this evening, a leading payroll, time and attendance, and HR service provider. ADP are very new to Bristol and handily located in Temple Back near the centre & Temple Meads.

Sign up on our meetup page so we have an idea of numbers. There may be pizza or somesuch and non-alcoholic refreshment.

This month we have decided to call an Extra Ordinary General meeting, its extra ordinary not because its not aligned with our normal general meeting but because we generally do not hold a general meeting.

This event is kindly hosted by The Bristol SETsquared Centre which is at Temple Meads – attached to the UK’s most connected transport hub, Bristol Temple Meads Station, at the centre of the Temple Quarter Enterprise Zone, just a few minutes walk from the city centre Bristol at 7pm.

In the last meeting we did a call out to see if any of our members would be interested in getting more involved and there was a surprising show of interest which was great to see. Rather than let this enthusiasm go to waste we have decided to invite members to attend this meeting to discuss further not only any help they wish to offer but also do a general call on what people want from the group and where they see it heading or wish it to move forward into the future.
The group has been running since 2010 and is one of the most active GGD’s in the south west we believe – this has been down to downright doggedness in many cases and largely thanks to Ali who was one of the founding members and also other enthusiastic co-organisors such as Maria, Serrie and Claire as well as many others. We believe in the group and find it heart-warming that we have had such a positive and collaborative relationship within the group and indeed with our sponsors. The group has become very well known within the community and we are often approach by industry to either advertise ourselves or support tech based initiatives, as many of you will know from our busy facebook page.
Some of the things that we would like to consider moving forward are below – we would like you to join the meeting to give us your views and hear your voice on these and suggestions on anything else we might be involved with. We also believe that by building a bigger central support committee all with less responsibilities we will be better able to serve the group as a whole. Obviously we are keeping with the general ethos that we are aware how busy people are and as such will not be pushing anyone outside of their boundaries of either comfort or time limitations.
Proposals:
We are not the only tech group in Bristol and plenty of times we are clashing on dates which affects our participation we propose therefore some of the following:
These are some of the groups we are aware of
Urbanistas, Women who code, Women in engineering, Women in technology,
Women in Biz, Women outside the box, ladies that ux, grrrlgames
We would like to add any others members may be aware of
Plan is to contact them and propose the following:
A shared yearly meetup to present the groups and their activities and hopefully increase participation
A Shared calender- proposed Google calender as its version controlled
Possibly a central site for ‘Bristol Women in Tech Hub’ to share info and initiatives across the groups
Some of the initiatives who are looking for involvement are:
STEM (we know some of you are already involved)
Digimakers – HBB
Codeclub is the current mayoral initiative and they want us to get more women involved
We would like to be made aware of any others
Finally we are looking at any other initiatives that members wish to throw into the ring, some possibilities:
Merchandising – to spread the word and also to allow fellow girlgeekers a chance to talk to each other at conferences (badges was the thinking here)
Conferences – possibly extend the shared yearly meetup with the other groups to invite in industry and publicize ourselves
Blogging – Techspark have approached us to do regular girl geek blogs – any thoughts on this?

The meeting will be held in the engine shed and SetSquared and is kindly sponsoring us this for the space. If we do food then we will need to use their caterers and we have no current sponsor for this – but we (Claire and Serrie) are willing to get some between us once we know numbers.
So please pop along and either just listen in or have your voice so we can move forward in a direction that we all want – for newbies we will also present a bit about the group so you can understand a bit about us also.
Please sign up on our meetup page http://www.meetup.com/Bristol-Girl-Geek…/events/225801917/

This month our speaker is Emma Prest, General Manager at DataKind UK. She spends her time explaining what data science is to charities and nurturing an influx of data science volunteers looking to donate their time and skills. Before joining DataKind UK, Emma worked for a range of non-profits including Tactical Tech, Amnesty International UK, the Campaign for Freedom of Information and Chain of Hope. She was a freelance contributor to The Independent and worked as a Spanish-English translator. Emma holds an MA in Public Policy from Central European University in Budapest. Her first degree, in Politics and Geography, was from the University of Edinburgh.

This event is kindly hosted by MixRadio at their offices on wine street in central Bristol at 7pm.

Find out more info on our next dinner page

Sign up here: www.meetup.com/Bristol-Girl-Geek-Dinners/events/225089486/

As always, we welcome men to our group, but to keep our audience predominantly female, we ask that all men are accompanied by a woman