The London Hopper Colloquium, named after the late Admiral Grace Hopper, is an annual celebration of female-led research in Computing.

Neema Kotonya, PhD student of the Department of Computing’s Computational Logic and Argumentation group (CLArg) was invited to present her research on ‘Natural Language Explanations for Automated Fact Checking at the 14th London Hopper Colloquium, after being shortlisted as one of twelve finalists for the Colloquium's Research Spotlight Competition.

The London Hopper Colloquium, named after the late Admiral Grace Hopper, is an annual celebration of female-led research in Computing. Modeled after the North American Grace Hopper Celebration, the event features talks from established researchers from around the world.

Guest speakers for 2020 were Sharon Moore (IBM), Emine Yilmaz (UCL), MiriamBackens (University of Birmingham), and RebeccaStewart (Imperial College).“I found all the talksextremelyengaging.Theygave me new perspectives about my own research and research in Computing more broadly”, says Neema.

As well as the speaker talks, the Colloquium also hosts the Research Spotlight Competition for female Masters and PhD students in Computing and Computing-aligned disciplines. For the competition, participants are given a maximum of five minutes to communicate the essence of their research.

“One of my highlights from the event was watching the presentations of the other finalists whose work ran the gamut from AI in games to neural machine translation.”

“I thoroughly enjoyed the London Hopper Colloquium and I’m very grateful to the organisers at UCL and BCS for putting together such a wonderful event. I would strongly encourage women, postgraduate students, to participate next year.”

For undergraduate students, BCS Women also host a similar event, the Lovelace Colloquium, which takes place in spring.

Read more about the Computational Logic and Argumentation group (CLArg)and follow research updates from Neema and her peers on Twitter @arg_cl