Last year’s Ada Lovelace Day Live! event, held with BCSWomen, was such an amazing success that we decided to do it again on 16 October! This year, we are collaborating with the Women’s Engineering Society who will be presenting the prestigious Karen Burt Memorial Award to a newly chartered woman engineer at the event.

As well as the announcement of the award winner, we’ll be spoiling you with performances from:

• Dr Suzie Sheehy, accelerator physicist
• Gia Milinovich, technology and TV presenter
• Dr Helen Scales, marine biologist
• Helen Keen, comedian
• Dr Alice Bell, science communicator
• Sarah Angliss, robot maker and thereminist
• Sydney Padua, creator of the Lovelace & Babbage webcomic

All hosted by inimitable songstress and one third of the Festival of the Spoken Nerd, Helen Arney!

Rest assured, it will be an entertaining evening of science, technology, comedy and song, featuring all manner of wonders, from marine biology and particle physics to the secrets of fridges and performance robots. Seriously, Ada Lovelace Day Live! is an event not to be missed!

Tickets are £10 each and available from the WES site. Do not miss out!

Thanks to our partnership with WES, we’ll be holding ALD Live! at the Institution of Engineering and Technology, Savoy Place, London. This is apt not least because the IET archives holds a small collection of letters, written by Ada Lovelace to Michael Faraday in 1844, as well as a letter from Charles Babbage to Faraday in which Babbage describes Lovelace as an ‘enchantress’! The IET also has a copy, by Mary Remington, of the 1836 portrait of Lovelace by Margaret Carpenter.

About WES and the Karen Burt Memorial Award
Founded in 1919, WES is “a professional, not-for-profit network of women engineers, scientists and technologists offering inspiration, support and professional development.”

Although the world has changed since a group of women decided to band create an organisation to support women in engineering, the need is still there. WES works to connect students with professionals, organise events to support  young people, and provide career support and networking groups.

Karen Burt was a WES Council officer who campaigned to improve the recruitment and retention of women in science and engineering. She was instrumental in the establishment of the Centre for Advanced Instrumentation Systems at University College, London, but her career at UCL was cut tragically short by a stroke.

The Karen Burt Memorial Award was first presented in 1999 to Rebecca Dowsett, and is given each year to a Chartered woman in engineering, applied science, and IT.

“The award recognizes the candidate’s excellence and potential in the practice of engineering and highlights the importance of Chartered status, as well as offering recognition to contributions made by the candidate to the promotion of the engineering profession.”

Planning for this year’s Ada Lovelace Day is kicking off and I’m pleased to announce that this year it will be held on Tuesday 16 October 2012. As soon as we have more details about what we’re planning for the day we will let you know, but in the meantime please mark the date in your diary and spread the word! (And don’t forget to join our mailing list!)

FAQ

Why has the date changed?
The primary reason why the date has changed is simply that I had an insurmountable clash in my diary. The secondary reason is that the 7th October this year falls on a Sunday which is a bit of a rubbish day for events.

I had already begun planning for 7 October. What do I do now?
Keep going! Spreading events out a little bit will help give Ada Lovelace Day legs, and there’s no earthly reason why we have do to absolutely everything on the same day. Who knows, maybe soon it’ll be Ada Lovelace Week instead!

Why isn’t ALD on one of Ada’s important dates, like her birthday or deathday?
Ada may be the figurehead for this movement, but we’re focused on celebrating all women in STEM, not just Ada. Ada’s significant dates are also a bit too close to Christmas for comfort and we’d have problems getting venues for events as we’d be in competition with parties and other festive events.

Can’t the day just stay put?
Think of it like Easter, which wanders around all over the place and yet we still seem to cope.

What will the date be in 2013?
When I have a better idea what my diary is like in October 2013, I’ll be able to set a date. Check back in about a year’s time.

If you have any other questions, please fire away! But do bear in mind that Ada Lovelace Day is organised by me and a tiny group of volunteers who put their own time into the project. It only exists because people are kind enough to give up their evenings and weekends to make it happen.

This year’s Ada Lovelace Day has been a fantastic success, but it wouldn’t have happened without the hard work of a lot of people, so I have some heartfelt thanks to share:

Paolo Valdemarin and his team at Evectors worked hard to get the new website up and running. I look forward to working with them further over the next year to develop the site in some exciting directions!

Thanks to Helen Arney, Hannah Dee, Maggie Berry and BCSWomen for their invaluable support in organising Ada Lovelace Day Live!. Huge thanks to our speakers: Maggie Philbin, Helen Keen, Dr Sue Black, Sarah Pascoe, Gia Milinovich, Maggie Aderin-Pocock and special thanks to our compere for the evening, Kate Smurthwaite. It was a truly fabulous event!

And thanks to Hannah Dee, Karen Petrie and BCSWomen for putting on the Ada Lovelace Day Android Extravaganza.

Further thanks to the volunteers who have helped over the last year: Steph Troeth, Miles Taylor, Joel Mitchell, Owen Blacker, Jen Blacker, Saul Cozens, and everyone else in the working group who has contributed. ALD wouldn’t have been what it was without such a great group of volunteers.

And finally, thank you to everyone who came to the events, everyone who organised events around the world, and everyone who took part online.

Please do keep an eye @findingada on Twitter and on our blog as we continue to develop the site over the next few months.

Ada Lovelace Day has already begun in the island nation of Kiribati! One of the curious things about a ‘day’ is that due to various dateline shenanigans it’s Ada Lovelace Day somewhere around the world for a grand 50 hours. This means that you have plenty of time to get your tribute to a woman in science, technology, engineering or maths and add it to our collection.

If you don’t have your own blog or website, please do feel free to use the comments on this post as a place to add your tribute.

Let the celebrations begin!