Leeds City Council, Sky, and Empowering Women with Tech invite you to celebrate Ada Lovelace Day with us with a day of inspirational digital, science and technology role models.
Delighted to announce that we have both Dame Stephanie Shirley & Helen Sharman as our keynotes, two women who have broken boundaries in science and technology.
We are also proud to be showcasing the ones to watch in 2021 onwards. The event is being streamed live - you can join for some of the talks or all of them, it's totally up to you.
Tickets are free and open to all (m/f/gn)
Programme
09:45 - 10:00 Opening Remarks: Natasha Sayce-Zelem, Founder of Empowering Women with Tech, and Head of Technology at Sky for Digital Service.
Morning session: Role Models to watch out for in 2021
10:00 - 10:30 Ava Garside
Talk: ”It should be healthier to walk to school than go in the car, right?"
Leeds based Ava is this year’s individual winner of the UK Space Agency’s SatelLife competition and junior champion of the government’s Youth Industrial Strategy challenge.
She will be talking about her journey into space with a team of nano-scientists at Graphene Manchester and how pin badge technology can help everyone lead a healthier life.
Ava is 14 years old and currently studying for her GCSEs in Leeds.
10:35 - 11:20 Sky’s Women in Tech Scholars panel, interviewed by Debbie Foster MBE, founder of Tech Talent Charter.
We can complain about the lack of women in tech, that only 18 per cent of the tech industry are women or that women-led start-ups are woefully underfunded, or we can do something about it.
Sky set up the Women in Tech Scholars scheme, which offers £25,000 in funding to five women in order to fund their tech idea, along with support and mentorship.
In this talk, Debbie Forster MBE will ask the ladies about how they took their ideas to proof of concept and reality, how to apply for funding, winning the Sky Tech Scholars, sharing lessons learnt (both good and bad) on their Tech startup journeys including the start-up challenges throughout Covid-19, how they overcame imposter syndrome, and on a day celebrating role models, discuss who inspires them.
The 2019 winners:
- Olga Kravchenko, who is building a virtual reality (VR) app that makes cultural institutions such as museums, more engaging for children
- Colleen Wong, who has developed a watch that doubles as a tracking device, aimed at elderly people and young children
- Rebecca Saw, whose project combines television and gaming to create a blended reality.
- Mary Murphy, who has built a GPS tracking system she devised to protect sheep from being stolen or attacked by predators.
- Rachel Clancy, who has developed a text adventure game called Get Closer. In the game, players are in open dialogue with a forest creature that needs their help. Clancy created the game with the aim of teaching children how to identify and cope with difficult emotions such as sadness and fear, as a way to talk about wider mental health issues.
11:25 - 11:55 Urenna Okonkwo, founder of Cashmere App.
Talk: The power of community and curiosity: how to build a tech company as a first time founder
Urenna is an award-winning entrepreneur and founder of fintech startup, Cashmere, a social savings app that enables young female aspirational consumers to save for and buy the luxury products and experiences they desire in a financially responsible manner and without falling into debt. Her mission is to empower women all over the world to be good with their money so they can afford and live the lifestyle they desire.
Alongside this, to help address the lack of access to funding for black entrepreneurs, Urenna also built a startup-investor matching tool, matching angel investors to early stage tech companies founded by black entrepreneurs. She is also a scout for Backed VC and always on the hunt for next generation of high growth startups to invest in.
Prior to this, she was a financial adviser at a leading wealth management firm, providing financial & investment advice to high net worth individuals, and a forensic analyst at KPMG.
Urenna’s strengths lie in building strategic relationships, product strategy & roadmapping and creating memorable online/offline experiences for the millennial/Gen-Z audience.
Her work has been featured in a number of media outlets and publications including Forbes, BBC, Sky News, The Evening Standard, Fashionista.com and more.
12:00 - 12:30 Maddie Julian, DigiBete
Leeds based Maddie Julian is the Co-Founder of DigiBete, an award winning digital platform and App supporting young people and their families to better manage their type 1 diabetes through much needed free support, awareness, education and training resources and digital tools for Young people and their families in the UK and in over 114 counties. All resources are clinically approved by our partners at Leeds Children Hospital and then supported by The National CYP Diabetes Network. The video content is designed and made with families living with the condition to help support the wider type 1 diabetes community by extending the reach of clinical teams onto a universal online platform supporting a community of more than 70,000 users.
Maddie and husband Rob identified the need for such a service in 2016, when their toddler son was rushed to hospital in a critical condition and diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes in ICU. They quickly realised that managing type 1 diabetes in childhood is complex and very challenging. While they were able to find information online for adults, there was limited age and milestone appropriate content targeted at children and young people and their families. With their existing video production and teaching skills, they decided to create a social enterprise in partnership with Leeds Children's Hospital Diabetes Team which would help other families in a similar situation to access the vital information they needed .
Afternoon Keynotes
13:20 - 13:35 Tom Riordan CBE - Chief Executive of Leeds City Council
Tom has been Chief Executive of Leeds City Council since 2010.
During this time, Tom has overseen £300 million of efficiencies across the organisation and a significant transformation of the city, which is halfway through a £10 billion investment pipeline.
Plans are set to double the size and economic impact of the city centre through regeneration of the South Bank, one of the largest city centre regeneration and growth initiatives in Europe.
Tom's top priority is for the city's growth to be inclusive with a key ambition of reducing health inequalities and improving the health of the poorest the fastest. Our innovative, low carbon district heating network is helping to reduce fuel poverty by supplying lower cost heat to nearly 2,000 council homes.
Tom recently played a key role on the NHS Test and Trace Programme as the lead for outbreak planning, bringing a local perspective to ensure that the work was community focused and effective.
13:40 - 14:25 Keynote - Helen Sharman OBE CMG
Helen Sharman became both the first British and first female Astronaut when, in May 1991, she launched on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft and spent 8 days orbiting the Earth, living and working on the MIR Space Station.
Helen Sharman was selected from 13,000 applicants but didn’t think she stood a chance of being chosen when she applied, after hearing an advert on the radio on her way home after work.
Sharman is passionate about Space, STEM and the wonders of science. She describes the meticulous training and preparation, learning Russian, launch and landing, how weightlessness feels, her science experiments, the team spirit, and readjusting to life on Earth.
Helen Sharman was awarded the OBE in 1993. In the New Year Honours List of 2018, she was further awarded a rare and special honour, being made a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) for services to Science and Technology Educational Outreach. She received the CMG personally from Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle in February 2018.
14:30 - 15:15 Keynote - Dame Stephanie Shirley
Dame Stephanie ‘Steve’ Shirley is a pioneer of British information technology and a philanthropist who has given away an estimated £67 million of her personal wealth to charitable causes.
Steve was born in Germany in 1933, moving to the UK in 1939 as a child refugee after her Jewish father’s judgeship was stripped by the Nazi regime.
In 1959 she founded an early software company Freelance Programmers (now called Xansa) with just £6. It went on to employ 8,500 staff and her female-friendly company broke new ground in its flexibility, its holistic approach to human resources and in its co-ownership, which peaked at 62% staff control.
Dame Stephanie was named by Woman’s Hour as one of the 100 most powerful women in Britain.
15:20 - 15:35 Closing remarks - Emma Trickitt, Head of Diversity & Inclusion in Technology at Sky.
