Yesterday, I attended the Alice and Eve 2024 workshop. Alice and Eve is a workshop celebrating women in computing, which has been going on now since 2020. Not only was it fascinating, but it also marked my first real time being in a room full of computer scientists which was intimidating to say the least! But first I’ll talk a little bit about what I learnt about there.
Possibly unsurprisingly, many of the talks were centred around LLMs and AI. They also centred pretty heavily around cyber security and data security, which I also found to be very interesting! I especially liked the talks that I had very little knowledge about before, such as the talk on Explainable Artificial Intelligence by Niki van Stein and Gender in Security Decision Making by Katja Tuma. Although I really am no computer scientist, it was a great experience to learn from others and truly immerse myself in it. Whilst I was here, I also had the opportunity to meet some other people who focus more on some gendered aspects of HCI, which helped me not feel entirely alone.
Which, of course, really was the truth. Despite the surprise that many had when I told them that I was an anthropologist and not a computer scientist, I obviously never felt alienated. Throughout a lot of my life, I’ve felt like there was some big difference between ‘technical’ and ‘non-technical’ people, but that is just clearly not true. ‘Technicality’ is nothing really but a sort of embodied knowledge and understanding, I think. Maybe I don’t yet inherentely understand diagrams of LLMs, for example, but nobody naturally does. It just requires a little bit of dedication. Really, it gave me a lot more confidence for when I will venture into more technical spaces in the future.
This was a piece of advice that I was given, that I should just practice being in technical spaces more. I don’t need to wait until I am perfect at all of this to do it, just having a little bit of knowledge and eagerness to learn is good. Some places will be more exclusionary and won’t want me around in that space, but that’s fine, because other palces are different. This is something that I definitely need to take forward with me.