Ellie Sleightholm

The UK loses billions of pounds every year when women leave tech jobs. Zara Birch, Women in High Performance Computing Lead at NI-HPC, sees the pattern repeat itself across computational research. Talented professionals who could transform their fields, but can't see themselves in senior roles because those roles are almost entirely occupied by men. "The research sector has been losing incredible people with years of experience," says Zara. "For myriad reasons, many talented researchers couldn't see themselves in the senior roles but we are seeing a shift." The numbers tell a stark story. The UK loses £2-3.5 billion every year when women leave tech jobs. The sector needs 98,000 to 120,000 more professionals, yet skilled women keep walking away. It is estimated that around £640 million to £1.3 billion disappears in annual churn. Another £1.4 billion to £2.2 billion evaporates when women exit tech completely. https://lnkd.in/emxkqt7Y

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This feature, part of Tomorrow’s Quants project, explores the technical skills junior quants are required to have to start their careers. Drawing on the opinions on 39 senior industry quants, we found that, perhaps surprisingly, advanced knowledge of AI tools isn’t near the top of the list. Coding in Python is, and so are solid finance and maths knowledge. https://lnkd.in/duDxfJeH

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"Nawr yw'r adeg i weithio gyda'n gilydd, ac ymgorffori cydweithio yn y ffordd rydyn ni'n gweithio"/ "Now is the time to be more collaborative with each other and embed collaboration in the way we work". (This is a bilingual post - English posted below the Cymraeg) Ymunodd Prif Weithredwr HACT, Andrew van Doorn, â ni heddiw yn #CHCAnnual25 i gyflwyno UK HIVE, canolfan newydd ar gyfer arloesi, ymchwil a datblygu ar y cyd ym maes tai cymdeithasol. Nod y gofod newydd hwn yw ymgorffori cydweithio a gwelliant parhaus yn DNA y sector. Bydd UK HIVE yn gweithredu fel canolfan i brofi syniadau, rhannu dysgu, cyfuno adnoddau a hybu'r hyn sy'n gweithio. Ochr yn ochr â UK HIVE, mae HACT wedi lansio Cynllun Cydweithio ac Ymchwil a Datblygu Tai Cymdeithasol, sy'n nodi gweledigaeth 3–5 mlynedd ar gyfer cydweithio ac arloesi, gan ddarparu argymhellion ymarferol ar gyfer buddsoddiad a rennir, isadeiledd a gweithredu ar y cyd. Mwy o wybodaeth yma: https://bit.ly/3X30kkG #CHCAnnual25 #Cydweithio #Arloesi #TaiCymdeithasol #UKHIVE _____ HACT’s CEO Andrew van Doorn joined us today at #CHCAnnual25 to introduce the UK HIVE, a new centre for collaborative innovation, research and development in social housing. The aim of this new space is to embed collaboration and continuous improvement into the DNA of the sector. UK HIVE will act as a hub for testing ideas, sharing learning, pooling resources and scaling what works. Alongside the UK HIVE, HACT has launched a Social Housing Collaboration & R&D Roadmap, sets out a 3–5 year vision for collaboration and innovation, providing practical recommendations for shared investment, infrastructure and collective action. More information here: https://bit.ly/3X30kkG #CHCAnnual25 #Collaboration #Innovation #SocialHousing #UKHIVE

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I recently competed in the Queen’s Smith School Scale-Up No-Code Hackathon alongside Mazin Abdelgader and Faris Ali!The case involved a Terraflow system designed to grow crops using 95% less water. We were tasked with choosing either an Earth-first or Mars-first go-to-market strategy for the Terraflow system. I led the financial modeling for my team to support our recommendation. Combined with the various workshops and masterclasses hosted by entrepreneurs that day, the experience gave me a glimpse into the kind of innovative thinking that pushes you to think outside the box. Now take a glimpse at our presentation!

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🚀 I’m thrilled to announce a major milestone: I am transitioning my software engineering research at The University of Sheffield into a commercial product! For the past few years, my research has focused on a massive bottleneck in spatial computing: Quality Assurance. While traditional 2D apps have robust automated testing pipelines, VR/AR development still heavily relies on manual QA. Existing tools simply cannot easily synthesise realistic 6-DoF spatial inputs, like grabbing, manipulating, and triggering objects. To solve this, I developed an automated testing framework for Unity-based XR apps (originally published at #ASE2025), and I have now engineered it into a lightweight, usable Early-Stage MVP. 🧠 How it works: Instead of relying on random clicking or pre-recorded macros, our engine uses advanced heuristics to autonomously map out the interactable elements in your 3D scene. It then systematically synthesises spatial inputs to physically explore the environment, trigger actions, and catch runtime exceptions without human intervention. 💡 Industry Validation: I recently had a great conversation with the QA team at FitXR. We discussed the potential for automated XR testing to bridge the critical gap between developer delivery and manual QA. The ultimate goal for this MVP is seamless CI/CD integration: empowering users with robust automated testing capabilities that accelerate release cycles and elevate overall app stability. 🤝 Call for Early Partners: I am currently looking for XR studios and companies to pilot this MVP. If you are based in the UK 🇬🇧 (especially the London area) and want to drastically reduce your manual QA time, I would love to connect. I am happy to visit your studio in person to demo the product on your codebase and help set it up—completely free of charge for our early design partners. If you are interested in exploring automated testing for your XR pipeline, drop a comment below or send me a DM! 📩 #SoftwareEngineering #VirtualReality #SpatialComputing #SoftwareTesting #AutomatedTesting #Unity3D #LondonTech #QA #GameDev #CICD

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I wanted to share a project Skyler Lee, Deshan de Mel and I worked on for the Hack the Herd hackathon just over a week ago that I'm really happy with! We really wanted to dig deep into real, solvable issues this time so after talking to Weston Dripps, Amherst's Sustainability Director, we decided to tackle book waste. Within the last year, Amherst implemented a textbook program that purchases new class materials for students at the start of each semester. These class materials have nowhere to go at the end of each semester, and are donated away. Some of these textbooks, which are mostly in perfect condition, can cost north of $300 (especially stem textbooks)! These textbooks then have to be re-bought at the start of every semester, representing a fairly costly waste both financially and materially. Since currently those books, and there are a lot of them.... , are being manually processed by the Sustainability Office, we built a straightforward application to address this waste: Nile. It is a book management system that allows anyone with a phone to scan in used books, logging them into a database at the end of the semester. Professors can then request their required textbooks and quantity through an integrated portal, with an admin side to approve those requests. For our tech stack, we used: - Supabase for google authentication, database management - Shadcn, and some fast 21st dev ui components, for some retro looking ui (since updated from the demo video) - Vercel for deployment and handling HTTPS API request from the scanner: THANK YOU vercel for being an amazing company and making deployment so much less of a pain :) - Next.js for server-side rendering and React Vision Camera for ISBN barcode scanning - Google Books API to fetch book metadata Finally, a massive thank you to Wes and the judges for so willingly spending their time with us! If you made it this far here is the devpost 😅 https://lnkd.in/ecRhFJ3N

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Over the last year I’ve spoken with 462 staff across UK colleges and universities about artificial intelligence. What I heard was powerful: staff are pragmatic, creative, and experimenting with AI every day. But they are also under pressure, often unsupported, and sometimes left to navigate a gap between policy on paper and practice in reality. AI is already shaping how we teach, plan, assess, and support learners. It is saving time and sparking creativity, but it is also raising big questions about fairness, workload, professional identity, and what it even means to teach in an AI-enabled world. My new blog captures these staff voices and reflections in full. It sits alongside our Student Perceptions of AI 2025 http://bit.ly/45JsUg1 report to show both sides of the story. If you are in the tertiary education sector, I hope it gives you insight into what staff are experiencing right now and prompts the conversations we need to have: How do we close the gap between intent and practice? How do we redesign assessment for authenticity? How do we make sure colleges are not left behind in a two-speed system? You can read the blog here: https://bit.ly/423zGuE I’d love to hear your thoughts. How is AI showing up in your own work, and what support would make the biggest difference?

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Being invited by Wikimedia Iraq to AUIB for the pleasure of celebrating Wikipedia’s birthday felt like a quiet milestone, because through the AUIS Wikimedians Club I have seen what open knowledge actually looks like in practice. I got to meet students who had never edited a page before, asking if anyone really reads their edits or if they are allowed to write about their own cities, their own histories, their own language. I got to watch them go from hesitant first edits to careful citations, late-night fact checking, small arguments over sources that ended in better pages for everyone. That is its own kind of celebration. As software engineers, we should care about open source and open knowledge not as as an ethos, as an actual life philosophy. Every library we import, every dataset we study, every protocol we rely on was written by someone who believed knowledge should circulate rather than close. If we benefit from that inheritance, we have a responsibility to contribute back, whether through code, documentation, translation, or careful editing. Open systems are not just technical choices; they are social contracts about trust, access, and shared progress. So celebrating Wikipedia’s birthday at AUIB was not only about an anniversary. It was a reminder that knowledge grows when people tend it together, patiently, argument by argument, citation by citation. And as engineers, we should be first in line, because the systems we build are only as honest as the knowledge we choose to keep open.

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CivTech Scotland is one of the few programmes that truly understands where real innovation comes from. It doesn’t always start in a lab. It doesn’t always come from large institutions.It often starts with people solving problems in their everyday lives.That’s what makes CivTech different. Instead of asking, “Who has the biggest company?”It asks, “Who is already closest to the problem?” And that shift is powerful. Because across the UK, there are founders, community leaders, and grassroots organisations quietly building solutions to challenges the public sector faces every day from access to services, to data gaps, to inclusion.The reality is: Many of these solutions already exist. They’re just not always visible. Programmes like CivTech create a bridge. They open the door for businesses like BobbAI : solutions built from lived experience, from working directly with entrepreneurs, from seeing the gaps in real time to step into spaces where they can scale their impact. Not by starting from scratch.But by building on what’s already working. For us, BobbAI is about making business support more accessible, more personalised, and more effective especially for those often overlooked by traditional systems. CivTech recognised that.And that recognition matters. Because when the public sector backs solutions that are already rooted in real communities, we don’t just innovate, we accelerate what’s already moving. More of this, please. Happy 10 years of CivTech, Cheers to many more years of innovation whilst creating more person centred solutions https://lnkd.in/ebfkJCaG Matthew Kendrick Jesse Henderson Alex Gordon Ana Stewart Richard Lochhead Kate Forbes MSP Jiveen MacGillivray Joe Tree Mark Elliott Colin Cook #CivTech #Innovation #PublicSector

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There was some interesting material posted yesterday by Mary Curnock Cook CBE on the ways in which AI use-cases are changing...and a big takeaway for me was the growth in the use of AI for creating and improving computer code... ...and then this morning I see a story about how an AI coding bot deleted an entire production database...and then lied about it to try and cover its tracks. We really have such a long way to go with all this stuff.... Story: https://lnkd.in/evAV3mr9

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I've been reflecting on the recent major changes to the UK research funding landscape: cuts to 'big physics' via STFC, the scrapping of the FAAM atmospheric research aircraft... UKRI insists this isn't managed-decline, but rather 'reprioritisation'. From its published targeted investments, the big winner seems to be "AI". Space, the environment, food and agriculture are all lumped together as 'wider priorities'. Is this really the future? No need for observatories or laboratories - just ask Copilot to interpolate from legacy data? https://lnkd.in/emCT5MCD

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🦾 Human-like robot dexterity is within our grasp! We’re very excited to announce that researchers at the University of Bristol Engineering, in collaboration with Imperial College London, have received a £5 million grant from the Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA) to revolutionise robotic manipulation. Led by Professor Nathan Lepora and Dr Edward Johns, the project Democratising Co-Design of Hardware and Control for Robot Dexterity will explore how AI can co-design robotic hands and intelligent controllers optimised for highly dexterous tasks. This investment is part of ARIA's broader £57M Robot Dexterity program, aiming to unlock a step change in human productivity and robotic capability. Read more: https://lnkd.in/eufBY3Nx #Robotics #AI #Innovation #RobotDexterity #CoDesign #UniversityofBristol #ImperialCollege #ARIA #ResearchFunding #HumanLikeRobots

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A short interview with ML Systems CDT Supervisor, Antonio Vergari, discussing his research on efficient & reliable AI models and programs.

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I've been working with Camden Giving to build out a decision-making tool for grant-making, only catch? Features were determined by young people in Camden Their challenges: ❌ Invisible voices at the table - Panel members had no structured way to contribute anonymously or revisit their votes ❌ Admin fatigue - Setting up voting sessions, onboarding users, and tracking decisions was a scattered, manual process ❌ Limited data insights - Restricted both real-time and retrospective analysis of voting patterns, panel engagement, and application trends So in less 4 weeks, I built Elevate, a purpose-built platform for inclusive, transparent, and accessible grant decision-making. What does it solve? ✅ Consensus-building made easy - Panelists can vote, reflect, re-rank, and build toward collective decisions in one space, no more scattered notes ✅ Accessibility from day one - Multilingual support, screen reader compatibility, and more to ensure no one is left behind ✅ Real-time collaboration - Live comments, anonymous feedback tools empower open, inclusive discussions ✅ Trackable, auditable and learnable - Every vote, comment, and decision is logged, so the team can look back, learn, and improve engagement over time. The impact? The young people were able to use Elevate just 4 weeks after co-designing the platform and award £100,000 in grants to 4 projects supporting young people. ⚡ Need help turning your idea into a live product in weeks, not months? Let’s chat. (Link in the comments 👇🏽)

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🎬 This week's Friday Filmmaking Blog offers a curated look into the minds shaping our industry: Steven Spielberg reflects on Stanley Kubrick's unparalleled vision. Owen Cooper's breakout performance in Adolescence showcases the power of fresh talent. StudioBinder provides actionable leadership tips for filmmakers, drawing from military principles. Explore these stories and more in our latest blog. #filmmaking #filmproduction #leadership #cinematography #industryinsights

This is an exciting pilot concept. I’m really keen to see how this plays out. I've often heard founders say it's hard to hire just from a CV. You can’t really tell if someone has that start-up 'spark' or is the right person for that role, until you actually work with them. This event ditches the interview process and just gets people working together on real problems. It feels like a much smarter way to find the right people.

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Excited to share Episode 79 of the Smooth Brain Society podcast featuring Ginevra Sperandio & Riya Verma from Women in Neuroscience UK. In this episode, we discuss: 🔹 Career journeys into neuroscience 🔹 Challenges and opportunities for women in research 🔹 The importance of women’s health and representation in STEM 🔹 How communities like Women in Neuroscience UK create impact #Neuroscience #WomenInSTEM #DiversityInScience #Podcast #WomenInResearch links in first comment 👇

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⚛️ 𝐀𝐫𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐩𝐡𝐨𝐭𝐨𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐬 𝐨𝐫 𝐪𝐮𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐮𝐦 𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐒𝐜𝐨𝐭𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐝? Whether you're a master’s student, early-stage PhD, post-doc or technician in photonics or quantum, Innovate UK ICURe Engage is an opportunity to explore how your research could create real-world impact. Delivered in partnership with the Photonics & Quantum Accelerator, Scottish Enterprise and Converge, this 4-week part-time programme introduces you to tools used by researchers who go on to spin-out companies, license technologies and collaborate with industry. You’ll learn how to: 💡 Identify who could benefit from your research 🧭 Understand pathways beyond academia 🚀 Explore entrepreneurship as a viable career option You don’t need a commercial idea to apply. This programme is about helping you explore what’s possible. 📅 Applications close: 24 February 2026 @ 23:59 👉 Apply here: https://lnkd.in/eaMtcjHQ 𝘖𝘱𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘰 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘱𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘴 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘚𝘤𝘰𝘵𝘵𝘪𝘴𝘩 𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩 𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘵𝘶𝘵𝘦𝘴. Delivered by SETsquared Partnership #ICURe #Photonics #Quantum #ScottishResearch

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CodeClan relaunches with software engineering and agentic AI courses. Scotland's digital skills academy - which shuttered in 2023 - welcomes first cohort of students early next year ⬇️ https://lnkd.in/e_zVJiuX #digitalskills #Scotland

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