Update post-conference: Four of the CSI students won awards at the conference. Frances Ryan won first prize for the best third year full presentation. John Mowbray won second prize for his second year 20×20 presentation and Iris Buunk third prize for hers. Lyndsey Jenkins won second prize in the first year poster competition.

Two students have blogged about the conference: Lyndsey at http://lyndseyjenkins.org, and Frances at http://justaphd.com.

Today the research students in the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University are hosting their annual conference (hashtag #socphdconf). The event has been organised by a committee of six students, three of whom are from the Centre for Social Informatics: Frances Ryan, Iris Buunk and Lyndsey Jenkins. The other student organisers are Baraq Ghaleb, John McGowan and Andreas Steyven. My colleague Dr Kevin Chalmers, who was previously involved in this series of conferences when a research student in the School himself, has also been helping out with the preparations for the event.

The programme includes an opening keynote presentation by Dr Wendy Moncur, who is Reader in Socio-Digital Interaction at the University of Dundee (and was formerly a Masters student in the School of Computing here at Edinburgh Napier University). All the students in the School will then present on their own research: in the morning 1st years will each speak for one minute to promote their poster submissions to be displayed over the lunch break; 2nd years are giving a series of 20×20 presentations; and 3rd years will have a full ten minute slot to summarise the output of their studies to the broad audience from across the School. There will be prizes for the best presentations in each category.

Three members of staff  have been asked to give short talks in which they should reflect on some of their earlier work, drawing out lessons learnt. In a short PowerPoint presentation (available on SlideShare) I will be critiquing a poster that I produced  for a conference in 2006.