Rolls-Royce Internship

I finished my 10 week internship in the Rolls-Royce R² Data Labs at the beginning of September and I’m very grateful for the opportunity to work with AI to detect cracks in turbine engine parts.

My 10 weeks was full of training, research and putting AI theory into practise to use GANs to generate some synthetic data. I am very impressed by the work the team and I did and I hope that what we managed to produce is going to help the company.

Thank you very much to our amazing line manager Mohammad Tanweer, as well as many other members of the team- Manisha Mistry, James Arney, Maria Ivanciu and many more- who supported me throughout my time working for Rolls-Royce.

I would also like to announce my acceptance onto the #CodeFirstGirls Nanodegree. I am very much looking forwards to the opportunity to develop my programming skills further throughout this 12-week course and I am grateful to Rolls-Royce for sponsoring me!

Open UK Internship and Creative Director Position

For the last couple of months I have been working with Open UK and you can read more about who they are here. I was initially approached by Amanda Brock who saw my video entry for the Open UK awards asking if I wanted to join the team as an intern, to make the courses and learning more kid friendly. This would involve the use of the MiniMu Glove kit and you can read all about that here.

I was enjoying working as part of the team to develop the new courses and was surprised but pleased to be invited to take on the position of Creative Director. This was quite a challenge as the project was behind a few months and it required working really hard to get things back on track in a very short period of time. The role required me having to come up with ten very simple projects featuring the glove kit and using the minimum in extra resources. The idea is that anyone can pick it up and they don’t need lots of other expensive things to get the project to work. The courses are designed to develop kids programming skills within the KS3 level and tie in with the ten open source definitions and the UN sustainability development goals.

Ten Open Source Definitions

It was great to hear that the Open UK Digital Camp was runner up in the first GNOME Community Challenge and I am very happy to be part of the amazing team.

Balancing all this with my studies has been a major challenge but time management has been a skill I have developed over the last few years and I know this is yet another fantastic experience to add to my CV. Thanks to the rest of the team!

Target Jobs Undergraduate of the Year Awards

A few weeks back I decided to apply for the Target Jobs Female Undergraduate of the Year awards. This is an annual award that enables girls to apply to win a range of fantastic prizes including a summer internship at Rolls Royce. As part of the application process we had to provide written responses to a number of questions demonstrating leadership. This was followed up by a series of online tests. The top 20 applicants were then invited to a two day networking and interview event to meet people at Rolls Royce, learn about the company, the work environment and the kinds of work they do. I was excited but nervous about the interview day!

The interviews were a short technical presentation requiring us to explain a technical concept in just over 5 minutes. I decided to talk about neural networks as I had built one for the Google AIY competition with Electromaker. The second interview was more of a business one, where I had to talk about my character, demonstrate various leadership qualities etc. This was a useful experience but tough and although I think it went badly, I learned a lot about the types of questions to expect in any future interview. After this process I got shortlisted to the top ten and have received a confirmed place on the Rolls Royce summer internship.

The award ceremony is on 30th April, which is very exciting. I will be working in the data labs at Rolls Royce over the summer and that is even more exciting and I will be updating this blog with what I do there, providing I can talk about it!

Raspberry Jam Online

The Bognor Raspberry Jam is now operating online and heaps of projects are getting done despite the problems experienced with doing a ‘hands-on’ type thing virtually. The upside is that we get people from all over the place, rather than just the local area, which is amazing. At this jam we had one participant in Dubai!

At the last meet I got to run a session to demo a project using the BBC Microbit to play music using motion. You can see a little of the code in the screenshot below.

The code is pretty easy but the kids love trying things out and their enthusiasm for learning new things is infectious!

Essex STEAM Speech

As part of my work with the Essex Steamettes over the last year or so, I was asked to attend a meeting at Essex County Council as a key-note speaker. I was very pleased to be asked to speak as we have been doing some amazing work with the girls over the last year or so, even though things have been difficult due to Covid 19. Teaching a hands-on type of thing using Zoom calls is not ideal but the girls have handled it really well. Some other great speakers were also there and it was an enjoyable meeting. Thanks to Essex County Council and to Andy for setting it up.

Women of The Future Awards 2020

The Women of the Future Awards was founded by Pinky Lilani CBE DL in 2006 and is designed to recognise female talent in the UK across a range of sectors. There is a wide range of categories of award ranging from arts & culture, to business, sport, technology and finance. One of the special awards is the Young Star, for girls aged 16 to 21.

I was thrilled to be nominated and shortlisted for this award for 2020. The award ceremony featured so many inspiring women and it was wonderful to be a part of this and to see how much inspiring work is being done by women each and every day in every part of life.

Visiting Harwell Space Cluster and Meeting Tim Peake

Back at the start of December I got a fantastic opportunity to visit Harwell space park as part of the UK Space Agency’s new promotion, ‘Inspired By Tim’. Five years after Tim Peake visited the International Space Station as part of the European Space Agency Principia mission, they are looking for people who have been inspired by this to share their stories. I was involved in the promotional video and got to look around at some of the research being done. Highlights of the day included getting to see the prototype Mars rover design and of course getting to meet Tim! Here is the blog post I wrote and you can find out more about the UK Space Agency initiative here.

Open UK Awards 2020

Open UK is an organisation that promotes the interest of those involved in open source data, software and hardware, primarily through collaboration between business, the public sector and community. They aim to provide a voice for the open source community, create the right legal and policy environment for it to thrive in the UK and promote education, learning and skills.

In October, they launched the first Open UK Awards with eight categories including sustainability, financial services, data, open hard and software, belonging, individual and young person. I was excited to learn that I had been shortlisted from for the Young Person Award. I got to attend the online ceremony in October and was the proud recipient of a goody box packed full of amazing stuff, as well as a very nice trophy!

OpenUK MiniMU Glove

Sometime last month, OpenUk announced they were giving away 3000 free MiniMU glove kits to kids across the UK. The Essex Steamettes, who I volunteer with, have recently been working on project with these gloves, so (still falling into the kids bracket!) I applied for one of these free kits.

Excited my @openuk_uk MiniMu Kit has arrived! Can’t wait to get started 😄 pic.twitter.com/cFZugLjBlA

— Lowena Hull (@LowenaHull) August 11, 2020

The trickiest part actually happened to be the making of the glove- I had to enlist my dad’s help for all the measuring and sewing of the felt to create the completed orange glove.

There are 10 weeks of activities (one per week) that can be found on the OpenUK website. I’ve been working through them and will detail them below!

Electromaker AIY Vision Kit competition results!

Result were revealed today and I am absolutely delighted to announce I won third prize!

The other winners can be found here. I watched the conference this morning (https://emea.info.mouser.com/ai-digitalconference) and was thrilled when I saw my own project up there!

Read the project notes here!