The Dutch word for enthousiastic is ‘bevlogen’. This word also has the word flying in it and it is the best word to describe Hester Bijl. On the 21st of April she stood before us, flapping her arms, showing us how the open and close movements of wings differ from each other. She was also mimicking what a butterfly does (clapping its wings) to give itself an extra push upwards.
Until now, people have made flying devices with stiff wings that do not work anything like the flapping wings you find in nature. An insect’s wing consists of a very thin membrane and blood vessels. The blood vains can swell up; this will influence the flight. Now a machine with flapping wings is created; the Delfly, a small insect-like flying device. Nobody really understands yet how flapping works. Simulation is used to get a grip on this subject, involving a lot of mathematics.
The Delfly can be geered up with a small camera. It can be used to monitor airports for example. If something is wrong, a whole swarm of them can gather. Or maybe they can even be put to use to check whether there are still people in a burning building! They are also great as toys.
As Hester told us, it will be unlikely that in the future we will board a plane that has flapping wings as well, because for big things other laws apply than for small things.
Even for someone not remotely interested in the subject this was a very interesting presentation; she captured the attention of everyone. She made complicated stuff comprehensible by comparing it with things that everyone can relate to; why don’t you stick your arm out of a car window, change the angle of your arm and see what happens?
At the end of the evening we had this fabulous cake to celebrate our 1st birthday!
On Friday April the 17th some British, Belgian and Dutch Girl Geek Dinner organizers met up in Amsterdam, during the Next Web ‘09 Conference.
(Clockwise L-R: Sarah Blow, Leen Segers, Imke Dielen, Marjon Wiendels, Melanie Rieback)
Excitingly, one of the attendees was Sarah Blow, the founder of the international Girl Geek Dinner movement!
Sarah brought along a male friend, Chippy, who showed us a menagerie of mobile computing gadgets. (Videos of this is can be seen at the girlygeekdom blog and at Chippy’s blog). The Girl Geeks compared notes about the Dinners in their various locations. And Chippy now even wants to start his own Girl Geek Dinner in Bonn!
Flies are true acrobats in the air. They can hover and even fly backwards! Therefore, for our development of small, flapping, aircraft we can learn a lot from them.
One of the activities in my research group is to simulate air flow around flapping wings in order to better understand the performance of insect flight. Approximating the solution to the physical flow equations
with mathematical techniques, we can compute flight performance quantities, such as lift and drag. Since these are time and memory space intensive computations, efficiency is of utmost importance.
With the insights obtained from analyzing the flow solution of the simulation, we hope to contribute to the design of Delfly Micro - a tiny flapping micro air vehicle developed at the faculty of Aerospace Engineering of Delft University of Technology. Delfly Micro is the smallest in the Delfly series. While the original Delfly has a 20 cm wing span, Delfly Micro only has 5 cm wing span. Due to the small wings aerodynamic performance is very important.
Speaker Bio
Prof.dr.drs.ir. Hester Bijl is full professor Computational Aerodynamics at the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering of Delft University of Technology. She studied Applied Math in Delft, as well as English in Leiden. After her studies she decided to become a PhD-student in Delft, developing a new method for the computation of flows with both high and low speeds regions. After her PhD she worked a little less than two years as management consultant for The Boston Consulting Group. Since October 1999 she works at the Aerospace Engineering faculty in Delft, starting as assistant professor. In april 2006 she was appointed full professor - the first female professor at the Aerospace Engineering Faculty of the TU Delft. As department chair, Hester now is a member of the management team of the Faculty. She has a partner and two sons (6 and 7 years old).
Monday 12 January was the fourth edition of the Girl Geek Dinner at the Flexbar in Amsterdam. ~35 girl geeks and their male companions listened attently to AI Professor Frances Brazier as she shared real-life tales of her climb up the academic ladder.
Frances quoted statistics regarding women in academia (from the VHTO), and shared her battle-hardened point of view as an ’old garde’ female academic, with “tough love” advice for the younger generation. Her unabashedly candid and direct point of view raised a bit of controversy, resulting in heated and passionate discussion. At the end of her talk, Francis also spoke about her research, explaining a bit about autonomous systems and the AgentScape platform that she has developed in conjunction with the IIDS group at the Vrije Universiteit.
The next Girl Geek Dinner will be on Tuesday 21 April 2009 in the Flexbar. The speaker will be Hester Bijl, Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the Technical University of Delft. Keep an eye on our website for more information!
Expectations — both our own and those of others — strongly influence our careers. Dealing with these expectations can be a challenge! Throughout my life and my academic career, I have encountered numerous choices, surprises, and life-lessons. Pain can be minimized by learning from others — so in this talk, I will share some of the lessons that I and my collegues have learned along the way …
Speaker Bio
Frances Brazier is a Professor of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, chairing the Intelligent Interactive Distributed Systems Group. She has published significantly in the areas of Autonomous Systems, Artificial Intelligence, Multi-Agent Systems, Distributed Systems, Web Services, and Human-Computer Interfaces, and is currently a member of the editorial board of “AI in Design and Manufacturing” and a new book series on Autonomic Systems. Beyond her academic career Frances has also been involved in numerous ventures including NLnet, the first ISP in the Netherlands. Frances is also the Vice-Chair of the Landelijk Netwerk Vrouwelijke Hoogleraren.
3 - Female high-school aged students (~18 or younger) can attend the next Girl Geek Dinner for free! If you know any who might be interested, please have them email us at organizers@girlgeekdinner.nl.
Wednesday 8 October was the third edition of the Girl Geek Dinner at the Flexbar in Amsterdam. Despite the short notice in announcing the event, there were approx. 30 girl geeks and a few male guests. Julie Lerman spoke about her years of experience as a woman in the world of computer programming. The story was not as technical as previous talks, but it was definately inspiring.
It all started for Lerman with the serendipidous discovery of a DBase-III book, that was left behind by someone else. Now, 25 years later, she is fluent in a score of programming languages. She is primarily self-taught as you can see from her biography and weblog.
Julie Lerman is an enthusiastic public speaker. She spoke for more than two hours about how she survives in the man’s world of ICT, and she explained how she accomplished it all. She provided a number of helpful tips like ‘participate in conferences and online communities’ and ‘try to become an expert in something’. At the end of her talk, she also provided a quick technical exploration of her area of expertise, the .NET Entity Framework. Interested parties can buy her book.
The discussion continued after Julie’s talk about the position of women in ICT, with the conclusion that women do stand out in the ICT crowd, but that it can be beneficial by drawing attention to our successes and accomplishments.
The next Girl Geek Dinner will be on 12 January 2009 in the Flexbar. The speaker will be Frances Brazier, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Keep an eye on our website for more information!
Julie Lerman has been programming for over 20 years, with the glorious beginnings of a single BASIC computer class while acquiring a degree in Russian history. At her first job (nothing to do with history) the only computer in a company of over 1000 people quickly ended up on her desk. Since then she has used about 10 programming languages, but it took 13 years before she attended her first programming class. Julie will talk to the Amsterdam Girl Geeks about the challenge of trying to remain sane while keeping up with constantly changing technology and some of the extra challenges that being a girl geek added along the way.
Speaker Bio
Julie Lerman is an independent consultant and .NET Mentor who has been designing and writing software applications for over 20 years. Julie is the author of “Programming Entity Framework” (O’Reilly) and is well known in the .NET community as a Microsoft MVP, ASPInsider and INETA Speaker. She is a prolific blogger, a frequent presenter at conferences around the world and author of articles in many technical publications. Julie lives in the tiny U.S. state of Vermont where she runs the Vermont.NET User Group and serves on the board of the Vermont Software Developers Alliance. You can read Julie’s blog at www.thedatafarm.com/blog.
Monday June 30th, the Flexbar filled up with girly geeks (and their male companions) for yet another evening of fun, food, and unapologetically geeky goodness. For some it was like a reunion, others visited for the first time. The Flexbar arranged a lovely dinner and interesting conversation ensued.
Guest speaker of the evening was Elisa Jasinska, who works at the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX). Her speech, ‘The Packets and I vs. The World’, was about the history and fundamentals of the Internet. It was a back-to-basics, but very interesting story about how Internet works.
You can get an impression of the evening by taking a look at Elisa’s slides, as well as some photos from Philip Homburg.
You can also find an excellent description of the evening (in Dutch) from Karlijn van den Berg at the Dutch Cowgirls website.
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If you would like to suggest a potential speaker for a future Amsterdam Girl Geek Dinner, or if you'd like to be a speaker yourself, please send an email to the organizers.
