Computer hackers are the bad guys, aren’t they? They cause mayhem: shutting down websites, releasing classified information, stealing credit card numbers, spreading viruses. They can cause lots of harm, even when they don’t mean to. Not all hackers are bad though. Some, called white hat hackers, are ethical hackers, paid by companies to test their security by actively trying to break in – it’s called penetration testing. It’s not just business though, it was also turned into a card game.
Perhaps the most famous white hat hacker is Kevin Mitnick. He started out as a bad guy – the most-wanted computer criminal in the US. Eventually the FBI caught him, and after spending 5-years in prison he reformed and became a white hat hacker who now runs his own computer security company. The way he hacked systems had nothing to do with computer skills and everything to do with language skills. He did what’s called social engineering. A social engineer uses their skills of persuasion to con people into telling them confidential information or maybe even actually doing things for them like downloading a program that contains spyware code. Professional white hat hackers have to have all round skills though: network, hardware or software hacking skills, not just social engineering ones. They need to understand a wide range of potential threats if they are to properly test a company’s security and help them fix all the vulnerabilities.
Breaking the law and ending up in jail, like Kevin Mitnik, isn’t a great way to learn the skills for your long-term career though. A more normal way to become an expert is to go to university and take classes. Wouldn’t playing games be a much more fun way to learn than sitting in lectures, though? That was what Tamara Denning, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Adam Shostack, computer security experts from the University of Washington, wondered. As a result, they teamed up with Steve Jackson Games and came up with a card game Control-Alt-Hack(TM) (www.controlalthack.com), sadly no longer available. It was based on the cult tabletop card game, Ninja Burger. Rather than being part of a Ninja Burger Delivery team as in that game, in Control-Alt-Hack(TM) you are an ethical white hat hacker working for an elite security company. You have to complete white hat missions using your Ninja hacking skills: from shutting down an energy company to turning a robotic vacuum cleaner into a pet. The game is lots of fun, but the idea was that by playing it you would understand a lot more of about the part that computer security plays in everyones lives and about the kinds of threats that security experts have to protect against.
We could all do with more of that. Lot’s of people like gaming so why not learn something useful at the same time as having fun? Let’s hope there are more fun, and commercial games, invented in future about cyber security. It would make a good cooperative game in the style of Pandemic perhaps, and there must be simple board game possibilities that would raise awareness oc cyber security threats. It would be great if one day such games could inspire more people to a career as a security expert. We certainly need lots more cybersecurity experts keeping us all safe.
Dan Stowell was a researcher at Queen Mary University of London when he founded an early version of what is now known as a Social Venture: a company created to do social good. With Florence Wilkinson, he turned birdsong into a tech-based social good.
His research is about designing methods that computers can use to make sense of bird sounds. One day he met Florence Wilkinson, who works with businesses and young people, and they discovered they both had the same idea: “What if we could make an app that recognises bird sounds?” They decided to create a startup company, Warblr, to make it happen. However, unlike many research driven startups its main aim was not to make money but to do a social good. Dan and FLorence built this into their company mission statement:
…to reconnect people with the natural world through technology. We want to get as many people outdoors as possible, learning about the wildlife on their doorstep and how to protect it.
Dan brought the technical computer science skills needed to create the app, and Florence brought the marketing and communication skills needed to ensure people would hear about it. Together, they persuaded Queen Mary University of London’s innovation unit to give them a start-up grant. As a result their app Warblr exists and even gained some press coverage.
It can help people connect with nature by helping recognise birds – after all one of the problems with bird watching is they are so damned hard to spot and lots that flit by just look like little brown things! However, they are far easier to hear. Once you know what is out there then it adds incentive to try to actually spot it. However, the app has another purpose too. It collects data about the birds spotted, recording the species and where and when it was seen, with that data then made freely available to researchers.
Social ventures are a relatively new idea that universities are now supporting to help their researchers do social good that is sustainable and not just something that lasts until the grants run out. As Dan and Florence showed though, as a researcher you do not need to commit to do everything. To be a successful innovator you need more than technical skills, though. You need the ability to be part of a great team and to recognise a sound deal!
Updated from the archive, written by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London.
Mike Lynch was one of Britain’s most successful entrepreneurs. An electrical engineer, he built his businesses around machine learning long before it was a buzz phrase. He also drew heavily on a branch of maths called Bayesian statistics which is concerned with understanding how likely, even apparently unlikely, things are to actually happen. This was so central to his success that he named his super yacht, Bayesian, after it. Tragically, he died on the yacht, when Bayesian sank in a freak, extremely unlikely, accident. The gods of the sea are cruel.
Mike started his path to becoming an entrepreneur at school. He was interested in music, and especially the then new but increasingly exciting, digital synthesisers that were being used by pop bands, and were in the middle of revolutionising music. He couldn’t afford one of his own, though, as they cost thousands. He was sure he could design and build one to sell more cheaply. So he set about doing it.
He continued working on his synthesiser project as a hobby at Cambridge University, where he originally studied science, but changed to his by-then passion of electrical engineering. A risk of visiting his room was that you might painfully step on a resistor or capacitor, as they got everywhere. That was not surprising giving his living room was also his workshop. By this point he was also working more specifically on the idea of setting up a company to sell his synthesiser designs. He eventually got his first break in the business world when chatting to someone in a pub who was in the music industry. They were inspired enough to give him the few thousand pounds he needed to finance his first startup company, Lynett Systems.
By now he was doing a PhD in electrical engineering, funded by EPSRC, and went on to become a research fellow building both his research and innovation skills. His focus was on signal processing which was a natural research area given his work on synthesisers. They are essentially just computers that generate sounds. They create digital signals representing sounds and allow you to manipulate them to create new sounds. It is all just signal processing where the signals ultimately represent music.
However, Mike’s research and ideas were more general than just being applicable to audio. Ultimately, Mike moved away from music, and focussed on using his signal processing skills, and ideas around pattern matching to process images. Images are signals too (resulting from light rather than sound). Making a machine understand what is actually in a picture (really just lots of patches of coloured light) is a signal processing problem. To work out what an image shows, you need to turn those coloured blobs into lines, then into shapes, then into objects that you can identify. Our brains do this seamlessly so it seems easy to us, but actually it is a very hard problem, one that evolution has just found good solutions to. This is what happens whether the image is that captured by the camera of a robot “eye” trying to understand the world or a machine trying to work out what a medical scan shows.
This is where the need for maths comes in to work out probabilities, how likely different things are. Part of the task of recognising lines, shapes and objects is working out how likely one possibility is over another. How likely is it that that band of light is a line, how likely is it that that line is part of this shape rather than that, and so on. Bayesian statistics gives a way to compute probabilities based on the information you already know (or suspect). When the likelihood of events is seen through this lens, things that seem highly unlikely, can turn out to be highly probably (or vice versa), so it can give much more accurate predictions than traditional statistics. Mike’s PhD used this way of calculating probabilities even though some statisticians disdained it. Because of that it was shunned by some in the machine learning community too, but Mike embraced it and made it central to all his work, which gave his programs an edge.
While Lynett Systems didn’t itself make him a billionaire, the experience from setting up that first company became a launch pad for other innovations based on similar technology and ideas. It gave him the initial experience and skills, but also meant he had started to build the networks with potential investors. He did what great entrepreneurs do and didn’t rest on his laurels with just one idea and one company, but started to work on new ideas, and new companies arising from his PhD research.
He realised one important market for image pattern recognition, that was ripe for dominating, was fingerprint recognition. He therefore set about writing software that could match fingerprints far faster and more accurately than anyone else. His new company, Cambridge Neurodynamics, filled a gap, with his software being used by Police Forces nationwide. That then led to other spin-offs using similar technology
He was turning the computational thinking skills of abstraction and generalisation into a way to make money. By creating core general technology that solved the very general problems of signal processing and pattern matching, he could then relatively easily adapt and reuse it to apply to apparently different novel problems, and so markets, with one product leading to the next. By applying his image recognition solution to characters, for example, he created software (and a new company) that searched documents based on character recognition. That led on to a company searching databases, and finally to the company that made him famous, Autonomy.
One of his great loves was his dog, Toby, a friendly enthusiastic beast. Mike’s take on the idea of a search engine was fronted by Toby – in an early version, with his sights set on the nascent search engine market, his search engine user interface involved a lovable, cartoon dog who enthusiastically fetched the information you needed. However, in business finding your market and getting the right business model is everything. Rather than competing with the big US search engine companies that were emerging, he switched to focussing on in-house business applications. He realised businesses were becoming overwhelmed with the amount of information they held on their servers, whether in documents or emails, phone calls or videos. Filing cabinets were becoming history and being replaced by an anarchic mess of files holding different media, individually organised, if at all, and containing “unstructured data”. This kind of data contrasts with the then dominant idea that important data should be organised and stored in a database to make processing it easier. Mike realised that there was lots of data held by companies that mattered to them, but that just was not structured like that and never would be. There was a niche market there to provide a novel solution to a newly emerging business problem. Focussing on that, his search company, Autonomy, took off, gaining corporate giants as clients including the BBC. As a hands-on CEO, with both the technical skills to write the code himself and the business skills to turn it into products businesses needed, he ensured the company quickly grew. It was ultimately sold for $11 billion. (The sale led to an accusation of fraud in hte US, but, innocent, he was acquitted of all the charges).
Investing
From firsthand experience he knew that to turn an idea into reality you needed angel investors: people willing to take a chance on your ideas. With the money he made, he therefore started investing himself, pouring the money he was making from his companies into other people’s ideas. To be a successful investor you need to invest in companies likely to succeed while avoiding ones that will fail. This is also about understanding the likelihood of different things, obviously something he was good at. When he ultimately sold Autonomy, he used the money to create his own investment company, Invoke Capital. Through it he invested in a variety of tech startups across a wide range of areas, from cyber security, crime and law applications to medical and biomedical technologies, using his own technical skills and deep scientific knowledge to help make the right decisions. As a result, he contributed to the thriving Silicon Fen community of UK startup entrepreneurs, who were and continue to do exciting things in and around Cambridge, turning research and innovation into successful, innovative companies. He did this not only through his own ideas but by supporting the ideas of others.
Mike was successful because he combined business skills with a wide variety of technical skills including maths, electronic engineering and computer science, even bioengineering. He didn’t use his success to just build up a fortune but reinvested it in new ideas, new companies and new people. He has left a wonderful legacy as a result, all the more so if others follow his lead and invest their success in the success of others too.
University has always been a place where you make great friends for life. Social media means everyone can easily make as many online friends as they like, and ever more students go to university, meaning more potential friends to make. So surely things now are better than ever. And yet many students suffer from loneliness while at university. We somehow seem to have ever greater disconnection the more connections we make. Klara Brodahl realised there was a novel need here that no one was addressing well and decided to try to solve it for the final year project of her computer science degree. Her solution was StudyBuddy and with the support of an angel investor she has now set up a startup company and is rolling it out for real.
A loneliness epidemic
In the digital age, university students face an unexpected challenge—loneliness. Although they’re more “connected” than ever through social media and virtual interactions, the quality of these connections is often shallow. A 2023 study, for example, found that 92% of students in the UK feel lonely at some point during their university life. This “loneliness epidemic” has profound effects, contributing to issues like anxiety, depression, and struggling with their programme.
During her own university years, Klara Brodahl had experienced first hand the challenge of forming meaningful friends in an environment where everyone seemed socially engaged online but weren’t always connected in real life. She soon discovered that it wasn’t just her but a shared struggle by students across the country. Inspired by this, she set out to write a program that would fill the void in student’s lives and bridge the gap between studying and social life.
She realised that technology does have the potential to strengthen social bonds, but how it’s designed and used makes all the difference. The social neuroscientist John Cacioppo has pointed out that using social media primarily as a destination in its own right often leaves people feeling distant and dissatisfied. However, when technology is designed to serve as a bridge to offline human engagement, it can reduce loneliness and improve well-being. StudyBuddy embodies this approach by encouraging students to connect in person rather than trying to replace meeting face-to-face.
Study together in the real world
Part of making this work is in having reasons to meet for real. Klara realised that the need to study, and the fact that doing this in groups rather than alone can help everyone do better, could provide the excuse for this. StudyBuddy, therefore, integrates study goals with social interaction, allowing friendships to form around shared academic interests—an ideal icebreaker for those who feel nervous in traditional social settings.
The app uses location-based technology to connect students for co-study sessions, making in-person meetings easy and natural. Through a live map, students can see where others are checked in nearby at study spots like libraries, cafes, or student common areas. They can join existing study groups or start their own. The app uses university ID verification to help ensure connections are built on a trusted network.
From idea to startup company
Klara didn’t originally plan for StudyBuddy to become a real company. Like many graduates, she thought starting a business was something to perhaps try later, once she had some professional experience from a more ‘normal’ graduate job. However, when the graduate scheme she won a place on after graduating was unexpectedly delayed, she found herself with time on her hands. Rather than do nothing she decided to keep working on the app as a side project. It was at this point that StudyBuddy caught the attention of an angel investor, whose enthusiasm for the app gave Klara the confidence to keep going.
When her graduate scheme finally began, she was therefore already deeply invested in StudyBuddy. Trying to manage both roles, she quickly realised she preferred the challenge and creativity of her startup work over the graduate scheme. And when it became impossible to balance both, she took a leap of faith, quitting her graduate job to focus on StudyBuddy full-time—a decision that has since paid off. She gained early positive feedback, ran a pilot at Queen Mary University of London, and won early funding for investors willing to invest in what was essentially still an idea, rather than a product with a known market. As a result StudyBuddy has gradually turned into a useful mission-driven platform, providing students with a safe, real-world way to connect.
Making a difference
StudyBuddy has the potential to transform the university experience by reducing loneliness and fostering authentic, in-person friendships. By rethinking what engagement in the digital age means, the app also serves as a model for how technology can promote meaningful social interaction more generally. Klara has shown that with thoughtful design, technology can be a powerful tool for bridging digital and physical divides, creating a campus environment where students thrive both academically and socially. Her experience also shows how the secret to being a great entrepreneur is to be able to see a human need that no one else has seen or solved well. Then, if you can come up with a creative solution that really solves that need, your ideas can become reality and really make a difference to people’s lives.
– Klara Brodahl, StudyBuddy and Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London
Want to make sure your life turns out the way you want? Want to trade this life for fortune and fame? If you believe post-grunge rock band Nickelback’s 2005 hit single, then ‘you wanna be a Rockstar’! Love or hate the song, are they right, or do you really wanna be a tech entrepreneur?
Some people want a hedonistic life. Some want to be famous. Others just want to be stinking rich. Some want all three. Some want to really make a positive difference to people’s lives.
So are Nickelback right? What is the best way to get all three and maybe even the fourth too – and quickly – say before the age of 35? In fact, let’s not set our sights too low. Let’s aim to be one of the richest people in the world. Let’s think multi-billionaire. Let’s assume too that we have to do it without relying on accidents of birth – no inheritance of billions from Mummy and Daddy’s money to look forward to. Winning the lottery wouldn’t even get you close so, while luck matters, don’t rely on your luck alone either. How you actually gonna do it?
From the queues of people wanting to be on reality TV programmes whether X-factor, the Voice or Love Island most people seem to agree with Nickelback’s solution: the way to early riches is to become famous, whether a Rock Star or maybe a footballer, or a film star, or these days just famous for being famous. It’s people like that that fill the super-rich but young and self-made lists isn’t it. Well isn’t it?
Nice idea, but no.
Some of those people do make a lot of money in a short time. They have to though as for most their career is likely to be very short. They don’t stay famous or in the rich lists for long and are unlikely to make super-rich.
They are all Techno Stars.
There is one very obvious pattern to Forbes’ self-made super-rich list of the top billionaires on the planet. Almost a quarter of the top super rich, at around the time that Nickleback wrote their hit song, made their money in a similar way. They aren’t film stars, rock stars or sports stars. They are all techno stars. They are also all self-made billionaires. That contrasts with the other people in the same league. With one exception, the rest are all there because of family wealth or are old: they took their time to extreme wealth. Contrast that with the Google guys, say, who made the top 30 by their 30s.
Number one – the richest person on Earth with 56 billion dollars – iin 2007 was not surprisingly Bill Gates, who with Paul Allen (Number 19) set up Microsoft. Paul Allen went on to found Dreamworks, a company working on the boundaries of film-making and computer science. They went on to use much of their personal wealth (and time) solving humanitarian problems, focussing on things like health and education. Yes, many rock stars do charity gigs (think Live Aid) occasionally, so if saving the Earth is your aim then becoming a Rock star may be one way to give you some clout to make a difference. It’s nothing compared to what someone as rich as the Microsoft pair have personally achieved though.
Not far behind was Lawrence Ellison, worth 21.5 billion dollars at the time. He made his name by creating the company Oracle that was largely responsible for pushing the database revolution – not just using databases of course but creating the software that allows other people to use databases. As he’s said “Money is just a method of keeping score now.”
There are then the Google pair Sergey Brin and Larry Page sharing position 26. They only had 16 billion dollars each, but, hey, they only founded Google in 1986. They planned to “do no evil” with their riches and also wanted to plough money into charity. What else do you do when you have that kind of silly money?
At positions and 30 and 31 in the 2007 rich list came Michael Dell and Steven Ballmer. Ballmer is ‘just’ another Microsoft man. Dell of course is responsible for Dell computers. He had the ear of a President as he was on the United States President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Want to make a difference? He could.
Have things changed? Well, yes. Forbes now use tech themselves to keep a real-time rich list. Now of the top ten richest people in the world as I write this, 8 are tech entrepreneurs, now with hundreds of billions of worth each. Elon Musk (Tesla, X etc), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Mark Zuckerberg (FaceBook), Larry Page (Google), Sergey Brin (Google), Jensen Huang (Nvidia) and Steve Ballmer (Microsoft – now richer than Bill Gates but he is still filthy rich too) .
In short, programming/computer science/electronic engineering and inheritance are the most likely source of riches for the richest people in the world. Programming is the only way to reach the top without inheriting money (or perhaps being a Russian president’s protege).
The other advantage of the technology route to riches over the Rock Star way of course is you can aim higher still. Don’t wind up dead at 40 from the drug-induced lifestyle of rock stars – why not aim to still be enjoying being filthy rich at 100 too. If you are wise you may make the world a far better place, though you may also gain the power to make it far worse too.
Women have made vital contributions to computer science ever since Ada Lovelace debugged the first algorithm for an actual computer (written by Charles Babbage) almost 200 years ago (more on CS4FN’s Women Portal). Despite this, women make up only a fraction (25%) of the STEM workforce: only about a fifth of senior tech roles and only a fifth of computer science students are women. The problem starts early: research by the National Centre for Computing Education suggests that female student’s intension to study computing drops off between the ages of 8 and 13. Ilenia Maietta, a computer science student at Queen Mary, talks about her experiences of studying in a male-dominated field and how she is helping to build a network for other women in tech.
Ilenia’s love for science hasn’t wavered since childhood and she is now studying for a master’s degree in computer science – but back in sixth form, the decision was between computer science and chemistry:
“I have always loved science, and growing up my dream was to become a scientist in a lab. However, in year 12, I dreaded doing the practical experiments and all the preparation and calculations needed in chemistry. At the same time, I was working on my computer science programming project, and I was enjoying it a lot more. I thought about myself 10 years in the future and asked myself ‘Where do I see myself enjoying my work more? In a lab, handling chemicals, or in an office, programming?’ I fortunately have a cousin who is a biologist, and her partner is a software engineer. I asked them about their day-to-day work, their teams, the projects they worked on, and I realised I would not enjoy working in a science lab. At the same time I realised I could definitely see myself as a computer scientist, so maybe child me knew she wanted to be scientist, just a different kind.”
The low numbers of female students in computer science classrooms can have the knock-on effect of making girls feel like they don’t belong. These faulty stereotypes that women don’t belong in computer science, together with the behaviour of male peers, continue to have an impact on Ilenia’s education:
“Ever since I moved to the UK, I have been studying STEM subjects. My school was a STEM school and it was male-dominated. At GCSEs, I was the only girl in my computer science class, and at A-levels only one of two. Most of the time it does not affect me whatsoever, but there were times it was (and is) incredibly frustrating because I am not taken seriously or treated differently because I am a woman, especially when I am equally knowledgeable or skilled. It is also equally annoying when guys start explaining to me something I know well, when they clearly do not (i.e. mansplaining): on a few occasions I have had men explain to me – badly and incorrectly – what my degree was to me, how to write code or explain tech concepts they clearly knew nothing about. 80% of the time it makes no difference, but that 20% of the time feels heavy.”
Many students choose computer science because of the huge variety of topics that you can go on to study. This was the case for Ilenia, especially being able to apply her new-found knowledge to lots of different projects:
“Definitely getting to explore different languages and trying new projects: building a variety of them, all different from each other has been fun. I really enjoyed learning about web development, especially last semester when I got to explore React.js: I then used it to make my own portfolio website! Also the variety of topics: I am learning about so many aspects of technology that I didn’t know about, and I think that is the fun part.”
“I worked on [the portfolio website] after I learnt about React.js and Next.js, and it was the very first time I built a big project by myself, not because I was assigned it. It is not yet complete, but I’m loving it. I also loved working on my EPQ [A-Level research project] when I was in school: I was researching how AI can be used in digital forensics, and I enjoyed writing up my research.”
Like many university students, Ilenia has had her fair share of challenges. She discussed the biggest of them all: imposter syndrome, as well as how she overcame it.
“I know [imposter syndrome is] very common at university, where we wonder if we fit in, if we can do our degree well. When I am struggling with a topic, but I am seeing others around me appear to understand it much faster, or I hear about these amazing projects other people are working on, I sometimes feel out of place, questioning if I can actually make it in tech. But at the end of the day, I know we all have different strengths and interests, so because I am not building games in my spare time, or I take longer to figure out something does not mean I am less worthy of being where I am: I got to where I am right now by working hard and achieving my goals, and anything I accomplish is an improvement from the previous step.”
Alongside her degree, Ilenia also supports a small organisation called Byte Queens, which aims to connect girls and women in technology with community support.
“I am one of the awardees for the Amazon Future Engineer Award by the Royal Academy of Engineering and Amazon, and one of my friends, Aurelia Brzezowska, in the programme started a community for girls and women in technology to help and support each other, called Byte Queens. She has a great vision for Byte Queens, and I asked her if there was anything I could do to help, because I love seeing girls going into technology. If I can do anything to remove any barriers for them, I will do it immediately. I am now the content manager, so I manage all the content that Byte Queens releases as I have experience in working with social media. Our aim is to create a network of girls and women who love tech and want to go into it, and support each other to grow, to get opportunities, to upskill. At the Academy of Engineering we have something similar provided for us, but we wanted this for every girl in tech. We are going to have mentoring programs with women who have a career in tech, help with applications, CVs, etc. Once we have grown enough we will run events, hackathons and workshops. It would be amazing if any girl or woman studying computer science or a technology related degree could join our community and share their experiences with other women!”
For women and girls looking to excel in computer science, Ilenia has this advice:
“I would say don’t doubt yourself: you got to where you are because you worked for it, and you deserve it. Do the best you can in that moment (our best doesn’t always look the same at different times of our lives), but also take care of yourself: you can’t achieve much if you are not taking care of yourself properly, just like you can’t do much with your laptop if you don’t charge it. And finally, take space: our generation has the possibility to reframe so much wrongdoing of the past generations, so don’t be afraid to make yourself, your knowledge, your skills heard and valued. Any opportunities you get, any goals you achieve are because you did it and worked for it, so take the space and recognition you deserve.”
Ilenia also highlighted the importance of taking opportunities to grow professionally and personally throughout her degree, “taking time to experiment with careers, hobbies, sports to discover what I like and who I want to become” mattered enormously. Following her degree, she wants to work in software development or cyber security. Once the stress of coursework and exams is gone, Ilenia intends to “try living in different countries for some time too”, though she thinks that “London is a special place for me, so I know I will always come back.”
Ilenia encourages all women in tech who are looking for a community and support, to join the Byte Queens community and share with others: “the more, the merrier!”
– lenia MaiettaandDaniel Gill, Queen Mary University of London
Following a tough experience at his last workplace, Stephen decided he needed a change. He used this as a prompt to start thinking about alternatives:
“[When] things aren’t working out, you need to take a step back and work out what the problem is before it becomes really serious. I still hadn’t had a diagnosis by that point, so things probably would have gone very differently if I had, but I took a step back after that job. I was fed up of being stressed, trying to help people [who] have already got far too much money make more money, and then being told that I was being paid too much. That was kind of my experience from my last employer. And so, I decided that I wanted to get stressed for something worthwhile instead: my mum had been a teacher, so I’d always had it in mind as a possibility.”
Stephen did, of course, have some reservations financially.
“I’d always thought it was financially too much of a step down, which a lot of people in the computer science industry will find out. I did take pretty much a 50% pay cut to become a trainee teacher: in fact, worse than that. But it’s amazing when you want to do something, what differences that makes! And there’s plenty of people out there that will sacrifice a salary to start their own business, and all the power to them. But people don’t think [like this] when they’re thinking about becoming a teacher, for example, which I think is wrong. Yes, teachers should be better paid than they are, but they’re never going to be as well paid as programmers or team leaders or whatever in industry. You shouldn’t expect that to be the case, because we’re public servants at the end of the day, and we’re here for the job as much as we are for the money. We want our roof over our head, but we’re not looking to get mega rich. We’re there to make a difference.”
While considering this change of profession, Stephen reflected on his existing skills, and whether they fit the role of teaching. With support from his wife and a DWP (Department for Work and Pensions) work coach, he was reminded of his ability to “explain technical stuff to [people] in a language [they] could understand.”
Stephen had the opportunity to get his first experience of teaching as a classroom volunteer. Alongside a qualified teacher, he was able to lead a lesson – which he found particularly exciting:
“It was a bit like being on drugs. It was exhilarating. I sort of sat there thinking, you know, this is something I really want to do.”
It’s around this time that Stephen got his autism diagnosis. For autistic people who receive a diagnosis, there can be a lot of mixed emotions. For some, it can be a huge sense of relief – finally understanding who they are, and how that has affected their actions and behaviours throughout their life. And for others it can come as a shock [EXTERNAL]. For Stephen, this news meant reconsidering his choice of a career in teaching:
“I had to stop and think, because, when you get your diagnosis for the first time as an adult or as an older person anyway, it does make you stop and think about who you are. It does somewhat challenge your sense of self.”
“It kind of turns your world a bit on its head. So, it did knock me a fair bit. It did knock my sense of self. But then I began to sort of put pieces together and realise just what an impact it had on my working life up until that point. And then the question came across, can I still do the job? Am I going to be able to teach? Is it really an appropriate course of action to take? I didn’t get the answer straight away, but certainly over the months and the years, I came to the conclusion it was a bit like when I talk to students who say, ‘should I do computer science?’ And I say to them, ‘well, can you program?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Yes, you do need to do computer science.’ It’s not just you can if you want to – it’s a ‘you should do CS.’ It’s the same thing if you’re on the spectrum, or you’re in another minority, a significant minority like that, where you’re able to engage with a teaching role: you should do.”
Stephen did go on to complete teacher training, and has now worked as an A-Level and GCSE teacher for 15 years. He still benefits from his time in work, however, as he is able to enlighten future computer science students about the workplace:
“Well, you know the experiences I’ve had as a person in industry, where else are the students going to be exposed to that second-hand? Hopefully they’ll be exposed to it first-hand, but, if I can give them a leg up, and an introduction to that, being forewarned and forearmed and all that, then that’s what should happen.
“I do spend a chunk of my teaching explaining what it’s like working in industry: explaining the difficulties of dealing with management; (1) when you think you know better, you might not know better – you don’t know yet; (2) if you do, keep your mouth shut until the problem occurs, then offer a positive and constructive solution. Hopefully they won’t say ‘why didn’t you say something sooner?’ If they do, just say, ‘Well, I wasn’t sure it was my place to, I’m only new.’”
Teaching is famously a very rewarding career path, and this is no different for Stephen. In our discussion, he outlined a few things that he enjoyed about teaching:
“It’s [a] situation where what you do, lives on. If I drop dead tomorrow, all that stuff that I learned about; how different procedure calls work or whatever, could potentially just disappear into the ether. But because I’ve shared it with all my students, they will hopefully make use of it, and it will carry on. And it’s a way of having a legacy, which I think we all want, to a certain extent.”
“Young people nowadays, particularly those of us on the spectrum, but it applies to all, the world does everything possible at the moment to destroy most young people’s self-esteem. Really, really knock people flat. Society is set up that way. Our social media is set up that way. Our traditional media is set up that way. It’s all about making people feel pretty useless, pretty rubbish in the hope, in some cases, of selling them something that will make them feel better, which never does, or in other cases, just make someone else feel good by making someone else feel small. It’s kind of the more the darker side of humanity coming out that teaching is an opportunity to counter that. If you can make a young person feel good about themselves; if you can help them conquer something that they’re not able to do; if you could help them realise that it doesn’t matter if they can’t, they’re still just as important and wonderful and valuable as a human being.”
“The extracurricular activities that I do: ‘Exploring the Christian faith’ here at college. And part of that is helping people [to] find a spiritual worth they didn’t realise they had. So, you get that opportunity as a teacher, which a bus driver doesn’t get, for example. Bus drivers are very useful – they do a wonderful job. But once they’ve dropped you off, that’s the end of the job. Sometimes we’re a bit like bus drivers as teachers. You go out the door with your grades, and that’s fine, but then some people keep coming back. I haven’t spotted the existential elastic yet, but it’s there somewhere. I’m sure I didn’t attach it. But that is another one of the things that motivates me to be a teacher.”
Stephen Parry now teaches at a sixth-form college near Sheffield. The author would like to thank Stephen for taking time out of his busy schedule to take part in this interview.
Autism is a condition with many associated challenges, but for some people it presents some benefits. This distinction is greatly apparent in the workplace, where autistic people often find it difficult to get along with others (and their boss), and to complete the work that has been set for them. It’s not all negatives though: many autistic people find the work in which they thrive, and given the right circumstances and support, an autistic person is able to succeed in such an environment.
We often rightly hear about the greats in computer science; Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, Lynn Conway (who sadly passed away earlier this month) – but let us not forget the incredible teams of computer scientists working around the clock; maintaining the Internet, building the software we use every day, and teaching the next generation. For this two-part article, I have spoken with Stephen Parry, an autistic computer scientist, who, after working in industry for 20 years, now teaches the subject in a sixth-form college in Sheffield. His autistic traits have caused him challenges throughout his career, but this is not a unique experience – many autistic computer scientists also face the same challenges.
Stephen’s experience with programming started at the age of 14, after being introduced to computers at a curriculum enrichment course. He decided against taking a then “really rubbish” O-Level (now GCSEs) Computer Science course, and the existence of the accompanying A-Level “just didn’t come up on my radar”. He was, however, able to take home the college’s sole RML 380Z for the summer, a powerful computer for the time, with which, he was able to continue to practice programming.
When it came time to go to university, he opted first to study chemistry, a subject he had been studying at A-Level. Though after a short amount of time he realised that he wasn’t as interested in chemistry as he first thought – so he decided to switch to computer science. In our discussions, he praised the computer science course at the University of Sheffield:
“[I] really enjoyed [the course] and got on well with it. So, I kind of drifted into it as far as doing it seriously is concerned. But it’s been a hobby of mine since I was 14 years old, and once I was on the degree, I mean, the degree at Sheffield was a bit like a sweetie shop. It really was absolutely brilliant. We did all kinds of weird and wonderful stuff, all of it [was] really interesting and engaging, and the kind of stuff that you wouldn’t get by either playing around on your own or going out into [the] workplace. As I’ve always said, that’s what a university should be. It should expose you to the kind of stuff that you can’t get anywhere else, the stuff that employers haven’t realised they need yet.”
Of autistic people who go to university, research shows they are much more likely the general population to pick STEM subjects [EXTERNAL]. For lots of autistic people, the clear logical and fundamental understanding behind scientific subjects is a great motivator. Stephen describes how this is something that appeals to him.
“[What] I enjoy about computer science is how it teaches you how the computer actually works at a fundamental level. So, you’re not just playing with a black box anymore – it’s something you understand. And especially for someone on the [autism] spectrum, that’s a really important aspect of anything you do. You want to understand how things work. If you’re working with something, and you don’t understand how it works, usually it’s not very satisfying and kind of frustrating. Whereas, if you understand the principles going on inside of it then, when you know you’ve got it, it kind of unlocks it for you.”
While autistic traits often result in challenges for autistic people, there are some which can present a benefit to someone in computer science. A previous CS4FN article described how positive traits like ‘attention to detail’ and ‘resilience and determination’ link well to programming. Stephen agrees that these traits can help him to solve problems:
“If I get focused on a problem, the hyper focus kicks in, and I will just keep plugging away until it’s done, fixed or otherwise overcome. I know it’s both a benefit and hazard – it’s a double edged sword, but at the same time, you know you have to have that attention to detail and that, to put it another way, sheer bloody mindedness to be determined that you’re going to make it work, or you’re going to understand how it works, and that does come definitely from the [autism] spectrum.”
Although he enjoyed the content greatly, Stephen had a rocky degree, both in and out of lectures. However, some unexpected benefits arose from being at university; he both found faith and met his future wife. These became essential pillars of support, as he prepared to enter the workforce. This he did, working both as a programmer and in a variety of IT admin and technical support roles.
About 78% of autistic adults are currently out of work [EXTERNAL] (compared with 20% in the general population). This is, in part, reflective of the fact that some autistic people are unable to work because of their condition. But for many others, despite wanting to work, they cannot because they do not get the support they need (and are legally entitled to) within their workplace.
At this time, however, Stephen wasn’t aware of his condition, only receiving his diagnosis in his 40s. He described how this transition from university to work was very challenging.
“I moved into my first job, and I found it very, very difficult because I didn’t know that I’ve got this sort of difference – this different way my brain works that affects everything that you do. I didn’t know when I came across difficulties, it was difficult to understand why, at least to an extent, for me and for other people, it was deeply frustrating. I mean, speak to just about every manager I’ve ever had, and the same sort of pattern tends to come out. Most of them recognised that I was very difficult to manage because I found myself very difficult to manage. But time management is an issue with everything – trying to complete tasks to any kind of schedule, trying to plan anything. Oh, my days, when I hear the word SMART. [It’s an] acronym [meaning] specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time specific. I hear that, and it just it makes me feel physically ill sometimes, because I cannot. I cannot SMART plan.”
However, during his time in work, he had some good luck. Despite the challenges associated with autism, some managers took advantage of the positive skills that he brings to the table:
“I found that a real challenge, interpersonally speaking, things like emotional regulation and stuff like that, which I struggle with, and I hate communicating on the phone and various other things, make me not the most promising employee. But the managers that I’ve had over the years that have valued me the most are the ones who recognised the other side of the coin, which is [that] over the years, I have absorbed so much knowledge about computer science and there are very [few] problems that you can come across that I don’t have some kind of insight into.”
This confidence in a range of areas in computer science is also a result of Stephen’s ability to link lots of areas and experiences together, a positive skill that some autistic people have:
“I found that with the mixture of different job roles I did, i.e. programming, support, network admin and database admin, my autism helped me form synergies between the different roles, allowing me to form links and crossover knowledge between the different areas. So, for example, as a support person with programming experience, I had insight into why the software I was helping the user with did not work as desired (e.g. the shortcuts or mistakes the programmer had likely made) and how maybe to persuade it to work. As a programmer with support experience, you had empathy with the user and what might give them a better UX, as well as how they might abuse the software. All this crossover, also set me up for being able to teach confidently on a huge range of aspects of CS.”
For autistic students who are planning on working in a computer science career, he has this to say:
“As an autistic person, and I would say this to anybody with [autism], you need to cultivate the part of you that really wants to get on well with people and wants to be able to care about people and understand people. Neurotypical people get that ability out of the box, and some of them take it for granted. I tend to find that the autistic people who actually find that they can understand people, that they work at it until they can, [are] often more conscientious as a result. And I think it’s important that if you’re an autistic person, to learn how to be positive about people and affirm people, and interact with them in positive ways, because it can make you a more caring and more valuable human being as a as a result.”
“Look for jobs where you can really be an asset, where your neurodiversity is the asset to what you’re trying to do, but at the same time, don’t be afraid to try to, and learn how to engage with people. Although it’s harder, it’s often more rewarding as a result.”
We’re occasionally asked by school pupils, their parents and teachers about where young people can find out about work experience in something to do with computer science. We’ve put together some general information which we hope is helpful, and there’s also information further down the page that might be useful for people who’ve finished a computing degree and are wondering “What’s next?”.
Work experience for school students
(This section was originally published on our website for teachers – Teaching London Computing).
Supermarkets – not in the store but in the office, learning about inventory software used to manage stock for in-store shopping as well as online shopping (e.g. Ocado etc).
Shops – more generally pretty much every shop has an online presence and may want to display items for sale (perhaps also using software to handle payment).
Websites – someone who’s a blacksmith might not use a computer in their work directly, but the chances are they’d want to advertise their metal-flattening skills to a wider audience which is only really possible with a web presence.
Websites involve technical aspects (not necessarily Python types of things but certainly HTML and CSS / JavaScript) but also making websites accessible for users with visual impairments, e.g. labelling elements helpfully and remembering to add ALT TEXT for users of screenreaders. Technical skills are important but thinking about the end-user is super-important too, and often a skill that people pick up ‘on the job’ rather than being trained about (though that is changing).
Usability – making websites or physical products (e.g. home appliances, cameras, phones, printers, microwaves) easier to use by finding out how easily users can interact with them and considering options for improvement. For computing systems this involves HCI (human-computer interaction) and UX (user experience – e.g. how frustrating is a website?).
Transport – here in London we have buses with a GPS transponder that emits a signal which is picked up by sensors, co-ordinated and translated into real-time information about the whereabouts of various buses on the system. Third-party apps can also use some of this data to provide a service for people who want to know the quickest route to a particular place.
Council services – it’s possible to pay parking fines, council tax and other things online, also utility company bills. The programs involved here need to keep people’s private data secure as well.
Banks – are heavy users of ‘fintech’ (financial technology) and security systems, though that might preclude them taking on people in a work experience setting. Similarly GP surgeries have dedicated IT systems (such as EMIS) for handling confidential patient information and appointments. Even if they can’t take on tech work experience students they may have other work experience opportunities.
Places that offer (or have previously offered) work experience
TechDevJobs website Our ‘jobs in computing’ resource (homepage) should give you an idea of the different sectors which employ all sorts of computer scientists to do all sorts of different things (see the list of jobs organised by sector). There are about 70 80 jobs there so far; it doesn’t cover everything though (that’s almost an impossible task!).
There are obvious computing-related jobs such as a software company looking for a software developer but there’s also a job for a lawyer-researcher (someone who is able to practise as a lawyer if necessary but is going to be doing research) into Cloud Computing. For example there are all sorts of regulatory aspects to computing, some currently under consideration by the UK Government on data leaks, privacy, appropriateness of use and how securely information is stored, and what penalties there are for misuse.
Possibly a local law firm is doing some work in this area and might be open to offering work experience.
Other resources for recent graduates
The TechDev Jobs website (listed above in Other resources) is a great place to start. The jobs ‘advertised’ are usually closed but the collection lists several organisations that are currently employing people in the field of computer science (in the widest sense) and we are adding more all the time. Finding out about jobs is also about finding out about different sectors, some of which you might not have heard of yet – but they are all potential sources of jobs for people with computing skills.
Recent graduates or soon-to-graduate students may be able to help newer students get to grips with things in the Year 1 modules. Sometimes it’s not the computer science and programming that they or the lecturers need assistance with but really practical stuff like logging on and finding the relevant resources.
The Find A Job website from DWP (https://findajob.dwp.gov.uk/search) can be filtered by location and keyword too. Put in a keyword and see what pops up, then filter by salary etc.
Further study: if you’re interested in continuing your studies you might consider a Masters degree (MSc) in computer science and see the panel below for information on studying for a PhD, for which you are usually paid.
The Entry Level Games site isn’t a jobs board but if you’re interested in games design then it gives you a really helpful overview of some of the typical roles, what’s needed to do those roles and information from people who’ve done those jobs.
If you are interested in creating assistive technology or making computing more inclusive you might be interested in the work of the Global Disability Innovation Hub.
Networking is also a good idea to build up contacts and hear about different roles, some people find LinkedIn useful as an online version of networking and as a great place to hear about newly-opened vacancies. You can also take part in local hackathons, or volunteer at code clubs etc. This sort of thing is useful for your CV too.
There are probably organisations near you and it’s fairly likely that they’ll be using computers in one way or another, and you might be useful to them. Open up Google Maps and navigate to where you’re living, then zoom in and see what organisations are nearby. Make a note of them and if they have a vacancies page save that link in a document so that you can visit it every so often and see if a relevant new job has been added. Or contact them speculatively with your CV.
If you have a Gmail account you can set up Google Alerts. Whenever a new web page (e.g. a new job vacancy is published) that satisfies your search criteria you’ll get a daily email with a summary of what’s been added and the link to find out more. This is a way of bringing the job adverts to you!
Digitally stitching together 2D photographs to visualise the 3D world
Composite image of one green glass bottle made from three photographs. Image by Jo Brodie
Imagine you’re the costume designer for a major new film about a historical event that happened 400 years ago. You’d need to dress the actors so that they look like they’ve come from that time (no digital watches!) and might want to take inspiration from some historical clothing that’s being preserved in a museum. If you live near the museum, and can get permission to see (or even handle) the material that makes it a bit easier but perhaps the ideal item is in another country or too fragile for handling.
This is where 3D imaging can help. Photographs are nice but don’t let you get a sense of what an object is like when viewed from different angles, and they don’t really give a sense of texture. Video can be helpful, but you don’t get to control the view. One way around that is to take lots of photographs, from different angles, then ‘stitch’ them together to form a three dimensional (3D) image that can be moved around on a computer screen – an example of this is photogrammetry.
In the (2D) example above I’ve manually combined three overlapping close-up photos of a green glass bottle, to show what the full size bottle actually looks like. Photogrammetry is a more advanced version (but does more or less the same thing) which uses computer software to line up the points that overlap and can produce a more faithful 3D representation of the object.
In the media below you can see a looping gif of the glass bottle being rotated first in one direction and then the other. This video is the result of a 3D ‘scan’ made from only 29 photographs using the free software app Polycam. With more photographs you could end up with a more impressive result. You can interact with the original scan here – you can zoom in and turn the bottle to view it from any angle you choose.
A looping gif of the 3D Polycam file being rotated one way then the other. Image by Jo Brodie
You might walk around your object and take many tens of images from slightly different viewpoints with your camera. Once your photogrammetry software has lined the images up on a computer you can share the result and then someone else would be able to walk around the same object – but virtually!
Photogrammetry is being used by hobbyists (it’s fun!) but is also being used in lots of different ways by researchers. One example is the field of ‘restoration ecology’ in particular monitoring damage to coral reefs over time, but also monitoring to see if particular reef recovery strategies are successful. Reef researchers can use several cameras at once to take lots of overlapping photographs from which they can then create three dimensional maps of the area. A new project recently funded by NERC* called “Photogrammetry as a tool to improve reef restoration” will investigate the technique further.
Photogrammetry is also being used to preserve our understanding of delicate historic items such as Stuart embroideries at The Holburne Museum in Bath. These beautiful craft pieces were made in the 1600s using another type of 3D technique. ‘Stumpwork’ or ‘raised embroidery’ used threads and other materials to create pieces with a layered three dimensional effect. Here’s an example of someone playing a lute to a peacock and a deer.
“Satin worked with silk, chenille threads, purl, shells, wood, beads, mica, bird feathers, bone or coral; detached buttonhole variations, long-and-short, satin, couching, and knot stitches; wood frame, mirror glass, plush”, 1600s. Photo CC0 from Metropolitan Museum of Art uploaded by Pharos on Wikimedia.
Using photogrammetry (and other 3D techniques) means that many more people can enjoy, interact with and learn about all sorts of things, without having to travel or damage delicate fabrics, or corals.
*NERC (Natural Environment Research Council) and AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) are two organisations that fund academic research in universities. They are part of UKRI (UK Research & Innovation), the wider umbrella group that includes several research funding bodies.
Other uses of photogrammetry
Examples of cultural heritage and ecology are highlighted in the post but also interactive games (particularly virtual reality), engineering and crime scene forensics and the film industry use photogrammetry, an example is Mad Max: Fury Road which used the technique to create a number of its visual effects. Hobbyists also create 3D versions (called ‘3D assets’) of all sorts of objects and sell these to games designers to include in their games for players to interact with.
What is photogrammetry? (12 November 2021) Great Barrier Reef Foundation “What it is, why we’re using it and how it’s helping uncover the secrets of reef recovery and restoration.” [EXTERNAL]
cs4fn 
