BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium 2015: Applied Computing student wins prestigious poster competition

Dhiya Al-Saqri with her prize winning poster at this year’s Lovelace Colloquium

A University of Buckingham MSc student has won a prestigious academic poster competition with a design reflecting a pioneering interactive project aimed at teaching students about the anatomy of the human body.

Dhiya Al-Saqri won the Best MSc Poster at this year’s Lovelace Colloquium – an annual one day conference for women students of Computing and related subjects – held at the University of Edinburgh.

Dhiya’s poster was among 54 selected by organisers of the event to be presented, of which 13 were by MSc students. She received a travel and accommodation grant from the organisers to attend.

Dhiya’s poster was based on her MSc Project, “Digitalized Human Body”, supervised by Dr Harin Sellahewa. The project focuses on the use of two technologies – Parallax design and Microsoft Kinect sensor – to provide a unique, low-cost interactive learning experience for students of different ages to help understand the human anatomy.

Dhiya said: “It was a wonderful feeling when I received the email from the organisers informing me that I’d been invited to attend to present a poster at BCSWomen Lovelance Colloquium. I enjoyed the two-day visit to Edinburgh and it was a fantastic event – there were interesting guest speakers, poster sessions, panel discussions and networking.”

Speeches were given by Dr Geetanjali Sampemane, a software engineer from Google, Dr Kate Ho, a Product Manager at Project Ginsberg, Professor Lynda Hardman from CWI Amsterdam and Professor Barbara Webb from University of Edinburgh.

Dhiya added: “I was very inspired by Dr Ho’s talk on ‘How I can live a better life’. Also, the event provided a really valuable opportunity to meet other women computing students. I was delighted to have won the Best Masters student poster and was glad to represent my university and my home country, Oman”.

Dr Harin Sellahewa added: “We are very proud of Dhiya’s achievement. The Digitalised Human Body project is really exciting because people of different ages will be able to use the system to learn about the human anatomy in a fun an interactive manner. We hope to see the finished product in schools, GPs’ surgeries and medical schools”.

Dhiya’s study in Buckingham is funded by the Applied Computing MSc scholarship from the Ministry of Higher Education in Oman.