Alice & Eve Germany 2026
Welcome to our free one-day workshop for celebrating women studying and working in computing! Alice & Eve aims to bring together talents in the field of computing. This year, the workshop is coming to Germany for the first time.
Alice and Eve event is inspired by the BCS Lovelace Colloquium that started in 2008. For more details about earlier editions of Alice & Eve in the Netherlands, see the websites of 2020, 2021, 2022 , 2023, 2024, and 2025.
The event is held during a single day, and features:
- keynote talks,
- a poster contest, and
- an exhibition on women in computing.
Join us, and participate to our poster contest on the topic of your choice!
Date:
Alice & Eve Germany will take place on September 28, 2026.
Venue:
The workshop will be held at the Einstein Campus in Münster, Orléans-Ring 12, in rooms SRZ 216/217 on the second floor.
Registration:
The registration is free and includes coffee breaks, lunch and drinks. We welcome everyone of all genders, from bachelor students to full professors, to attend the event.
Program
Software is everywhere, and (almost) everything we do relies on software. But can we actually rely on software? Software bugs are just as old as software, and frequently cause major disruptions, such as the recent CrowdStrike’s outage due to a software update.
I will argue that it should be possible to improve this situation by developing program verification tools that can be used efficiently to provide guarantees about programs in different programming languages, and for a wide range of properties. I will outline how we work towards this dream with the VerCors team. I will end with some of the recent developments around VerCors and our plans for its future.
AI systems are becoming increasingly prevalent in our daily lives: autonomous driving assistants, intelligent traffic control, smart homes, household robots... But do we understand what these systems are capable of and what behavior we can expect from them?
Wouldn’t it be great if these systems could simply explain their behavior to us? But in a way that we can understand, and only when we need an explanation—that can’t be that hard, can it?
Together, we’ll explore the requirements, challenges, and current research on this topic.
A very human thing is to forget something - homework, a date, to drink something... While a specific act of forgetting can lead to mild to severe consequences in everyday live, the overall concept of forgetting allows us humans to retain only the important information throughout life without getting overloaded by little details. E.g., without thinking about it, we regularly abstract away from a particular instance or generalise over a set of instances. Doing so means less memory is required to store the information.
AI systems are generally bad at this. However, looking at how humans forget and how we can translate that into forgetting in AI models opens up interesting new avenues of thinking about how to work on the generalisability and memory efficiency of AI models. This talk looks at models that describe worlds under uncertainty and how one can think about forgetting in them, inspired by the very human concept of - what was it? I just had it...
The academic system, especially in Germany, puts a high demand on researchers who want to get a permanent position. Jumping through hoops for a long period threatens well-being. In this talk, I will introduce psychological disorders and states of mind that threaten mental health, and provide tips to help keep your mental health in the academic marathon. Trigger warning: The overview of psychological disorders will cover burn-out, anxiety, depression, and also mention suicide.
Rejected papers, rejected project proposals, rejected anything -- rejection is a central part of life as a researcher. In this interactive talk we discuss the reality and anatomy of rejections in research, shifting a focus to actionable resilience against supposedly bad things like rejections. While this talk will mainly be provided frontal, we do encourage active participation in parts of the talk.
Stereotypically, mentoring is often be about time management to achieve a better work-life balance, but I am not very good at time management, and I am also not a good example for a great work-life balance. Thus I will have to leave this advice to other people. But I know quite a bit about failures and bad management, things actually rarely talked about. But I wouldn't want to do any other job, and it's all about finding your WHY and fulfilling it to inspire others. Thus, I will tell you about my journey through academia, pointing out quite a few failures from rejected papers to rejected proposals and how to achieve the resilience to deal with those pushbacks. And I will talk about the frustrations of bad management (sometimes leading to those rejections) and share what I have learnt about leadership in academia. Practical advice will include a few easy things which you can do in your daily routines that make meetings way more productive and enjoyable for everyone.
Leaving academia after a PhD often leaves you with the question: was it really worth it, or did I just spend a few extra years studying before ending up doing the same job I could have started right after my master's degree? After completing a master's in Computer Science, I finished a PhD in 2025 that somehow involved doing electrical engineering research in a mathematics department while trying to convince everyone around me that cybersecurity mattered. Today, I work in industry as a Lead Product Manager at a scale-up building software for distribution grid operators. The cybersecurity part is (mostly) gone, as is the joy and pain of writing yet another revision of a paper. Yet somehow, I still spend my days thinking hard about problems in front of my computer and making decisions about which direction to proceed in without having complete knowledge of all the background information, constraints, and trade-offs involved. In this talk, I'll share what I learned from moving between academia and industry, and how all the side quests I completed during my PhD benefited me (or at least didn't harm me) along the way. I'll talk about which skills transferred remarkably well and which ones turned out to be far less important than I expected. We'll discuss interdisciplinary careers, being the odd one in the room, the reality of the current job market, and the decision between becoming a domain specialist or a more generalist leader responsible for people, products, and business outcomes. This talk is not a blueprint for success, but rather an adventure story from a somewhat unconventional career path, and an open invitation for discussion.
Computer science with its research mechanisms and educational approaches experiences both internally and externally triggered changes at a breathtaking speed. No one can safely predict the evolution in the forthcoming years but one aspect already seems clear: the academic mechanisms of the last decades, regarding both research and education, urgently need radical adaptions. In this talk, I discuss some of the most pressing arising problems and some currently observable approaches towards their solution.
Poster Contest
We invite all female students (Bachelor/Master/PhD) and early career researchers of computing and related subjects (in the broadest sense) to submit a poster. The poster could be on any computing topic they like: from social networking to quantum computing and from medical image processing to formal verification.
Poster submissions are open until August 31. Selected participants are expected to bring their poster to the workshop and present it during the poster session. The best poster will be awarded at the end of the day.
Exhibition
In addition to the keynote talks and the posters, there will be an exhibition which portrays thirty women in computing and their most important contributions.
Some highlights of the exhibition:
- Ada Lovelace who is known for her work on the sign of the ‘Analytics Machine’, the first ever general-purpose computer, and the first published algorithm;
- Grace Hopper who created the world’s first workable compiler and the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, an annual conference;
- The Bletchley Park Codebreakers included approximately 8,000 women, known as the “Bletchleyettes,” whose crucial code-breaking efforts during World War II, including operating cryptographic machinery and breaking complex codes, remain largely unrecognized due to the enduring secrecy of their work.
More information can be found at the exhibition website.
Speakers
- Erika Ábrahám, Professor at RWTH Aachen University
- Tanya Braun, Junior Professor at University of Münster
- Marieke Huisman, Professor at University of Twente (UT)
- Verena Klös, Professor at Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg
- Verena Menzel, Lead Product Manager at Venios GmbH
- Ina Schaefer, Professor at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
- Maike Schwammberger, Junior Professor at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
- Janet Siegmund, Professor at Chemnitz University of Technology
Organizing Committee
- Paula Herber, University of Münster
- Anne Remke, University of Münster
- Carina da Silva, University of Münster
Steering committee
- Marieke Huisman, University of Twente (UT)
- Mariëlle Stoelinga, University of Twente (UT)
- Sophie Lathouwers, TNO
- George Fletcher, Eindhoven University of Technology
- Machiel van der Bijl, Axini
- Lu Cao, Leiden University
- Jiapan Guo, University of Groningen
Code of Conduct
Alice and Eve is dedicated to providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form. Conference participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the conference at the discretion of the conference organizers. Harassment includes, but is not limited to:
- Verbal comments that reinforce social structures of domination related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, religion.
- Sexual images in public spaces
- Deliberate intimidation, stalking, or following
- Harassing photography or recording
- Sustained disruption of talks or other events
- Inappropriate physical contact
- Unwelcome sexual attention
- Advocating for, or encouraging, any of the above behaviour
Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately. If someone makes you or anyone else feel unsafe or unwelcome, please report it as soon as possible by contacting us ether in person or via email.