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Ada Lovelace Day 2026: Campus Events, AI Chatbot and Study Tools

Ada Lovelace Day 2026 falls on Tuesday 13 October, the second Tuesday of the month, and once again U.S. universities, math departments and online study groups are using the day to make women’s contributions to computing visible. The day began in 2009 as a day of blogging and has grown into a multi-national event with conferences and workshops. If you are studying mathematics or computer science, the day is also a practical moment to revisit the resources that support your own work.

The date and origin

Ada Lovelace Day is an annual event held on the second Tuesday of October to celebrate and raise awareness of the contributions of women to STEM fields. It is named after mathematician and computer science pioneer Ada Lovelace. The day was founded in the United Kingdom in 2009 by Suw Charman-Anderson as a means of raising awareness about women’s work in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Charman-Anderson later said: “I launched Ada Lovelace Day in 2009 because I felt passionately that we needed a way to celebrate and highlight women’s work and achievements in STEM, which frequently don’t get the recognition they deserve.” In 2022 she announced that it would be the last year in which the organisation she founded, Finding Ada, would organise an annual flagship Ada Lovelace Day event. This year, many U.S. campuses observe the day on 13 October.

Campus events and a chatbot

At the University at Buffalo, UBIT is inviting students, faculty and staff to explore Lovelace through an AI chatbot powered by BullsAI. The chatbot is customized with information about Lovelace, who described an algorithm intended for Charles Babbage’s proposed Analytical Engine and is often considered the first computer programmer. You can ask it about her work, her ideas, her place in computing history, and her thoughts on modern-day topics such as AI or cybersecurity.

UBIT held an event in Davis Hall on 7 October from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., with a life-size cutout of Lovelace and the chatbot on an iPad; Vice President and Chief Information Officer Heath Tuttle joined the activity. The next day, the chatbot was featured during a Family Feud-style Cybersecurity Stump the CIO event in the Buffalo Room, from 2 to 4 p.m.

Outside any single campus, online forums and community portals can extend the same conversation. A portal such as SimpCity community portal gathers tech and forum guides and news, which can help you find peers discussing computing topics raised on the day.

A global day of making

Ada Lovelace Day is not limited to U.S. campuses. At the Australian National University, the College of Systems and Society will come together on 13 October from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. AEDT to write postcards, make badges, create poetry magnets and bookmarks, learn about Ada Lovelace and the history of computing, and chat with student groups. A later panel includes professors and PhD students discussing the impact of Ada’s work, current challenges for women in their disciplines, and the future of women in STEM.

On 18 October, BCS Oxfordshire’s Women in Computing event marks its fifth annual gathering, with short talks from students and a professional placement discussion. Many of these talks are recorded; if you have permission to save one for later, a free online HD YouTube to MP4 converter can let you download eligible videos in HD or 4K for personal offline use without signup or software.

What the research says

A post on the Ada Lovelace Day blog reviews four literature reviews on workplace gender equity interventions. It groups the interventions into eight categories: Change The Woman (8), Equip The Woman (14), Value The Woman (12), Change The Culture (25), Change The Business (44), Change The Law (8), Equip The Man (13), and Change The Man (11).

Drawing on work by Lydon et al, the post notes that 82.4% of interventions actually used fell into Equip The Woman, which includes mentoring, peer networking, championing and sponsoring programs, and skills-based training in leadership, public speaking and media skills. The author argues that these are popular because they are relatively easy to set up and show positive results, but they also expect women to do extra work on top of their jobs and can allow organizations to avoid harder changes to culture and business processes. The post points out that Change The Culture and Change The Business together account for 69 intervention types, suggesting plenty of opportunity for structural improvement.

For your linear algebra practice

If a study session or lecture sends you back to row reduction, working through reduced row echelon form by hand is still the best first step. A free online RREF calculator with steps can then check your result, reduce a matrix using exact fractions, and explain each row operation as you go. Enter your values, follow the pivot columns, and compare the matrix rank and nullity with your own work.

A small practical conclusion

Ada Lovelace Day is a reminder that the history of computing is also a history of women’s ideas. Whether you attend a campus event, work through a linear algebra problem, or watch a recorded talk, the most useful response is to learn something concrete and then share it with someone who has not yet seen themselves in the field.