Christmas is fast approaching from all sides. This year, it really does seem to be sneaking up on me. Oh well... I will of course keep you up to date on all the happenings.
Since I got back from Computer Science 2008, I spent Thursday just relaxing around catching up on a few things, Friday organising what I need to get done and then tidying up the house a bit, then playing on EVE before going to watch a movie. Today I woke up late and have spent the morning playing with my younger brothers, Logan and Byron.
All in all, I've had quite a few unproductive days. So hopefully in the next coming week I can actually get some real work done. Anyway, until my next blog post!
Saturday 20 December 2008
Wednesday 17 December 2008
Computer Science 2008 - Day 3
Today was truely driven to research in the field, for everything we visited was trying to drive the field of computing forward. After waking up early once again, and having breakfast, we headed straight to the first talk, that of our chosen industrial challenge related to the future!
Some of these problems include developing technology to support airspace design (the design of airspace to be more efficient and 3D made); modelling airspace change for safety, environment and delay, and whole network modelling and management, among others. They also pointed to SESAR as a major european research group, and the fact that research delivers both business benefits and opportunities, alongside increasing relationships with the universities that are researched with.
The next speech was on industrial research from BT, labelled BT Innovate. BT have 100 years of innovation behind them, the infrastructure to show for it, and the ability to provide numerous services to customers. In fact, BT takes an extremely low proportion of it's profits from the standard telephone numbers, so it is suffice to say that BT is no longer just a telephone service company, but a whole lot more.
The technology that BT offer include the development of fibre optics, which make things go further and faster, and the design of the 21st century network with new service capabililities on one network (a single IP network). As such, BT have migrated to this new network infrastructure to be able to offer more, better. But they still need more improvements. They still want to offer more high value services utilising the ever growing Internet usage over the next few years.
After a short break, we moved on to interdisciplinary research challenges. These include computer use in other sciences (or even beyond sciences) and look at big questions. The different strands are below:
Track A started off with Engineering, which is said to be quite dependent on computing nowadays, in things such as CAD, solar-powered car's, satellites and modelling. We looked at how computers were utilised in real-world engineering environments, and particularly looked into agriculture, or precisely, "precision agriculture". This utilised computer vision (which enables computers to see) and the processing of digital images as signals for decisions, measurements and control. This is useful in agriculture to enable automated robots that are environmentally friendly and can look after, spray and de-weed the crops.
The robot used GIS/GPS to get the vehicle to the field, then would use the camera to locate individual plants. This would then enable real-time navigation and spraying. To detect the plants, a bandwidth detector is used (so dark colours would be the dirt, white colours the plants) and with a bit of processing (such as removing small objects and passing the results through a Kalman filter), the plants and their boundaries can be found and identified. Then, these plants can be checked whether they are weeds or not.
If you are interested more on this technology, you can view the Silsoe Research Institute and also view the Tillet and Hague Technology site (the robot we looked at was the Autonomous Crop Treatment Vehicle, which you can watch a video of there).
The next talk was on nanotechnology. This looked at technology that was being developed at nanometre size. To the layman, a nanometer is the length the fingernail grows in a second. Nanotechnology is the ability to measure and manipulate matter at submicron scales, and is applicable to Moore's Law.
With everything becoming more powerful and yet smaller, heat is an increasing problem. But there is also a problem with physics that can't be worked around. This is due to the limit of the size of atoms. The challenges for nanotechnology are to continue Moore's Law while going around current physical limits and keeping this all within a reasonable price range. This can be done using new devices and fabrication paradigms.
For example, the use of a single atom memory can be done using salts and not silicon, due to the increase in ions. Electronics can also be self-assembled, and the use of bio electronics can come together to help as well (using biological organisms to develop technology at a nanoscopic level). This could also be solved by rewriting software, but with increasingly complex systems this means increasingly complex software.
After lunch, we were presented with the final talk... on Quantum Computing. Unfortunately, I am not very good at mathematics or physics, and so this topic was way over my head. If you are a computer scientist who is interested in mathematics and/or physics and are good at it, then this subject may interest you more. And if you want to understand more on what was presented, then speak to Saqib. He understood it a lot more then most people there!
Before I close off this conference, I would like to provide a few more photo's of various locations around the college that I took at various times. First, a few of the external:
The main building at night
Then, I also took a few of the rooms that were offered to us. This of course is not representative in any way of the entire university rooms, but just gives a small insight into the rooms we stayed in:
A nice bed
The desk in the room (with more shelves going up)
The phone - it's an IP Phone!
En-Suite Bathroom! Each!
Overall, this entire experience has been wonderful! It has been extremely worth attending, and I have not been disappointed by anything presented to me during my time here. It was all completely awesome and fascinating at the same time! To also meet so many wonderful people who are fellow Computer Scientist's in the field (including so many cool professors and businessmen) was an honour indeed. I had a great time and, if asked, would most certainly go again!! Thanks to Goldsmiths College, London, for giving me the oppourtunity to go, and to the conference organisers for such a fabulous conference; you know who you all are! :)
And that's me signing off. Phew!
- Track A: Industrial Challenge Session 1
- Air Traffic Control
- The Changing Face of Industrial Research
- Track B:Industrial Challenge Session 2
- Finance
- Service Oriented Computing
- Track C: Panel - Research Careers
Some of these problems include developing technology to support airspace design (the design of airspace to be more efficient and 3D made); modelling airspace change for safety, environment and delay, and whole network modelling and management, among others. They also pointed to SESAR as a major european research group, and the fact that research delivers both business benefits and opportunities, alongside increasing relationships with the universities that are researched with.
The next speech was on industrial research from BT, labelled BT Innovate. BT have 100 years of innovation behind them, the infrastructure to show for it, and the ability to provide numerous services to customers. In fact, BT takes an extremely low proportion of it's profits from the standard telephone numbers, so it is suffice to say that BT is no longer just a telephone service company, but a whole lot more.
The technology that BT offer include the development of fibre optics, which make things go further and faster, and the design of the 21st century network with new service capabililities on one network (a single IP network). As such, BT have migrated to this new network infrastructure to be able to offer more, better. But they still need more improvements. They still want to offer more high value services utilising the ever growing Internet usage over the next few years.
After a short break, we moved on to interdisciplinary research challenges. These include computer use in other sciences (or even beyond sciences) and look at big questions. The different strands are below:
- Track A
- Engineering
- Nanosystems
- Track B
- Open Data in Science (Cancelled)
- Physics
- Track C
- Biosciences
- Medicine
- Track D
- Psychology
- Humanities
Track A started off with Engineering, which is said to be quite dependent on computing nowadays, in things such as CAD, solar-powered car's, satellites and modelling. We looked at how computers were utilised in real-world engineering environments, and particularly looked into agriculture, or precisely, "precision agriculture". This utilised computer vision (which enables computers to see) and the processing of digital images as signals for decisions, measurements and control. This is useful in agriculture to enable automated robots that are environmentally friendly and can look after, spray and de-weed the crops.
The robot used GIS/GPS to get the vehicle to the field, then would use the camera to locate individual plants. This would then enable real-time navigation and spraying. To detect the plants, a bandwidth detector is used (so dark colours would be the dirt, white colours the plants) and with a bit of processing (such as removing small objects and passing the results through a Kalman filter), the plants and their boundaries can be found and identified. Then, these plants can be checked whether they are weeds or not.
If you are interested more on this technology, you can view the Silsoe Research Institute and also view the Tillet and Hague Technology site (the robot we looked at was the Autonomous Crop Treatment Vehicle, which you can watch a video of there).
The next talk was on nanotechnology. This looked at technology that was being developed at nanometre size. To the layman, a nanometer is the length the fingernail grows in a second. Nanotechnology is the ability to measure and manipulate matter at submicron scales, and is applicable to Moore's Law.
With everything becoming more powerful and yet smaller, heat is an increasing problem. But there is also a problem with physics that can't be worked around. This is due to the limit of the size of atoms. The challenges for nanotechnology are to continue Moore's Law while going around current physical limits and keeping this all within a reasonable price range. This can be done using new devices and fabrication paradigms.
For example, the use of a single atom memory can be done using salts and not silicon, due to the increase in ions. Electronics can also be self-assembled, and the use of bio electronics can come together to help as well (using biological organisms to develop technology at a nanoscopic level). This could also be solved by rewriting software, but with increasingly complex systems this means increasingly complex software.
After lunch, we were presented with the final talk... on Quantum Computing. Unfortunately, I am not very good at mathematics or physics, and so this topic was way over my head. If you are a computer scientist who is interested in mathematics and/or physics and are good at it, then this subject may interest you more. And if you want to understand more on what was presented, then speak to Saqib. He understood it a lot more then most people there!
Before I close off this conference, I would like to provide a few more photo's of various locations around the college that I took at various times. First, a few of the external:
A view from my room
The main building at night
Then, I also took a few of the rooms that were offered to us. This of course is not representative in any way of the entire university rooms, but just gives a small insight into the rooms we stayed in:Our first impression
A nice bed
The desk in the room (with more shelves going up)
The phone - it's an IP Phone!
En-Suite Bathroom! Each!
Overall, this entire experience has been wonderful! It has been extremely worth attending, and I have not been disappointed by anything presented to me during my time here. It was all completely awesome and fascinating at the same time! To also meet so many wonderful people who are fellow Computer Scientist's in the field (including so many cool professors and businessmen) was an honour indeed. I had a great time and, if asked, would most certainly go again!! Thanks to Goldsmiths College, London, for giving me the oppourtunity to go, and to the conference organisers for such a fabulous conference; you know who you all are! :)
And that's me signing off. Phew!
Tuesday 16 December 2008
Computer Science 2008 - Day 2
I woke up at around 7:15 this morning, having set a few alarms to wake me up then. Breakfast was in the great hall, and was a nice buffet of stuff (pastries, and the full English breakfast). By 9am, we were all back in the auditorium for today's first speech on procrastination, called The Power of Procrastination. This was spoken to us by Jorge Cham, who is the same guy who has created the comic Piled Higher and Deeper.
The speech itself was extremely funny and well put together, and utilised Jorge's comic strip character's. All I will say regarding the speech is that procrastination is not like laziness. Laziness is not doing the things you have to do; where as procrastination is not doing the things we have to do, now! For the rest of the speech though, you really need the wit and charm of Jorge himself.
Next up was the first set of mini tutorials for that day. We had a wide range of different tutorials on offer, as listed below:
The systems themselves should change/update their behaviour dynamically in response to changes, without a human's aid. Such as self-configuring themselves, self-healing and self-tuning. This would follow the basic architecture of Collect -> Analyse -> Decide -> Act -- Feedback Loop (although this was the early model and later models compressed this into Controller, Sequencer and Deliberator) with the three-layer architecture model.
There were a few examples with the cat and mouse game (where the cat and mouse can't be in the same room, and the controller must manage this without human intervention) and the Koala example (with a robot that had to take a ball from one location to another). This really was a most fascinating and enjoyable tutorial; creating a networked community of self-autonomous robot's (even virtual robots) would be so enjoyable!
After lunch, we got another wide multiple choice, this time in a group of workshops:
Basically, Google works off decades of Computer Science research, most of which is intertwined with engineering. The user's view of Google is to organise the world's information to make it more accessible and organisable. However, there are large design challenges for that, including the vast scale, huge data growth, wide geographical distribution and the huge latency challenge that Google has set themselves (getting search results and the like delivered to the user "in a blink of an eye".
Google has a vast number of highly efficient servers in highly efficent data centres (they use huge water cooling). These data centres (which are actually warehouse-scale computers) off extremely fast responses and are highly managed. Google is extremely efficient in whatever they do; trying to keep waste to a minimum and recycling all waste they produce.
They also have fast moving applications, good OS System design (using Linux), loosely-coupled distributed systems, distributed data storage, processing and interpretation, and use a wide variety of programming languages (including but not limited to, C++, Java, Python and Javascript). But it's the way they do software development that fascinates me...
They have small teams that use an agile "launch and iterate" philosophy (that is launch internally). Once a product is launched, any engineer across the entire codebase (that is any engineer in Google!) can work on the code. This may seem completely chaotic, as with people working in small teams all editing each other's work, there are going to be variations; but there are strict style guides (and I mean strict) with automated code tests and constant code reviews. Engineers are also given the tools they want. If you want Eclipse, sure! If you prefer Notepad++, sure!
Overall, Google has an integrated tech platform and offers tools on high-quality output with continous agile improvement methodologies. Fantastic! There are also a lot of open research issues within Google; improving distributed systems and information extraction being two (contact me for a full list).
After a short break (Google sort of overran a little) we had our second half of mini tutorials, out of:
Virtual environments are where you movements are tracked and the display and audio are changed along with you. The kit is often also voice activated. A few examples of virtual environments include Twinity, Neer and of course, Second Life.
However, they also offer some virtual tools, such as the historic Nintendo series (the Nintendo VirtualBoy, the Nintendo Power Glove, the Nintendo Wii).
However, the research tools used were the UCL ReaCTor, a Virtual Reality (VR) "Cave" system. This system is used because head-mounted displays often cause motion sickness due to high latency (ie, you move your head quickly, and the display updates too slowly, seconds afterwards). This is due to the primitive OS and the low screen refresh rate.
By using the Caves, people are able to immerse themselves more fully in a VR system. This provides a tool, a high-bandwidth human-computer interface, it exploits proprioception and participants treat VR differently from desktop graphics. This is evident from the fact that users behave as if VR was real. As such, reactions are usually appropriate for the situation (they treat virtual characters as real people, react to explosions and projectiles, and also to large drops).
The avatars themselves obviously make an important part in the creation of VR systems; the more realistic they look, the more realistic people expect them to behave, and therefore the less believable they are if they don't behave that realistically at all (if they look realistic that is). Therefore, if you have a stupid AI, make it cartoony and it's more believable.
I'll finish off once again with information on the dinner. We went to Girton College, a 5-10 minute drive from Homerton College. The Gala dinner was officially sponsored by Microsoft Research, and it was very nice of them to do so. At Girton, we entered a nice hall and was offered a Christmassy lunch. To start was pumpkin soup. There was turkey, with sausage wrapped in bacon, and veg. And for desert, was homemade christmas pudding, followed by coffee and tea.
As can be seen by the pictures, we all had lots of fun blowing up balloons (presented in little christmas boxes along with poppers, tape and a horn) and then letting them go to whizz around the room making noise! Overall, a fun evening to end another amazing day at this wonderful conference!
The speech itself was extremely funny and well put together, and utilised Jorge's comic strip character's. All I will say regarding the speech is that procrastination is not like laziness. Laziness is not doing the things you have to do; where as procrastination is not doing the things we have to do, now! For the rest of the speech though, you really need the wit and charm of Jorge himself.
Next up was the first set of mini tutorials for that day. We had a wide range of different tutorials on offer, as listed below:
- Track A - Natural Language Processing and Text Mining (Cancelled)
- Track B - Self-Adaptive Systems (Creating systems that manage themselves)
- Track C - Designing Technology for Human Values (Human-Computer Interaction)
- Track D - Realistic Imagery (Cancelled)
- Track E - Web Science (from Wendy Hall, who has worked with Tim Berners-Lee himself, on how we can't predict how the web will grow)
- Track F - Computer Vision (Microsoft Research on Graphics and Maths)
- Track G - Design for the Future Internet (BT Research on the new technology for the future of the Internet)
The systems themselves should change/update their behaviour dynamically in response to changes, without a human's aid. Such as self-configuring themselves, self-healing and self-tuning. This would follow the basic architecture of Collect -> Analyse -> Decide -> Act -- Feedback Loop (although this was the early model and later models compressed this into Controller, Sequencer and Deliberator) with the three-layer architecture model.
There were a few examples with the cat and mouse game (where the cat and mouse can't be in the same room, and the controller must manage this without human intervention) and the Koala example (with a robot that had to take a ball from one location to another). This really was a most fascinating and enjoyable tutorial; creating a networked community of self-autonomous robot's (even virtual robots) would be so enjoyable!
After lunch, we got another wide multiple choice, this time in a group of workshops:
- Track A: Tech Briefing: Infrastructure at Google
- Track B: Research Methods
- Track C: Intellectual Property
- Track D: Changing the World
- Track E: Getting your Paper Published in Journals
- Track F: Digital Divide
- Track G: Future of Science Publishing
Basically, Google works off decades of Computer Science research, most of which is intertwined with engineering. The user's view of Google is to organise the world's information to make it more accessible and organisable. However, there are large design challenges for that, including the vast scale, huge data growth, wide geographical distribution and the huge latency challenge that Google has set themselves (getting search results and the like delivered to the user "in a blink of an eye".
Google has a vast number of highly efficient servers in highly efficent data centres (they use huge water cooling). These data centres (which are actually warehouse-scale computers) off extremely fast responses and are highly managed. Google is extremely efficient in whatever they do; trying to keep waste to a minimum and recycling all waste they produce.
They also have fast moving applications, good OS System design (using Linux), loosely-coupled distributed systems, distributed data storage, processing and interpretation, and use a wide variety of programming languages (including but not limited to, C++, Java, Python and Javascript). But it's the way they do software development that fascinates me...
They have small teams that use an agile "launch and iterate" philosophy (that is launch internally). Once a product is launched, any engineer across the entire codebase (that is any engineer in Google!) can work on the code. This may seem completely chaotic, as with people working in small teams all editing each other's work, there are going to be variations; but there are strict style guides (and I mean strict) with automated code tests and constant code reviews. Engineers are also given the tools they want. If you want Eclipse, sure! If you prefer Notepad++, sure!
Overall, Google has an integrated tech platform and offers tools on high-quality output with continous agile improvement methodologies. Fantastic! There are also a lot of open research issues within Google; improving distributed systems and information extraction being two (contact me for a full list).
After a short break (Google sort of overran a little) we had our second half of mini tutorials, out of:
- Track A: Interaction Design
- Track B: Immersive Environments
- Track C: Programming Language Semantics
- Track D: AI for the Web
- Track E: Sensor Nets
- Track F: Computer Gaming
- Track G: Human-Centred and Affective Computing
Virtual environments are where you movements are tracked and the display and audio are changed along with you. The kit is often also voice activated. A few examples of virtual environments include Twinity, Neer and of course, Second Life.
However, they also offer some virtual tools, such as the historic Nintendo series (the Nintendo VirtualBoy, the Nintendo Power Glove, the Nintendo Wii).
However, the research tools used were the UCL ReaCTor, a Virtual Reality (VR) "Cave" system. This system is used because head-mounted displays often cause motion sickness due to high latency (ie, you move your head quickly, and the display updates too slowly, seconds afterwards). This is due to the primitive OS and the low screen refresh rate.
By using the Caves, people are able to immerse themselves more fully in a VR system. This provides a tool, a high-bandwidth human-computer interface, it exploits proprioception and participants treat VR differently from desktop graphics. This is evident from the fact that users behave as if VR was real. As such, reactions are usually appropriate for the situation (they treat virtual characters as real people, react to explosions and projectiles, and also to large drops).
The avatars themselves obviously make an important part in the creation of VR systems; the more realistic they look, the more realistic people expect them to behave, and therefore the less believable they are if they don't behave that realistically at all (if they look realistic that is). Therefore, if you have a stupid AI, make it cartoony and it's more believable.
I'll finish off once again with information on the dinner. We went to Girton College, a 5-10 minute drive from Homerton College. The Gala dinner was officially sponsored by Microsoft Research, and it was very nice of them to do so. At Girton, we entered a nice hall and was offered a Christmassy lunch. To start was pumpkin soup. There was turkey, with sausage wrapped in bacon, and veg. And for desert, was homemade christmas pudding, followed by coffee and tea.
As can be seen by the pictures, we all had lots of fun blowing up balloons (presented in little christmas boxes along with poppers, tape and a horn) and then letting them go to whizz around the room making noise! Overall, a fun evening to end another amazing day at this wonderful conference!
Monday 15 December 2008
Computer Science 2008 - Day 1
Heya all! So, here is my blog post on the Computer Science 2008 conference I am attending in Homerton College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge. You can see more on this on the Facebook page, or on the official website, including a list of all the major sponsors that sponsor the event.
It took Saqib and I about 1 hour and 45 minutes to get to Cambridge. When we arrived, we were registered and given a badge registering our name, and our College name (Goldsmiths). Before we proceeded to hand in our bags to the Porter, we got given another bag (provided by Microsoft Research) filled with wonderful goodies. The images shown here only show some of what was being offered to us.
Oh, and the small things in the image on the left, from left to right, are mints (which Saqib didn't get), two usb sticks, a calculator, and a funky notebook from Google with the front page being a representation of Google Earth zooming in on what is (supposedly) Google's headquarters. Simply awesome!
Then we had the introductory speech. The conference was stated to "open doors to research", with many opportunities for research being offered. This was clearly so as the conference is being hosted by the UK CRC (UK Computer Research Committee).
The keynote speech for today was on Security Messages, and it was given by Lorrie Faith Cranor from Carnegie Mellon University, all the way in the US!! It was a fantastic speech that covered how approximately 64% of all people ignore most of the warnings they are shown, how this is, and what we can do to improve on it.
Most people ignore warnings because they don't understand what they mean, or what to do about them, or they are too similar to each other. As such, most security breaches are due to human error. Therefore, there is a significant human threat to security from not only malicious humans, but also unmotivated or incapable humans.
A "human-in-the-loop" framework was presented, which listed ways for communication to be effectively. This leads to the human threat identification and mitigation process, a way of identifying a task, automating it as much as possible, and then finding out when that task as failed and mitigating any failures as much as possible. By automating as much as possible, and improving warnings, people should pay more attention to the less frequent warning messages that are shown.
To find out more about this subject, visit the offical CUPS website.
After a lunch break came the Grand Challenges. There were 9 Grand Challenges overall in Computer Science, and you can find out more about them by viewing the PDFs available here (although they miss out GC8 which is Learning for Life (how to use technology to help us learn) and GC9 which is Bringing the Past for the Citizen (using technology to review the past)).
We picked two of the Grand Challenge's to look at, and the two we saw was GC6 (Dependable Systems Evolution) and GC9 (Bringing the Past to Life for the Citizen).
GC6, hosted by John Fitzgerald from the University of Newcastle, was all about using automated verification to deliver warrantable software; that is, software that we can trust not to continually give us blue screen's of death. This is down by producing design languages that can be rigorously analysed by humans and by machines, and having formal methods that offer in "hidden" push-button tools that perform these analyses.
For example, Microsoft's Device Driver Verification, as device drivers caused 85% of Windows XP crashes. Doing this helped improve the stability immensely. Another case is the Pacemaker challenge, making complex software that is guaranteed to work in a cardiac pacemaker.
By using formal methods to verify software, it offers a larger stage in design and less testing and bug fixing. The area is wide open, and if you are interested in this area of expertise I have contact information.
GC9, hosted by David Arnold from the University of Brighton, was all about reconstructing the past using technology. It was designed to be a cross between Time Team, Laura Croft and the European Digital Library. Among offering both economic and social benefits, it would enable architect's, historians and archaeologists to work together to show off history.
There were different ways to communicate this history. Through Avatars, Bluescreens, an RFID game, and a virtual reality overlay. There is also a lot to do in this challenge; the sheer scale of data capture as everyone has their own cultural heritage, views and interpretations; there is the simulation vs artificial life; there are digitalisation issues; semantics issues (what to record and what are their significance); how to tell the stories of the past; using images to tell stories; and the challenges of using legacy data.
The final talk was on the Rough Guide to Entrepreneurship. It was hosted by Jack Lang, an entrepreneur from Cambridge. He stated that an entrepreneur is someone who starts a project without having the full resources or knowledge. There are many reasons to become an entrepreneur, either because you can see an opportunity, because you have a good idea, or simply because you just can. You must obviously know why you are doing it, and that will be either for fun or profit.
Now is a good time to start, because everyone is providing the money and support to get you (and the rest of the economy) started. There are also a lot of eager people out there to help you, the Government included, and of course if you can "dare to begin" then there is the adventure. You do need to have a good investor criteria (if you are going to get someone to invest in you), and for that you need to know your market, your technical advantages, your people and the finance available to you (with the market being the most important criteria for high-tech... who needs a fooglefarg?) Oh, and by clicking that link, you can see the slide notes for this lecture.
Finally, I just want to bring you up to date on what happened over dinner (the welcome dinner and icebreaker). The dinner was lamb (lovely!) with potato, carrots and broccoli in a candlelit (quite dark) atmosphere. Desert was chocolate orange tart. Then, things began to light up for the icebreaker, which was none other then Caribbean drum kits!
And yes, we played the drums!
It is hard to summarise the four lectures (and the evening) we had today in a simple blog post, but I hope I did my best in trying to give you a taster of exactly what we experienced. It truly is an amazing conference and I am once again honoured to be part of it. More pictures and information to come in the future blog posts!! Until next time :)
It took Saqib and I about 1 hour and 45 minutes to get to Cambridge. When we arrived, we were registered and given a badge registering our name, and our College name (Goldsmiths). Before we proceeded to hand in our bags to the Porter, we got given another bag (provided by Microsoft Research) filled with wonderful goodies. The images shown here only show some of what was being offered to us.
Oh, and the small things in the image on the left, from left to right, are mints (which Saqib didn't get), two usb sticks, a calculator, and a funky notebook from Google with the front page being a representation of Google Earth zooming in on what is (supposedly) Google's headquarters. Simply awesome!
Then we had the introductory speech. The conference was stated to "open doors to research", with many opportunities for research being offered. This was clearly so as the conference is being hosted by the UK CRC (UK Computer Research Committee).
The keynote speech for today was on Security Messages, and it was given by Lorrie Faith Cranor from Carnegie Mellon University, all the way in the US!! It was a fantastic speech that covered how approximately 64% of all people ignore most of the warnings they are shown, how this is, and what we can do to improve on it.
Most people ignore warnings because they don't understand what they mean, or what to do about them, or they are too similar to each other. As such, most security breaches are due to human error. Therefore, there is a significant human threat to security from not only malicious humans, but also unmotivated or incapable humans.A "human-in-the-loop" framework was presented, which listed ways for communication to be effectively. This leads to the human threat identification and mitigation process, a way of identifying a task, automating it as much as possible, and then finding out when that task as failed and mitigating any failures as much as possible. By automating as much as possible, and improving warnings, people should pay more attention to the less frequent warning messages that are shown.
To find out more about this subject, visit the offical CUPS website.
After a lunch break came the Grand Challenges. There were 9 Grand Challenges overall in Computer Science, and you can find out more about them by viewing the PDFs available here (although they miss out GC8 which is Learning for Life (how to use technology to help us learn) and GC9 which is Bringing the Past for the Citizen (using technology to review the past)).
We picked two of the Grand Challenge's to look at, and the two we saw was GC6 (Dependable Systems Evolution) and GC9 (Bringing the Past to Life for the Citizen).
GC6, hosted by John Fitzgerald from the University of Newcastle, was all about using automated verification to deliver warrantable software; that is, software that we can trust not to continually give us blue screen's of death. This is down by producing design languages that can be rigorously analysed by humans and by machines, and having formal methods that offer in "hidden" push-button tools that perform these analyses.
For example, Microsoft's Device Driver Verification, as device drivers caused 85% of Windows XP crashes. Doing this helped improve the stability immensely. Another case is the Pacemaker challenge, making complex software that is guaranteed to work in a cardiac pacemaker.
By using formal methods to verify software, it offers a larger stage in design and less testing and bug fixing. The area is wide open, and if you are interested in this area of expertise I have contact information.
GC9, hosted by David Arnold from the University of Brighton, was all about reconstructing the past using technology. It was designed to be a cross between Time Team, Laura Croft and the European Digital Library. Among offering both economic and social benefits, it would enable architect's, historians and archaeologists to work together to show off history.
There were different ways to communicate this history. Through Avatars, Bluescreens, an RFID game, and a virtual reality overlay. There is also a lot to do in this challenge; the sheer scale of data capture as everyone has their own cultural heritage, views and interpretations; there is the simulation vs artificial life; there are digitalisation issues; semantics issues (what to record and what are their significance); how to tell the stories of the past; using images to tell stories; and the challenges of using legacy data.
The final talk was on the Rough Guide to Entrepreneurship. It was hosted by Jack Lang, an entrepreneur from Cambridge. He stated that an entrepreneur is someone who starts a project without having the full resources or knowledge. There are many reasons to become an entrepreneur, either because you can see an opportunity, because you have a good idea, or simply because you just can. You must obviously know why you are doing it, and that will be either for fun or profit.
Now is a good time to start, because everyone is providing the money and support to get you (and the rest of the economy) started. There are also a lot of eager people out there to help you, the Government included, and of course if you can "dare to begin" then there is the adventure. You do need to have a good investor criteria (if you are going to get someone to invest in you), and for that you need to know your market, your technical advantages, your people and the finance available to you (with the market being the most important criteria for high-tech... who needs a fooglefarg?) Oh, and by clicking that link, you can see the slide notes for this lecture.
Finally, I just want to bring you up to date on what happened over dinner (the welcome dinner and icebreaker). The dinner was lamb (lovely!) with potato, carrots and broccoli in a candlelit (quite dark) atmosphere. Desert was chocolate orange tart. Then, things began to light up for the icebreaker, which was none other then Caribbean drum kits!
And yes, we played the drums!
It is hard to summarise the four lectures (and the evening) we had today in a simple blog post, but I hope I did my best in trying to give you a taster of exactly what we experienced. It truly is an amazing conference and I am once again honoured to be part of it. More pictures and information to come in the future blog posts!! Until next time :)
Sunday 14 December 2008
Computer Science 2008
Right, it's extremely late and I don't have much time, so I am just writing a short blog entry this week to say that I will be attending Computer Science 2008 conference in Cambridge from tomorrow. I will of course be keeping you all up to date, both via Twitter and this blog.
If I know you, and you wish to access my protected Twitter stream, and you have a Twitter account, then look me up by visiting my Twitter feed (see link on right). If not, don't worry as I will be posting nightly posts on this blog with updates on all that has happened.
Right, night all!
If I know you, and you wish to access my protected Twitter stream, and you have a Twitter account, then look me up by visiting my Twitter feed (see link on right). If not, don't worry as I will be posting nightly posts on this blog with updates on all that has happened.
Right, night all!
Thursday 11 December 2008
Twitter is now Protected
Just a quick note to let everyone know that my Twitter account is now protected. What that means is, if you want to view my Twitter updates, you have to have your own Twitter account and you have to be a known friend. If you match those two statements, then speak to me :)
Sunday 7 December 2008
Have a Happy Twittery Holiday!
Welcome to December! Another year almost up, another year looming on the other side, another year older. Time seems to pass so fast!
Sorry I haven't updated for two weeks, but last weekend (and this one just past) I was quite busy doing other stuff. Suffice to say I haven't had the time. However... I have found a wonderful new way to keep you all informed during my long absences of blogging!
Twitter!
"What is twitter?", you may ask, and a good question too! Twitter is a service that lets me update what I am up to as easily as sending a free text message. This will allow you to keep up to what I really am up to, rather then relying on my sketchy blog posts.
Anyway, to summarise these past two weeks, I'll simply talk about what I can remember... which is only stuff from the past week it seems (especially considering the hour I am writing this blog post at). To start with, this past week has seen me working on both my Design report for my project, my Logic assignment, and an E-Commerce assignment, at Uni. I have also been doing various things for the companies I work for.
On Friday, we hosted a surprise party for my brother Andrew, to celebrate that he turned 18 in early November. Quite a few of his friends turned up, and we had a nice dinner followed by a late evening. Then the past two days have been spent finishing off both my E-Commerce and Design report assignments; luckily both have been completed for now!
In the future, I am going to Computer Science 2008 from the 15th-17th of December, up in Cambridge University. Looks to be a good programme of entertaining computer science stuff. Really looking forward to it and going to be sure to keep you all updated with extremely regular Twitter and Blog posts, complete with photos!
I also break up this Friday. So this is my last week at Uni before the Christmas holidays really start. And you can see my personal countdown to Christmas day over on the right (under my Twitter Updates section).
Right! I will finish this post by wishing you all a Happy Twittery Holiday!! Yeehar!! :)
Sorry I haven't updated for two weeks, but last weekend (and this one just past) I was quite busy doing other stuff. Suffice to say I haven't had the time. However... I have found a wonderful new way to keep you all informed during my long absences of blogging!
Twitter!
"What is twitter?", you may ask, and a good question too! Twitter is a service that lets me update what I am up to as easily as sending a free text message. This will allow you to keep up to what I really am up to, rather then relying on my sketchy blog posts.
Anyway, to summarise these past two weeks, I'll simply talk about what I can remember... which is only stuff from the past week it seems (especially considering the hour I am writing this blog post at). To start with, this past week has seen me working on both my Design report for my project, my Logic assignment, and an E-Commerce assignment, at Uni. I have also been doing various things for the companies I work for.
On Friday, we hosted a surprise party for my brother Andrew, to celebrate that he turned 18 in early November. Quite a few of his friends turned up, and we had a nice dinner followed by a late evening. Then the past two days have been spent finishing off both my E-Commerce and Design report assignments; luckily both have been completed for now!
In the future, I am going to Computer Science 2008 from the 15th-17th of December, up in Cambridge University. Looks to be a good programme of entertaining computer science stuff. Really looking forward to it and going to be sure to keep you all updated with extremely regular Twitter and Blog posts, complete with photos!
I also break up this Friday. So this is my last week at Uni before the Christmas holidays really start. And you can see my personal countdown to Christmas day over on the right (under my Twitter Updates section).
Right! I will finish this post by wishing you all a Happy Twittery Holiday!! Yeehar!! :)
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