- 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!
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