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 :)
