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I have been remiss in keeping up my blog, and realise I have about 8 things I should write about. So I am going to do a post a day, catching up with things chronologically. Today: an EU project, and a kick off meeting, only about 3 months late. A few years ago Jordi Freixenet visited Aberystwyth. He’s a computer vision guy, and he does lots of schools outreach, so we got along fairly well and decided to put in an EU grant to do schools stuff. This got knocked back, revised, resubmitted, … lather rinse repeat … and finally, this year, we got theRead More →

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One of the great things about the REF is the way every one’s a winner. Well, not everyone. But there are three different categories of stuff being measured, and two obvious choices of modifier. The things being “measured” are: Outputs: these are the actual papers Impact: this is a measure of how an institution’s research has impacted outside the academy Environment: this is a nebulous bucket containing completed PhD students, grants won, and softness of toilet paper. Or something And the obvious modifiers are number of people submitted (this gives us “power”, and is used as a multiplier) and proportion of “world class” (4*) research.Read More →

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The Research “Excellence” “Framework” is how university departments are judged on their research. It’s more than that though. It determines our funding, and it is effectively the only way that an institution can influence how much money it gets from the central funding agencies. This is in part due to the fact that under the new 9k fees regime, student-related funding pretty much all comes from students. If we get better at teaching, we might be able to get more money as that might reflect itself in better student satisfaction scores which might lead to higher recruitment, which might lead to more money… but theRead More →

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In 2015, an IEEE sponsored conference is going to have an ex-playboy centrefold as their guest star. Yes, you read that right. The committee of ICIP – coincidentally, almost entirely made up of guys – think it’s a good idea to have Lena do the prizegiving. Who’s Lena? In a nutshell: Back in 1973, some people wanted a test image One of them had bought some porn to work (wat?) So they said (hur hur) let’s scan that (wat?) And then released it to the “vision community” who’ve been using it ever since… (If you want to find out more about the background to Lena,Read More →

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It’s strange the way that knowledge can change the way we see things. I can’t see a live video feed without wondering how it was put together; how the effects were done; how it was mixed to make a (more or less unified) visual experience… and the gig I went to on Friday (Peter Gabriel, Birmingham) really made me think. Cameras, live video manipulation, and cool computer vision effects have really changed the live music experience. The first time I noticed the use of live video effects in earnest was at an Arctic Monkeys gig in Grenoble, in early 2010. They’d used small screens atRead More →

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This last week I’ve been at an interdisciplinary Rank Prize Fund meeting on sensing and automation in crop production. Normally I am very careful about taking time out during the teaching term, but these meetings are so prestigious, and I managed to talk Roger into delivering one of my lectures, so I don’t think the students missed out much. The Rank Prize Fund is a trust set up by Lord Rank (J. Arthur Rank – he of the film company, with the gong) to support research into his two main interests: optoelectronics, and human nutrition. The Rank Prize Symposiums are meetings which invite a mixtureRead More →

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I started this blog for Ada Lovelace Day in 2009 so this is my 5th ALD post. The idea is to write about a women in science that you admire, and this year, I’ve chosen Cate Huston. When I met her in April (she spoke at the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium) she was a Google Engineer who’s talk I missed, but I knew it got super feedback from our attending students, and we had a chat, and that was nice. Since then we’ve tweeted and emailed and met at conferences, and I’ve grown to respect her opinion hugely on matters from software testing to corporate culture. She’sRead More →

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Right: input plants, left: colour based plant segmentation using Gaussian Mixture Models I’ve won a grant to investigate the dynamic modelling of plant growth using computer vision. The plan is that we’re going to grow a load of Arabidopsis (that’s the plant in the picture above), under time-lapse cameras, and work out where the leaves are, and which leaves cover up which other leaves. Essentially, we’ll use the time-series of images as the plant grows to infer the 3D structure of the plant. Cool, eh? If you might be interested in this kind of project, and you can do computing and machine learning, then getRead More →

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I’m really pleased to be teaching computer vision this year. It’s the subject I research in, it’s what my PhD is in, and it’s my favourite part of computing. Challenging, mathematical, and very very visual. The previous lecturer (Fred Labrosse) is on sabbatical this year, and it’s great to take over from someone as good as Fred; the materials (blackboard, reading lists, slides) are all very thorough. So all I need to do is to update them to my style, shuffle the syllabus a bit, think about assessment, and make fancy videos demonstrating the algorithms we’ll be covering.

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I went to Machynlleth this afternoon to visit Ysgol Bro Ddyfi, one of the schools I’m working with on the GOWS project. A group primary teachers from the feeder schools were there, and we were meeting up to talk about computing, computational thinking, and how the project is coming along. Jordi and Mariona, who are visiting researchers from Girona, came along too and talked about the work they’ve been doing with local primary schools back in Catalonia. The way Tomi (Bro Ddyfi’s ICT teacher) and I have been thinking, Raspberry Pi computers and the scratch programming language are the key things for getting computing intoRead More →