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We (me, Clem Herman at the OU and Gillian Arnold of Tectre ltd) are running a short project on gendered microaggression in computing at University. We have run some focus groups and are now at the survey stage. SO! This post is to help advertise the survey, which you can fill in in English or in Welsh: https://openuniversity.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/gendered-microaggressions-survey https://aber.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/microymosodiadau-rhyweddol-mewn-adrannau-cyfrifiadura We’d like responses from students, as we’re interested in the current picture, but we’re also interested in the experiences of grads and staff. We ask about microaggressions you’ve experienced but also those you’ve witnessed. This means we want to capture responses from guys as well asRead More →

Surrounded by robots

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A couple of weekends ago we (Aberystwyth Robotics) held our annual “Beachlab” event. Usually, this is a hands-on event with robots and activities on the promenade. This year, we had to relocate to the campus because of COVID issues, and the robots were strictly hands-off for attendees. It was a bit like a pop-up robot museum, rather than an interactive display, but hey that’s better than nothing. This was the first outing for our new robotic submarine Afanc (which means “Beaver” in Welsh). Here I am talking about how the sub works: And here I am posing with the submarine whilst surrounded by other robotsRead More →

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I’ve just finished a MOOC (massive open online course) on play, with Futurelearn and the University of Sheffield: Exploring Play. Ideas about play have been coming up quite a bit in my work in the last few years – both in teaching (gamification, exploration) and in research (particularly in the research I’ve been doing into kids and coding). But I didn’t really know much about theoretical or practical ideas of play, particularly not outside of computing, so I signed up for a MOOC to take the broader look. I found that earlier on in this course, the readings about play types enriched my conception ofRead More →

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BCSWomen Chair Sarah Burnett has had a fab idea, which is to hold a series of webinars that talk about AI and how it is changing the world. In BCSWomen we do a lot of stuff about the women, and a lot of stuff to support women, but we also do a lot of stuff that is useful for tech people in general. The AI Accelerator falls into this category; the idea is that tech is changing and AI is driving that change, so we’re going to try and provide a background and overview of AI to help people get to grips with this. OnceRead More →

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On Wednesday I hosted my first ever British Machine Vision Association (BMVA) one-day workshop. The BMVA are the organisation which drives forwards computer vision in the UK, and they run a series of one-day technical meetings, usually in London, which are often very informative. In order to run one, you have to first propose it, and then the organisation work with you to pull together dates, program, bookings and so on. If you work in computer vision and haven’t been to one yet, you’re missing out. I won’t write an overview of the whole day – that’s already been done very well by Geraint fromRead More →

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We’ve had our first journal paper published from my EPSRC first grant. It gives a comprehensive review of work into the automated image analysis of plants – well, one particular type of plant, Arabidopsis Thaliana. It’s by Jonathan Bell and myself, and it represents a lot of reading, talking and thinking about computer vision and plants. We also make some suggestions which we hope can help inform future work in this area. You can read the full paper here, if you’re interested in computer vision and plant science. The first grant as a whole is looking at time-lapse photography of plants and aims to buildRead More →

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Last week I was invited to present at the first Human Centred Cognition summer school, near Bremen in Germany. Summer schools are a key part of the postgraduate training experience, and involve gathering together experts to deliver graduate level training (lectures, tutorials and workshops) on a particular theme. I’ve been to summer schools before as a participant, but never as faculty. We’re at a crossroads in AI at the moment: there’s been a conflict between “good old fashioned AI” (based upon logic and the symbol manipulation paradigm) and non-symbolic or sub-symbolic AI (neural networks, probabilistic models, emergent systems) for as long as I have known,Read More →

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Last week (on Friday) we held the Aberystwyth Image Analysis workshop. I think it was the 3rd, or maybe the 4th one of these I’ve organised. The aim is to have some informal talks and posters centred around the theme of image analysis (including image processing, computer vision, and other image-related stuff) from across Aberystwyth. To encourage participation from people whether they’ve got results or not we have 10 minute slots for problem statements, short talks, work in progress and so on, and we have 20 minute slots for longer pieces of work. This year there were 4 departments represented in talks: Computer science, Maths,Read More →

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A Lightstage is a system which lets you completely control illumination in a particular space, and capture images from multiple views. They’re used for high resolution graphics capture and computer vision, and they’re fairly rare. I don’t think there are many non-commercial ones in the UK, and they’re research kit (which means you can’t really just go out and buy one, you’ve got to actually build it). Usually, Lightstages are used for facial feature capture, but I’m kinda interested to use them with plants. With the support of the National Plant Phenomics Centre, here in Aberystwyth, and and Aberystwyth University Research Fund grant (URF) I’veRead More →