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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 weekend was Electromagnetic Field, the UK’s main Hacker/maker camp. It’s an outstanding opportunity for meeting up with tinkerers, coders and makers from across the UK and beyond. I was at the first EMF (in 2012, blog post here) talking about women in tech, and went back to this one to talk about schools outreach and the work we’re doing with kids and families. I spoke about schools and kids engagement in general, but also more specifically about our EU playfulcoding project. You can see my talk here: And you can view the slides here, if you just want slides, not talk. The talk wasRead More →

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Early last Sunday I left sunny mid-Wales for the last ever meeting in our EU Erasmus+ project “Early Mastery/Playful Coding”. We flew from Bristol to Girona with Ryanair (who call Girona “Barcelona”, which gives some clue to its location). The cloud cover cleared as soon as we crossed the channel, and the view from the airplane was rather lovely. The Pyrenees in particular were stunning. Once in Girona we met up with the Ysgol Bro Hyddgen crew, teachers from the school up the road in Machynlleth. A chatty evening spent in a lovely riverside bar rounded off the day of travel nicely. Monday morning, brightRead More →

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I gave a talk today about using short videos in teaching, to the Aberystwyth University Teaching and Learning conference (info here). The conference is an annual event which serves as a showcase for best practice in the uni, and it’s always interesting to see what people are up to. As part of my prep for the talk I did a lot of thinking about the different uses of video in learning and teaching, and about the different types of video I’ve put together. So I thought I’d do a blog post about that. If you’re interested in the how, as well as the what andRead More →

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Soapbox Science is a public engagement event designed to get scientists out into the public and into public spaces, talking about their work. It’s supposed to demystify science (a bit) but also to change people’s perceptions of what scientists look like; one of the ways it does this is by making all of the scientists on the soapbox women. When I heard about it, I thought… Public engagement? Women in Science? Sounds a bit mad? Guess I’d better apply then! The event I applied for was my nearest one, this year, and that was Cardiff, and it was yesterday. As you can probably guess fromRead More →

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I’m just back from the workout called Insanity, which was the last class in my personal mission to try every type of exercise class offered at Aber Uni at least once (except yoga – you’ve got to draw the line somewhere). I saved Insanity for last, you can probably guess why. Being a proper nerd of course I kept a spreadsheet, with comments and some estimates (percentage of class completed, approximate proportion of guys, that kind of thing). So here are some stats: Highest max heartrate reached: Insanity. Today. 140bpm Lowest max HR: Pilates, where most sessions I got up to 70bpm max Lowest heartrateRead More →

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On Friday I went to Cardiff to see a play. It’s a long way to go for a play, but this one’s special. It’s written by my friend Catrin, who’s a law lecturer here in Aberystwyth, and it concerns Alan Turing. She wrote it during the Alan Turing centenary year (2012), and the play has grown and developed since. Some of the actors read a scene at the BCS Mid Wales AGM in 2012, and I thought it was captivating. Since then, my interaction with the play has been accidentally at-a-distance. I wrote a piece on AI for the program, I supported the kickstarter, IRead 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 →