In Aberystwyth Robotics Club we run after school robot-based activities for local schoolkids. This year we’ve just started a new term, and we decided to take in twice as many new starters as before. We decided it’d be a good idea to try being more open and let more kids have a go; it doesn’t matter if they haven’t been keen enough in the past to try out computing or robotics, what matters is they’re interested now and they want to give it a go. If they drop out at Christmas, that doesn’t matter, they’ve given it a shot. So we are running two parallelRead More →

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 →

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 →

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 →