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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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For the last 9 weeks I’ve been visiting the University of Girona (UdG), and working on some research in Vicorob and Udigital. I’ve taken part in three engagement activities whilst I’ve been here – even though I don’t speak the language. It turns out that with colleagues to help translate, it’s possible to be useful even without many words, although in the first two workshops I was more of an observer/helper than a facilitator. The first of these was an underwater robotics workshop, with a visiting class or around 15 teenagers; the second of these was a wheeled robotics workshop with 9 adults in aRead More →

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I’m visiting Girona Uni at the moment as part of my sabbatical term, and whilst I’m here I’m trying to expand my horizons a bit academically. SO, this week I attended a workshop on marine robotics, which just happened to be going on whilst I’m here and they let me attend for free. The workshop is for marine robotics, but it is not just a research conference. Attendees come from 30 research centres, and 12 companies. Presentations come from 14 EU projects, 4 national projects, 4 companies. On day one, I saw 16 of the talks and then skipped the rest (including the demo andRead 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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The 10th BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium was held on April 12th, at Aberystwyth University. Around 200 attendees enjoyed a day of inspiring talks, fascinating student posters, careers advice, employers fair, lots of networking and too much cake. Our headline sponsor this year was Google, who covered loads of the student travel and also sent a speaker along. As we pay for travel for all the poster contest finalists and as we were in Aberystwyth this year, we paid for 2 nights for everyone. This enabled us to have a social the night before, with Scott Logic providing a hackathon activity which got people talking and codingRead 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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On Sunday we had our first Aberystwyth Robotics Club pumpkin hack. Kids, pumpkins, flashing lights and electronics together in a fun afternoon workshop. In the carving station, the kids hacked away at their pumpkins with kid-safe tools or gave their design to one of our high powered Dremel wielding helpers. With a suggested age range of 6-12 we weren’t going to let the attendees loose with super sharp knives or powertools, but they managed to design their pumpkins themselves and help to cut them out (or at least, carve them) In the coding zone, we had a bunch of laptops, a bunch of Arduino nanoRead 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 →