Work Stuff

Work continues! Besides the travel to Prague, a few more things have been going on. Right now, the students are back so it's all got very busy - teaching combined with all the usual writing papers and grant applications and all the rest of it. Between all that, a few other things over the summer...

First up, a wee trip to KLM in Amsterdam. Just one day and a night but lots of promising discussions and we should be able to to some really nice work with them.

Exciting view from the office where we spent most of the day.

I enjoyed that the meeting room was "CAPTAIN KIRK"

 

Another anonymous hotel room and glamorous view!

At least we did see some of proper Amsterdam. Very pretty.

Next up, I was chair of a couple of events in Stirling. One was the SICSA PhD conference, where we had 150 Computing PhD students from all over Scotland for a couple of days of workshops and networking....

Me sitting next to one of the keynote speakers, a guy from BT who does work in AI.

Free conference bottles or bags anyone? We now have an abundant supply of these if you want one.

Just in case this is all sounding far too cool... here's the table numbering at the conference dinner.
Cue joke about there being 10 kinds of people in the world - those who get this and those who don't.

We also had a workshop specifically for people working in my field, evolutionary computation. The idea of this one was that people who had talks in international conferences could share them with other locals who wouldn't be travelling this year (particularly as about five conferences were represented, including the Prague one, one in New Zealand, and other far flung places). Here's me opening the event...

And now to more mundane things...

When I returned from my travels, these red light up X signs had been installed in the corridors where my office is.
Slightly terrifying!

I felt it was necessary to have somewhere to read and ponder in my office, so I now have this nice easy chair.
Lydia helped me take it in, and gave it a test run for me! 

A nice perk of the job, this is a thankyou beer (one of several) from a PhD student I've been helping supervise for the past year, who just passed his viva.

This pigeon was larger than it looks, and kept peering in through my window.

Prague

Not quite as exotic as last year, but this year's conference trip was to Prague. A city I've wanted to see for a long time and it was a nice place to visit. Friendly people and a really varied mixture of architecture - some Alpine, some almost Nordic, some Turkish, some Soviet and more. Somewhat happily I had four publications at this one - two that I wrote myself (one on a tool for research into automatically improving software, and one on my "evolving sounds of places" project), one by one of my PhD students, and one literature review paper that I'm still not sure how I ended up on but was happy to be asked. I also ended up chairing a panel discussion at the last minute as my former PhD supervisor (what was meant to be doing it) was ill and unable to travel, so he asked me to cover. My busiest conference yet! But still good fun and, as always, one of the highlights of the year.

The view from my hotel room - just a sample of the different architectures...

Our taxi driver pointed at this (the conference was here) and said "typical Soviet building"

Lots of trams!

I enjoyed the name of "nostalgic museum".
I guess there might be other kinds.

There's the famous castle

Some evidence of work... this is the poster I presented.

There was also some of this. Networking is important.
The local beers are also just very good.

My PhD student Ken, doing his talk.
I've made it look like the room was empty but really everyone was at the left hand side of the room for some reason.

A famous bridge visible in the distance.

More trams!

And the famous clock.

And some local food. Wholesome and generally very good.

And catchup with various people. On the right is Nada, who I shared an office with for several years and is now a lecturer at the University of Lille. In the middle is yet another John (those one is from Leicester) who I've known for a while via the DAASE project. On the left is Saemi and his wife Heidi. I helped to supervise his PhD and his now a lecturer in the office next to me. There were far more connections but not photographic evidence of those!

Easter

I just found these pictures from Easter's egg rolling! A little overdue but a fun afternoon out enjoying the lovely ground of my workplace.

Esther playing

Esther is very much one of the big girls now and it getting very good at playing, both by herself and with her big sisters...

This shape sorter (genuinely called an "intelligence box", I think it came from ebay China) is surprisingly engaging for her as she has totally mastered it.

Hidey...

Boo!

Getting the hang of our very own bike

Puzzles are a big favourite.

So are sisters.

She is also starting to draw real things. This is a "person, two arms"

Pirates!

Most nice days the girls ask if we can build something with "the pipes" - the Quadro set we got free a few years ago. It is very fun but it also takes up most of a day so we only do it once or twice a year... This time we decided that it was time to rebuild the the climbing frame and the obvious place to go next was a pirate ship!