Jul
27
2009
The weekend was fairly uneventful. Saturday I missed the Hamburg trip to look for more PhD positions online and try to figure out how I’m going to proceed. According to the Estonian I asked I didn’t miss much anyway. Sunday I mainly read and watched anime and generally recovered from the previous week.
Jul
27
2009
In the morning of day 6 we had George Kornaros from the Technological Educational Institute of Crete
giving a talk on Special Topics in Embedded Systems, which I’m sad to say I missed most of due to being very sleepy.
In the afternoon, we had Paul Jarvis, from our own University (Glamorgan) who did a talk on the artificial intelligence used in Pacman, and used game-maker as a base piece of software to allow us to play with the AI ourselves.
The game maker software package, is not something I feel would ever be used in a real game development environment, it’s a hobbyist kit, plain and simple. So I was a little concerned that this may lead to the others feeling that our course is too easy.
However for the most part it simply generated interest. I think the hands on lecturing style is very different to what most people here are used too, and adding a practical aspect to the lecture kept the interest up very well. So on the whole, well done Paul!
With regards to my future, I’ve received an offer from Glamorgan to continue there taking on the teaching hours I would have been doing as part of my PhD for fairly low pay and wait in hope of a project opening up.
This is taking a chance, and I’m still a little unsure about it. Waiting to discuss it with Ian hopefully.
Jul
23
2009
Well – Day 4 passed mostly without incident. The most interesting part of the day was the mediadome event. The Mediadome at Kiel university uses a digital projector system so they can both use it like an ordinary planetarium and also have interactive things on it. For example, they showed the night sky at a specific time and place, but then as well as just showing it, they can move around the stars in 3D – since each star is a point on a 3D map of the Galaxy. Very cool.
Day 5 – The lectures today were very interesting.
The first lecture was identifying objects and areas on 3D images – the lecturer was explaining the systems he’s developed to, for example, identify and mark all the differnt bones in the backbone from an X-ray.
In the afternoon we had lectures on Pattern recognition and Neural networks. This covered a LOT of things I’d already done, since I researched Neural Networks and learning paradigms for a year for my final year project.
Now for the bad news (for me anyway) – my PhD Application seems to have fallen through. Nothing is specific yet but the Company that was partially funding it seems to have fallen victim to the economic downturn and are most likely going to drop out.
So now I’m in Germany and most of the PhD deadlines fall short of the time I get back (about 3rd August). I’m looking for others to apply for though and hope to find something before it’s too late.
Jul
22
2009
Day 3 Started off with a lecture on “On-Line Algorithms for adaptive and anticipatory systems” which was quite interesting, although again things that we had mostly covered already, although sometimes phrased differently. I think with regards to AI, our group (or at least the two year three students) are ahead of the majority of the others.
Online algorithms are algorithms where the input is not known in it’s entirety. They must make a decision based on the current information which is as close to the perfect solution as possible.
In the afternoon we had a lecture by a finnish professor on the “RoboCup” explaining about his team and the robots they created.
In the early evening we went on a guided visit of Kiel town-hall, which was nearly entirely destroyed during the second world war. We were taken to the top of the tower and the interesting landmarks were pointed out. I have some photographs of this which will be uploaded at some point.
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