In the morning session on the 9th day (Monday) we had a lecturer from Vaasa in finland talking about service oriented applications and mobile intelligent devices.
In the afternoon, it was a lecture on semantic web and web services in ambient intelligence.
After the afternoon lecture, we went to visit a world war 2 submarine, which was very interesting, and a war memorial. In the submarine they had bunk directly UNDER the torpedoes.. I could never sleep there.
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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.
Tags: University Germany Travel
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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.
Tags: Germany, Travel, University
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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.
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