Theory and Practice combined

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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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.

Tags: Germany, Travel, University
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Well, day 1 didn’t get a blog entry, because I figured I’d combine them. There’s not much to say about day 1 except we flew and it was quite cool – my first time flying anywhere. Not scary at all, surprisingly.

Day 2 started off with a basic introduction to the event and a discussion of what “ambient intelligence” means. It’s a term to describe the idea of having thousands of artificially intelligent devices all attached in some way to one person – and the devices can interact.

After lunch, we had a lecture on Knowledge engineering, but it was covering things that myself and Alex Marshman have already covered in the final year of our degree. The second year students who are also here with me seemed to catch some of it though and maybe it will act as a good “taster” for the Modelling Intelligence module.

To get to and from the University I have to catch a ferry. It feels quite strange to casually catch a ferry every morning like a bus, but it’s a more entertaining way to travel than on the bus that’s for sure.

After catching the ferry home (well, back to Deutsch-Nordische Burse, which is where I’m staying) I caught the bus and went into town to get some food and stuff to wash with. The german bus system is very efficient (in Kiel at least), you don’t have to show anybody your ticket (same as the ferry) if you have one, you can just get on and ride. There are random bus checks and a large fine if you’re caught without a ticket instead. They also have maps of the entire bus route at every stop, along with a timetable, a display box of the predicted arrival times for the next few buses, and a “next stop” screen on the bus, with the name, plus a voice announcer for the next stop.

So anyway I succesfully found where I’m staying, attended the first days lectures, and travelled to town and back, so far. Hopefully tomorrow will go smoothly too.

Tags: Germany, Travel, University
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Okay, no updates in a long time. As is the way with hastily organised out of term projects, a lot of them have been progressing very slowly, or not at all. So as a result, I’ve not really had anything blog-worthy.

However I feel it is blog-worthy that I’ve had my results back from the University, First Class with Honours

Hopefully that means the PhD is now in the bag (at least as far as getting the position goes), although I still have to apply and interview for it.

I’m heading out to germany in two weeks time to take part in an intensive course on embedded AI at the University of Kiel, so hopefully we’ll have internet access, and I can blog about the course.

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