Theory and Practice combined

Final day!

* Morning Session:
Helmut DISPERT, Kiel University of Applied Sciences
Title: Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence

* Afternoon Session:
Helmut DISPERT, Kiel University of Applied Sciences
Title: Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence

Were the two sessions on the final day. Both were interesting and some of the best talks of the whole thing well done Helmut.

Worthy of note, I got talking to a nice young lady called Qian on this last day also, she sat next to me and we chatted – and it seems I made a new friend

The farewell dinner in the afternoon was quite nice food very nice pizza’s and all. I left very early because I had to pack for the next day (was waking up at 4 o’clock).

Tags: Germany, Travel, University
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Tuesday, July 28, 2009
* Morning Session:
José Alberto FONSECA, University of Aveiro
Title: Embedded Systems in Ambient Intelligence

* Afternoon Session:
Heikki PALOMÄKI, Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences
Title: Wireless Network Systems in Ambient Intelligence

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

* Morning Session:
Luc FRIANT, Katholieke Hogeschool Kempen
Title: Special topics in the area of embedded systems
1. FPGA architectures with the Altera Cyclone

* Afternoon Session:
Ludo CAMBRÉ, Katholieke Hogeschool Kempen
Title: Special topics in the area of embedded systems
2. Embedded servers with the TCP/IP stack from Microchip

Thursday, July 30, 2009

* Morning Session:
Klaus KISSIG, Kiel University of Applied Sciences
Title: Multi-core Programming

* Afternoon Session:
Kimmo SALMENJOKI, SeinäjokiUniversity of Applied Sciences

Yes I’m being very lazy and copy/pasting from the IPEAI website. I didn’t really have much to say about these, they were interesting, but none of them were really my field so I was finding it hard to grasp it very well.

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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.

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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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