Deadline for BBC Innovation Labs

This Thursday was the last day to submit ideas to the BBC Innovation Labs. I submitted a few ideas in several areas, but I am not sure if they will be picked, as Leeds Met is not really a small company, and the call asked for small institutions to submit their ideas. Well, we will see...

New Semester Begins

This Tuesday is for me the first day of teaching in the new semester. It starts with two 2-h tutorials for the final-year project supervision. Fortunately, the tutorials are shared, and we supervisors can take turns in supervision.

The students propose interesting projects - in the tutorial we give them advise for the development of their ideas. They will have to showcase them in May.

I am also up for two "guest lectures", and I give one tutorial on "Innovation and Enterprise". Besides that, I still keep my group for which I am the "Academic Coach". Is quite reasonable, but I also have to move the Centre for Creative Technology forward... we need to prepare bids and publish the achieved results.

C3KE Lunchtime Seminar

On Monday our Centre for Creative Technology hosted a lunch time meeting at the Old Broadcasting House for our partner institutions in the C3KE (= Centre for Creative and cultural Knowledge Exchange). Our Dean Cath Orange also came to give a welcome address. Then I briefly outlined the overal concept of the centre. But the main presentation was given by several of our members: Richard Stevens and Tony Renshaw presented the work on eye tracking and the ReViewed project. Steve Wilkinson gave a short intro on motion capture and animation work. Nikos Stavropoulos presented the music work, followed by Kinglsey Ash who explained the concept of his interactive music performance/composition. Ben Dalton gave an impromptu talk on various projects related to the Leeds Big Screen. This concluded our Leeds Met presentations. Tim Challis from Leeds University offered to talk briefly about the C3KE in general, for the benefit of our staff members. Alison Mealey from U. Huddersfield's Digital Research Unit (DRU) followed with a brief impromptu overview on her activities.

Afterwards, a few demos had been set up: Tony Renshaw gave a demo of the eye tracker system, Kinglsey Ash demonstrated his interactive music composition, and Bal Singh showed his tilt sensor enabled laptop, on with he played a game for rolling a ball. We also were running a interactive movie by MSc student Rana Gangari. Buffet food was available, and we had then the opportunity to chat and discuss.

There are pictures of this event available on the Leeds Met website.

Final Year Networking Event

On Monday and Tuesday, a networking event was organised at Leeds Met for our Innovation North level-3 final year project students, to setup their project teams and to get to know the supervisors. The event took place in the Headingley Carnegie Stadium.

Congratulations, Thomas Yau!

Today on our Leeds Met homepage, there was a short note about a successful student of mine: Thomas Yau got a place in an advertisement for his employer, the Halifax Bank. I had been a supervisor of his level-3 final year project in 2005/06 here at Leeds Met, and he did a great job then. But at that time, I would not have thought about his new career move...



Congratulations, Tom, and best wishes!

Happy New Year 2008 to all of You!

The year 2007 is over.
Got a good rest during the holidays.
Finally I set up my home "music studio" in that little room in the Cottage - took me a while until everything worked ok. There is still a problem in the audio setup - I will have to be very careful using the software-routing of the audio, to avoid feedback. But I hope that in 2008 I will be able to finally produce a few new music recordings, using the Garritan Personal Orchestra samples.

Further goals for my 2008:
- keep better in touch with friends / colleagues,
- get the Leeds Met Centre for Creative Technology into high gear regarding work, research, development, practise, funding,
- develop some cool useful interesting relevant approaches for HCI and intelligent systems components,
- publish a few good papers.

Sounds like a lot - so back to work now. :)

And to all my friends / colleagues / readers of this blog:
I wish you a very good, successful and happy New Year 2008!