Travel to the EuroPLOT Meeting, Hradec Kralove

After the farewell dinner with our friends from India, I went back home for the weekly evening online chat session with my student group in California. However, in the UK the time has changed from daylight savings time to regular time, whereas it has not yet changed in the US... so when I went online, only a few students were there, as they had been already waiting for one hour... why can the daylight savings time not be changed simultaneously in all countries of this planet?

Then, after midnight, I began packing my stuff for the travel next day, and I was done with everything at 3am.

Wednesday morning was cold, grey, foggy in Leeds. Driving to the airport, then a bit of sun came out. Leeds-Bradford airport was very empty, I got immediately to the check-in counter. Later I meet Georgi from LeedsMet who is also travelling to this meeting: the bi-annual face-to-face meeting of the project EuroPLOT, in Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic. Departure was on time, and arrival in Prague was 20 minutes ahead of schedule. There was a thick grey cloud cover, no sun came through.

I got a white Fiat Panda. Nice car, but the 1.2i engine seems quite weak.
Instead of driving around Prague on the south side, Georgi and I decide that it might be nice to drive straight through Prague towards the East. And yes, we had a glimpse at the illuminated Hradschin, after crossing the river Vltava (Moldau) near the Karls Bridge, as the evening darkness set in. Around 19:00 arrival in Hradec Kralove.

Nice meal for dinner: Altboehmische Kartoffelsuppe, Lendenschnitte mit Boehmischen Knoedeln. And Pilsener Urquell.

At the after-meal walk, I see the participants from Krems: Peter and Erich, who just arrived. And then we meet Nicolai, Margarethe, Helle, and Tom. A few of us decide to go out for another pint, and we end up in the Na Hrade restaurant. When we enter, a very familiar smell hits us which I had not smelled for quite a while: cigarette smoke. It is apparently (still) legal to smoke in bars and restaurants, and this smell is somewhat reminiscent of past times. The bar itself with its interior decoration at the wall appears also to be so nostalgically out of the past.

And now the mind moves to the EuroPLOT meeting which will take place on Thursday and Friday.

On the way to London

I really do not like getting up so early, but I had no other choice: in order to be in time at the meeting in Granary Wharf at 9:30, I had to take the 6:05 train leaving from Leeds. What an ungodly hour in the morning!

Contrary to what many people say, trains in the UK are very punctual. At least I had no contrary experience, all trains I had ever travelled on here, left spot on time. This one is no exception: exactly at 6:05 it began to roll out. Slight rain, which cleared after a driving south for a while.

The "National Express" train has free WiFi, giving me an opportunity to post this blog entry here.

The meeting today is a workshop, organised by EPSRC on the topic "Maths of Life". The participants were invited, after submitting a one-page summary about experience and ideas. My area of interest which I pitched here is the "mathematics of music". I hope that this topic will attract some interest by others, and that thiw might lead to joint projects.

The meeting will end late afternoon. I reserved for a later train, so that I will be able to walk a bit around London and visit places where I have not yet been.

Meeting my friend Marius

Right now I am sitting in a train, on its way from Peterborough to Leeds - I will arrive after midnight in Leeds. The free WIFI is nice, although a bit slow, and the connection breaks down often.

I had met my friend Marius once again, who is in London for a conference. I know Marius from my work in California at RSC since 1996, where he has been my colleague, group manager, and function director until 2003. The last time I met him in 2006 in Stratford, when he was in the UK at another conference. This time we decided to meet in Peterborough, as this would be easily reachable by train both from London and Leeds. I did not want to drive by car, as this would be a bit stressful. We had a great time. Saw the magnificent cathedral of Peterborough (from the outside only), had dinner in one pub (he had Fish and Chips, I had a Sunday Roast) and desert in another, and told stories about our ongoing and past activities, travels, and funny hoaxes.

The outside temperature was quite chilly (it had been a very nice sunny Sunday, without any clouds in the sky), but he wore a baseball hat and was ok with the cold air. I hope we have another opportunity to meet again!

Busy Time at Work

Two meetings today at the Old Broadcasting House in the morning. Then in the afternoon, a bit of time for other work. A long list of things to do in the next 2 weeks...

Committee Work

Work at Leeds Met also involves participating in committees. Today I am scheduled to attend the examiners board meeting at a partner college in our "Regional University Network (RUN)". While the approach to have many people thoroughly go through each student and confirm the results is very laudable and shows a high commitment to quailty and fairness, it appears to me that this is a bit of an overkill. What the 13 attending people did, was basically to look at the students' grades and determine their degree classification. In principle, a computer could to that task simpler and more efficiently. Of course, in such meetings it is possible to uncover problems and mistakes, and critical cases can be discussed. But I still think that there might be a more efficient way of dealing with this. Either to do it online, with online collaboration tools, or do some kind of automatic verification / validation, maybe only with a smaller number of people. It seems to me quite a significant amount of resources to be spent on these meetings, to invite several external examiners who have to come to the meeting location.

Meeting my Friend Kevin

Kevin is the first person I knew in Leeds. His photographs about Leeds were the first images I saw from Leeds when I checked out the place on the internet, before my move from the US. I have been friends with him and his family since, and once in a while we meet for a chat in a pub. This happened this Ssturday, in the "Greyhound" in Tong, a nice oldfashioned pub. There was a lot to catch up, as our last meeting had been more than a year ago.

PhD Seminar

The main reason why Claudio has invited me to this conference was the participation in the newly launched European PhD supervision program. In the afternoon a seminar is held for those PhD students. I learn that this collaboration with Austrian Universities actually pre-dates the collaboration with Krems DUK!

At Harrogate College

The Faculty Board meeting of INN took this time place at Harrogate College. Since in a few months Harrogate College will be joining with Hull College, this was the last time that the board meeting would take place in Harrogate.

Workshop with C3KE

On Friday afternoon, Derek and myself had setup a workshop for a joint bid within the C3KE framework. There were about 10 people in the Impressions Gallery in Bradford where this event was held. From INN, Ben joined me. There was also Marc from AXIS. A good meeting, to get together and learn about the different interest of the participating institutions.

Meeting Joe Gilmore

For integrating the C3KE website with a few other things (blog, Flickr), Tie and I met with Joe Gilmore, who is a freelance web designer and artist. He has very interesting creative activities and also knows a few people from our faculty.

Guest Lectures

This week I was very busy: in addition to my regular teaching, I did two "guest lectures" in a lecture series for Multimedia Students projects. The talk at both occasions was the same: about computer vision and augmented reality.

In addition, my main activity is now related to linking with other institutions (universities, businesses) in order to get connections and networking for preparing funding proposals to research councils and other funding agencies.

One of the main concerns is that some of members of staff are very interested in pursuing research activities, but they do not have external funding available. So I have taken it as my responsibility to enable these members of staff to do follow their research interest. This means bidding for funding - and winning it.

Next week I have an array of 10 meetings spread over the week - meeting with potential collaborators and staff members for organising such bids.

C3KE Operational Group Meeting

Today, the quarterly operational group meeting of the C3KE took place at U.Bradford. We discussed past work and opportunities for joint projects. This group of academics has the critical mass for winning bids to interesting projects in the Creative Technology domain - there are a few calls out currently in various topics, and we plan to bid.

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.

C3KE Meeting at U. Huddersfield

Together with centenary PhD student Michael Ward I drove on Friday to the C3KE meeting at University of Huddersfield, where a talk was given by two researchers from University of Leeds about the interaction of dance and computing technology.

The next of these informal seminar meetings will take place at Leeds Metropolitan University, on 28. January 2008 - I will organise it and prepare a talk / presentation of our Centre for Creative Technology work.

Technology-Enhanced Learning

Today was a one-day workshop held at the Carnegie Stand, organised by our Pro-Vice Chancellor for Assessment, Learning, and Teaching, Sally Brown. I somehow had missed this event - and yesterday evening Sally invited me to participate. I was only able to attend in the morning, because I again had a meeting this afternoon that had been previously scheduled.

We discussed the use of online learning and the issues associated with it. It emerged that the current implementations are still quite away from the ideal solution, where students can use these online "eLearning" systems for individual learning - but we are on the way. Leeds Met has invested significantly into WebCT, and will continue to use this system.

One issue that was brought up was that students nowadays do not always accept the "institutional" online systems provided by the university (email, discussion boards) - and rather use forums and discussion boards outside of the university. This just has to be accepted - one cannot "force" students to use a specific system, as they have a great choice of where they want to participate. The solution might be to link to these other resources and to provide an attractive and easy to use portal. There may still be some work to do on our side...
Graffiti Board with questions and issues.

Barbecue at Falk's Home

The "Bank Holiday" weekend (Monday, 28. May, was a day off) was a bit cool and wet - not suited for any excursions or outdoor activities. But this weekend the sun came out, and temperatures went above 20 deg. C (> 68 F). On the occasion of his birthday, Falk had invited to a barbecue in his backyard. A nice late afternoon into the evening, with talk, chat, and some beer.