ILW
So, I almost wasted my "holidays" Innovative Learning Week. Well except for today. I went to research talks in Informatics Forum. And it was so worth it.
By the way, I am living a day without Tumblr right now. I even did something useful in the morning. Programming actually. Hell yes, I like programming.
So, the talks:
The first one I thought I'd skip because well it was "LW X-A-Thon Team - ILW X-A-Thon". Some students made some apps. But I came on time to see some useful stuff they've made. I liked that HTML5 based player for Android which turned out to be flash based because of issues. Basically the idea is that your music sits at home in your pc and you stream every song. It also has last.fm scrobbling and it shows album art and artist pictures fetched from last.fm using their API. The developer actually explained how does it all work so that was quite interesting. And it would be certainly useful... If I had Android phone. And then I would make it play FLAC but then I couldn't use it because the internet connection wouldn't be fast enough. That's the only one app that I remember.
Then there was that boring-ish guy from Heriot-Watt who talked about flocking. Called Andy Taylor - Artificial Sheep: The Evolution of Flocking Behaviour in Artificial Agents.
Sethu Vijayakumar - Building Faster, Smarter, Agile Robots: An Informatics Perspective - this one was really interesting. Now I have an idea how complicated it is to actually program robotic arm to do something using physics. And how you don't even have to use it! Kind of made me think that maybe I should take Machine Learning or something with robots next year. He also showed some robots produced in Edinburgh University and made me feel proud (or smth) about being here. The epic part was when he managed to forget robotic hand under the desk. He just came during next talk and said "I forgot my robotic hand!" (functional, I witnessed).
Danny Helson - Informatics Commercialisation Team - this was not really useful. But somewhat useful. Just made me realize that I could actually make a robotic hand at the uni and earn a million from that. Or something.
Don Sannella - Contemplate: programming language research solving real-world problems - this one is crazy. Stock exchange companies use software that trades so fast that they actually put servers closer to ... whatever because the speed of light is too slow for them. Like he said "If you're 0.2 ms to late - you are too late.". Well basically he just said a lot about his company (which is actually commercialised research of his). They find bugs in concurrent Java applications.
AND
Michael Fourman - Superfast Broadband Inquiry - this is where I got really bored in the end (mainly because it took so long). Well the good part was:
When it comes to fibre - we, Lithuanians, rock. Not only he showed this slide (countries that are currently developing fibre networks) but he mentioned Lithuania several times. "75 million households in the world have fibre cable connections. And only 10 million of them are in Europe. And that's including Lithuania.". And then he talked about how UK says they will have the fastest internet in Europe soon. Currently, railway network in the UK is longer and wider than fibre network. (LOL)
Okay, so basically I just wanted to post a photo. And now there is a full review. Well. Cool. And this post is not for you! It's for me! (Comments welcome anyway ^^)
P. S. Now you can all see how geeky I am. Muahahaha.
By the way, I am living a day without Tumblr right now. I even did something useful in the morning. Programming actually. Hell yes, I like programming.
So, the talks:
The first one I thought I'd skip because well it was "LW X-A-Thon Team - ILW X-A-Thon". Some students made some apps. But I came on time to see some useful stuff they've made. I liked that HTML5 based player for Android which turned out to be flash based because of issues. Basically the idea is that your music sits at home in your pc and you stream every song. It also has last.fm scrobbling and it shows album art and artist pictures fetched from last.fm using their API. The developer actually explained how does it all work so that was quite interesting. And it would be certainly useful... If I had Android phone. And then I would make it play FLAC but then I couldn't use it because the internet connection wouldn't be fast enough. That's the only one app that I remember.
Then there was that boring-ish guy from Heriot-Watt who talked about flocking. Called Andy Taylor - Artificial Sheep: The Evolution of Flocking Behaviour in Artificial Agents.
Sethu Vijayakumar - Building Faster, Smarter, Agile Robots: An Informatics Perspective - this one was really interesting. Now I have an idea how complicated it is to actually program robotic arm to do something using physics. And how you don't even have to use it! Kind of made me think that maybe I should take Machine Learning or something with robots next year. He also showed some robots produced in Edinburgh University and made me feel proud (or smth) about being here. The epic part was when he managed to forget robotic hand under the desk. He just came during next talk and said "I forgot my robotic hand!" (functional, I witnessed).
Danny Helson - Informatics Commercialisation Team - this was not really useful. But somewhat useful. Just made me realize that I could actually make a robotic hand at the uni and earn a million from that. Or something.
Don Sannella - Contemplate: programming language research solving real-world problems - this one is crazy. Stock exchange companies use software that trades so fast that they actually put servers closer to ... whatever because the speed of light is too slow for them. Like he said "If you're 0.2 ms to late - you are too late.". Well basically he just said a lot about his company (which is actually commercialised research of his). They find bugs in concurrent Java applications.
AND
Michael Fourman - Superfast Broadband Inquiry - this is where I got really bored in the end (mainly because it took so long). Well the good part was:
When it comes to fibre - we, Lithuanians, rock. Not only he showed this slide (countries that are currently developing fibre networks) but he mentioned Lithuania several times. "75 million households in the world have fibre cable connections. And only 10 million of them are in Europe. And that's including Lithuania.". And then he talked about how UK says they will have the fastest internet in Europe soon. Currently, railway network in the UK is longer and wider than fibre network. (LOL)
Okay, so basically I just wanted to post a photo. And now there is a full review. Well. Cool. And this post is not for you! It's for me! (Comments welcome anyway ^^)
P. S. Now you can all see how geeky I am. Muahahaha.