I’m currently attending a computing research conference being held in Cambridge. After yesterday’s long trip down, the conference kicked off properly today. I’m going to give some impressions of Cambridge as well as talk more generally about the conference.
I have to admit that with free breakfast, lunch and dinner, they are treating us well. Breakfast thankfully included some healthy option which is the route I chose to go down. I’m most definitely not a fan of fried food at 8 in the morning.
After registering and receiving a goody bag (which I’ve yet to sift through, but some of it looks pretty cool) we decided to venture into Cambridge itself. I have to say it truly is a lovely place. The architecture is absolutely stunning, with a number of different styles throughout as well. It feels incredibly English, a fact lost on my companions on this trip, Dundee this is not. One bizarre thing of note is the sheer number of bicycles, I have to wonder if this is a council policy. Sadly there wasn’t time to go to the Scott Polar Museum and I doubt there will be time later in the week.
The conference kicked off properly with a talk about security, specifically why people fail to heed the warnings which web browsers offer. While certainly interesting, I personally felt most of this was obvious. The current warnings generally aren’t very intrusive, or self explanatory. I can certainly see why the uneducated would ignore a phising warning (Incidentally Google Chrome has a very imposing screen for when a site’s SLL certificate is not up to date, or authenticated by a trusted certificate authority, a feature I wish other browsers would inclue). A number of solutions were offered, including replacing known phising sites with cartoon information on how to avoid phising, that seems sensible.
After this came lunch. We were once more in the Great Hall of Homerton College, which is certainly like nothing out of a university I have visited previously. This was a typical buffet type affair, triangle sandwiches and things on (classy) sticks, with the odd piece of chinese food thrown in.
On to the Grand Challenges in Computing and I picked the track which had sessions on In Vivo – In Silico and Architecture of The Brain and Mind. In Vivo – In Silico was a fascinating talk on the attempts to model relatively simple organisms (a simple weed) growth through computing simulations. It turns out that the techniques for this can allow for results pretty close to the real thing and it seems like a fantastic area of research for the future. This could offer great benefits as it allows the simulation of mutations which occur when a particular gene is killed in the organism, this has fairly obvious practical uses. Architecture of The Brain and Mind focused a lot on neuroscience aspects of computing, touching on neural nets and also attempts in research to try to model how the human brain works. A particularly interesting attempt here is a massively parallel processing structure (roughly 20 million processors). I wasn’t quite as enthused by this as In Vivo – In Silico, but that’s probably because the talk covered areas I already knew a reasonable amount about.
Finally the day ended with a welcome dinner, again in the Great Hall. The dinner was a slightly odd experience, with the food and plates appearing and disappearing without so much as an explanation, or any interaction at all. This was topped off by a bizarre collaborative drumming sessions (I’m sure designed to get everyone loosened up). Admittedly that was more fun than I’d probably like to admit.
So far it’s been a fantastic experience.
I recently covered my experiences at the Highland Fling 2008 conference. What I didn’t go into a lot of detail about however, was the excellent swag I left the event with. Indeed all attendees received the free goodies. At first, I thought I’d only received a free bag, I say only but I really mean I was astonished. This is not your standard freebie bag, it is in fact something I’d quite happily use and indeed have already used since the conference.
This was not the only thing that we received however. Indeed the other excellent freebie was a sort of leather booklet organiser. It’s really soft, and has a nice space to slot in a small pad of paper. Indeed, the organisers saw fit to provide both a pad of paper and a pen, which I put to good use. Not thinking that morning, I had neglected to pick up a pad of paper and a pen, so I was very grateful for this. It allowed me to take notes on bits of the talks I really wanted to remember. This is a stroke of genius, and can only be borne out of the organiser having experienced a similar situation where they were also under-prepared and regretted it.
On a final note on the conference, perhaps a more amusing one, when I arrived; I received my name badge as well as all the other things I’ve pointed out. Now I don’t know where in the line of communications it occured, but my name had been spelt incorrectly. I’m going to assume it happened at the last step, because I can’t honestly see a chain of people thinking Gordon Stephn is a real name, but then I could be wrong. Still it made for an interesting day, with people staring at the name tag and wondering to ask about it.