purplecat

Over 30 teams worldwide decided to take on my Lego Rover challenge. Having poked around a bit on the Space Apps web site, I reckon that is a pretty good uptake, especially considering I had very little idea of what was expected or wanted from a challenge creator.

One thing I hadn't appreciated, which is a definite beneficial side effect of all this, was that by giving people a challenge to create something, rather than presenting them with some software to download, you give them real ownership of the outcome. I'm overwhelmed by the number of project teams who took on Lego Rovers who are now planning to take their own version of the system in schools in their country. There is absolutely no way, without the NASA Global Space Apps challenge, that my idea for a school-based activity would now be being used to inspire children as far afield as Mexico and Nepal.

( An overview of the solutions under the cut )

sophievdennis has started a blog about the progress of our project.


It is a pleasure to accept your manuscript entitled "Verifying Autonomous Systems" in its current form for publication in Communications of the ACM. The comments of the reviewer(s) who reviewed your manuscript are included at the foot of this letter.

Thank you for your fine contribution. On behalf of the Editors of the Communications of the ACM, we look forward to your continued contributions to the magazine. You will hear from us in a few months, when the paper is slated for production.


Communications of the ACM is a magazine style publication, rather than an academic journal though our paper was still peer reviewed. However it was written more as an overview/survey style paper describing our approach to the verification of autonomous systems. In it my boss basically pulled together a description of the verification work we did during the Engineering Autonomous Space Systems project and another project he had running on the Certification of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. It's a three author paper by my boss, myself and the RA on the UAV project.

I'm really pleased to have had two paper acceptances in such a short space of time. I didn't get any papers published in 2012 and the papers I published in 2011 were mostly "legacy" papers from previous project rather than current work. Mind you when I expressed concern about this in my PDR, my boss just teased me gently and pointed out that I preferred the programming aspect of my job to churning out papers just because. He also said he wasn't worried about it and observed that we had a lot of papers submitted or in preparation at the time and so things were likely to pick up. It looks like he was right.

100 Current Papers in Artificial Intelligence, Automated Reasoning and Agent Programming. Number 7

Sabine Glesner, Johannes Leitner, and Jan Olaf Blech. 2007. Coinductive Verification of Program Optimizations Using Similarity Relations. Electron. Notes Theor. Comput. Sci. 176, 3 (July 2007), 61-77. DOI=10.1016/j.entcs.2006.02.037 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.entcs.2006.02.037

DOI: 10.1016/j.entcs.2006.02.037
Open Access?: Yes

( Discussion )

We are pleased to inform you that your paper

24 : Verification of Brahms Human-Robot Teamwork Models

has been accepted for presentation and publication in the proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Logics in Artificial Intelligence JELIA 2012. Congratulations!

This is another paper primarily by my PhD student and is mostly about how we verified some simple examples of an "intelligent house" system that is supposed to assist a confused elderly person living on their own. The actual example is just a simple case study, most of the work has been the infrastructure to allow programs in the Brahms language (which is designed to simulate examples of humans and robots working together) to actually be verified.

Inevitably I have been linked via Facebook to the UCU petition of no confidence in the government's policies in further, higher and adult education.

Now, I think its fair to say, that I think the government doesn't have a good grasp of the higher education sector. It is probably also fair to say that I'm not convinced the UCU actually has any better a grasp of the situation. The sector is riven with elitist divisions between "old" and "new" universities, between researchers and teachers, between science and humanities teaching styles, between businessmen, scholars and engineers, between those who study out of interest and those who study to obtain a qualification, between the worth of the theoretical versus the worth of the practical (however you choose to define those two terms), between the sense of entitlement held by students and the sense of entitlement held by lecturers. The higher education sector has proved itself adept at optimising whatever short term targets the government has chosen to place before it, often to the detriment of researchers, teachers and students and any stated government long term goal the target was intended to encourage. A side effect seems to have been increasing and entrenched factionalism within universities. It would be nice to see the sector more united, with a clearer understanding of its own value and the reasons it does things the way it does. The government could play a part in that, though it would be a brave politician to try. But I don't think tuition fees are, per se, wrong if we know why we are charging them and how a student is meant to make ends meet while studying as a result and I strongly suspect the above petition will primarily be read as "I believe tuition fees are wrong under any circumstances" and not as a wider criticism of successive governments and the higher education sector itself in failing for decades to adequately define its role.

Pierr-Yves Oudeyer gave another plenary talk on how you control/direct curiosity driven learning in Robotic systems. The talk was, I think, a little be stolen by the acroban robot. Broadly speaking Oudeyer observed that many existing robot platforms for AI experimentation are optimised for things like ease-of-changing batteries and are, in fact, quite difficult to program because their locomotor abilities are very rigid and inflexible. The Acroban robot is engineered to be a lot more "human-like" in it's mechanics, essentially with a lot of the intelligence in the mechanics itself, rather than in the software.


Cute video follows:

I spent the last week in Taiwan at AAMAS 2011 and thought I'd do my usual thing of randomly blogging about bits of various talks that peaked my interest.

( Game Theory under the Cut )

Accepted to a journal with only minor corrections. Admittedly this was the second journal we tried. The first took issue with our use of the words "case study" and demanded we do a large and complex case study. Since this is the final publication from the MCAPL project there was no enthusiasm for the revisions necessary, so instead we changed the words "case study" to "example" and submitted to a different journal.

Not actually read the referees comments yet mind, since I have to log into somewhere to access them and that felt too much like hard work until I sit down to make the revisions which won't be for at least a week!

I'm supposed to be giving a talk to misc year 10 and 11 maths students (that's O' level students, I think, to us ancient types) on mathematical careers in academia.

I have half an hour and I've been asked to cover: "career path, qualifications, University life, experiences, Job Spec, potential salary (the pupils always seems to ask how much people earn!)"

I think I have just written 10 of the dullest slides I have ever produced. My will to live saps just glancing over them, and I have 4 more slides than I have any right to for a half hour talk. I am also torn between wanting to stress that you should only consider a career in academia if you really want to know more about your subject, and wanting to bang the "study mathematics" drum.

But really, is anyone going to be inspired to study maths because I tell them I once worked on a project called "Proof and Specification Assisted Design Environments", that all these jobs want you to have a PhD, excellent communication skills and the ability to self-motivate research and that the pay scale at the bottom starts in the low £20,000 per annum and goes up to who knows what because Professors negotiate their own salaries.

Or should I ignore the teacher's request and just waffle about satellites and orbital debris?

Advice much appreciated, especially advice on what it would be useful and interesting for me (as an academic with a maths background) to tell some teenagers...