Here are some photos of my new lab at work:

( Photos under the Cut )

My colleagues in Engineering who three years ago were all moved into a ginormous custom-built state of the art building where there is not enough room and they have to share offices are all a bit gob-smacked by how I managed to get this much space. I'm not honestly sure I know either - I forsee spending the rest of my career defending my territory.

The department recently partnered with the British Computer Society (BCS) to make some videos for... I don't know, honestly, generic publicity reasons I presume. Anyway the final results prominently feature one of my postdocs (Hazel) and my former boss (Michael). I get a bit part in Hazel's video and the book Michael and I wrote features in his video.

The interested can find them here.

I was going over my early LJ posts and regretting that I don't post about science much any more. Science blogging requires a fair bit of mental energy to put everything together in a coherent, yet understandable, way.

Anyway, here is a paper in which I, another Computer Scientist and a legal scholar discuss what kind of explanations offered by autonomous and AI systems might be of interest to lawyers. This includes both explanations that might be offered to lawyers after some event, but also what lawyers might want to know about explanations offered to users during some interaction that let to an event. It's fairly preliminary work aimed at mapping the space more than offering specific conclusions or calls to action.

Verifiable Autonomous Systems

I wouldn't expect anyone here to buy it, and certainly not at the price CUP are charging. But still, BOOK!

Model-Checking for Analysis of Information Leakage in Social Networks has been accepted into the post-proceedings volume of the conference it was given at. The acceptance is notable, in particular, for the referees' comments which amount in all cases to "have dealt with previous comments more than sufficiently, nothing more to do" which is good in the light of how much time I don't have between now and the camera ready deadline.

Sunday: 16k run (thought I might work slowly up to half marathon distance and see how I feel about it). Usual household chores and catching up. Sausage Casserole for supper (may the various packet sauce companies never stop making Sausage Casserole packet sauce!)

Monday: Gave a talk at work (a re-run of my TAROS talk), seemed to go OK. Read project specifications from some of my students.

Tuesday: Wrote up a quick guide to software engineering for my project students in the hopes that their project plans would become more realistic as a result. Had some rather frustrating conversations with them in the afternoon. E.g.

Me: Why did you add all this complicated stuff into your project plan?
Student: Because it says the robot should explore the room in the project description.
Me: I'm sure it doesn't, let's take a look.
* We look at the project description. I read it out to the student. Including the bit about finding and displaying Mars surface data in a 3D simulator *
Student (panicked): But I don't know anything about 3D simulators!
Me: But it says in the project description "student must be familiar with 3D simulators"
Student: I didn't read that bit

Bear in mind that the project description is only 3 paragraphs long, I wasn't expecting him to have read and understood 10 pages of fine print. I've no idea what project he thought he'd chosen. I keep telling myself that, with 8 students, there was always a high chance that one would be at the lower end of the bell curve and I shouldn't invest too much time and energy in trying to rescue him. As B. has pointed out, there's a reason why I was so happy to give up teaching when I stopped being a lecturer. I'm definitely going to have to work on keeping my stress levels down, even with the fairly minimal amount of teaching that comes with the new post.

Wednesday: Went to a briefing meeting for an "Inreach" project in which I will mentor a bunch of undergraduates producing an activity for a University "Science Jamboree". Actually got some work that might pass for research done!

Thursday: Drove to work in order to collect the "robot table" that I use for some events. Problem project student emailed asking for a meeting because he couldn't get his Raspberry Pi onto the university Wifi network. Although I did actually have time I figured I could waste quite a lot of it on a day ear-marked for research doing this for him, so emailed back to say I wasn't available and he should familiarise him with running his Raspberry Pi powered robot directly, rather than over the network (was terribly proud of myself). B's older brother was at home when I arrived, though he left before my sister turned up to stay the night (she was speaking at a conference in Manchester).

Friday: Went out for lunch with B. We tried the new(ish) restaurant at the Whitworth which had been much trumpeted when it opened (indeed last time we tried to go there for lunch we couldn't get in). It was something of a disappointment the starter arrived after the main course (though B. thinks this was because we messed up when ordering) and my burger was burnt (B. tried to persuade me it was artistically char-grilled, but I'm fairly sure it was burnt). Conference call in the afternoon with the IEEE committee that's trying to come up with guidelines on the ethics of artificial intelligence and personal data.

Saturday: Spent the day at the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry running a Lego Rover stand as part of International Day of the Girl. The plan was that groups of Brownies and Girl Guides would go around various stands to experience structured activities. Initially this was pretty chaotic with random children turning up and leaving, but by about midday they had sorted themselves out and a small group would, indeed, come to the stand to be lead through what was going on. I also talked to a fair few members of the general public and some people from Computing At School North West who seemed interested in the idea of adopting the Lego Rover activity as something primary schools might use, so all in all a useful (if tiring) day.


We are pleased to inform you that your paper

"How Did They Know?" - Model-Checking for Analysis of Information Leakage in Social Networks

has been accepted for presentation at COIN@ECAI.


Matryoshka, the Boss, and I cooked up the idea for this paper while at Dagstuhl based, more or less, on the fact that I was going to be going to ECAI (European Conference on Artificial Intelligence) anyway (for an IEEE meeting on Robot Ethics) and so thought I would also attend the associated COIN workshop (which is about organisations of software agents). All that being the case it seemed a shame not to submit something to the workshop. We therefore took some previous work of ours on modelling groups of agents as further agents which we had applied to Digital Crowds, and Matryoshka's interest in "fixing the Internet", dumped it in a probabilistic model-checker and came up with some numbers for how likely messages were to reach unwanted parties via forwarding through social networks.

It needs a lot of further work, but it feels like it has some potential and the referees seem to have felt so too. In fact I'm not sure I've ever seen such unanimity towards "accept" among a set of reviews.

Lemn Sissay is a Manchester poet, possibly best known for writing poems on the walls of pubs, included the beleagured pub on the corner near us. B. did not support his bid to become Chancellor of the University, opting for someone more scientific and straightforwardly academic. However our neighbours (the Manchester Museum and Art Gallery Mafia) supported his successful bid and we've seen him several times since and can't fault his ability to say the right thing at the right occasion. This video he made for the university is a case in point.


EDIT: Actually "right thing at the right occasion" sounds rather false. It's his ability to eloquently express something that an event or organisation is, ideally, striving towards that is impressive.

Liverpool has a new vice-chancellor, Janet Beer, who has been indulging in a little bit of a charm offensive. This has involved a lot of consultation I didn't really feel qualified to engage with, but also garden parties. I went to one of the garden parties.



According to the VC's speech at said garden party, this tree was on the point of death until Yoko Ono hugged it and it revived. What Yoko Ono was doing in the grounds of the Liverpool VC's lodge was not explained, though one assumes it was some "Liverpool celebrity" connection.




The VC's lodge itself.