Dagda, the robot I spent several years of my PhD building - this post is on the cameras and computer system on the robot.

So on Saturday, the Minister for Education announced that he was very worried because two people had told him (possibly over coffee and some nice biscuits) that most academics only work for four hours a week. Now most of the time, with most people, that’d lead to someone looking up what the situation actually is and determining if there was a problem and so noone would be worried about knee-jerk reactions. Thing is, we’re talking about a Minister for Education who recently decided to abolish the NUI and didn’t tell anyone until the press conference (ignoring the point that abolishing the NUI does not abolish the work they are required to do; and that therefore abolishing the NUI means replacing a working system that’s been there since before the founding of the state with a quango whose suitability and efficacy will be utterly unproven). So it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that the Minister responded by calling in the press for a “forensic audit” (CSI has a lot to answer for with regard to the use of language in official statements) into third level spending with a view to changing teaching contracts.

Some academics are worried about this. I’m not. I think this is a great thing. I think it’s wonderful. Because now, when we calculate properly how many hours we spend on a course, we’ll be able to bill for all the time we spend on it. So in my case, for the CS7004 course, I could bill for the three contact hours a week I was paid for, plus the two-and-an-inevitable-half hours in labs (currently unpaid for), plus the three to four hours each contact hour took to prepare (currently unpaid for), plus the two hours each lab took to prepare (currently unpaid for), plus the twenty or … Read the rest

Or, as I first said on watching this, “Holy *****….”

I mean, myself and Ian Dowse built a micromouse robot once, way back in the mists of prehistoric time, but, well…

It wasn’t exactly going to finish in 4.766 seconds, you know?

And it certainly didn’t look as slick as Tetra did:

Makes you wish there was money and facilities for doing robotics hardware in an Irish college, doesn’t it? I mean, look at it, the sheer elegant efficiency of the design, the purpose to it – the PCB extends out in front to put the weight on the front drive wheels so that it’s fast when turning, and the rear wheels come into play when it’s accelerating forward – it’s very elegant minimalist design, mechanically. We just never had the money, facilities, tools or other necessary things to do that sort of work

If there is a lecturer in TCD’s CS department that doesn’t know of the problems and issues Joel just raised in his Capstone Projects post, they’re a rare bird indeed. But what Joel hasn’t mentioned — and what those lecturers can tell you because they’ve been debating it for decades, writing papers on it, holding conferences and have published peer-reviewed journals on the topic, as opposed to Joel’s one blog post — are that there are very specific and very good reasons why CS and CEng undergraduate courses don’t get to cover all the industry tools Joel uses.

To give a brief and inexhaustive list:

• Undergraduate courses in CS and CEng are not there to teach industrial tools, but basic principles, ususally ab initio to students just out of secondary school (high school for the US equivalent courses). This has implications:
  • Everyone must work solo. You can learn to work in teams later (and certainly there are team projects all through the four years of the CS and CEng courses in TCD) but until you have a grasp of the fundamentals, team projects are worse than useless as they mask the student’s problems with the basics.
  • No student is expected to graduate and be able the next day to walk into an industrial role without supervision or training, and no student has ever been expected to do that in Engineering since the first undergraduate course started in TCD in 1841. That’s why we have mentoring, why we have CPD processes, why we have Chartered Engineer (or Professional Engineer) titles granted by postgraduate programmes, it’s why there’s an entire structure there that’s been built up over hundreds of years of experience. Experience that we have paid for with lives in many cases.
  • Everyone needs to work on the “interesting 10%”
… Read the rest

So for CS7004′s labs, I wanted to have one large-ish, deep-ish, multi-step, interesting project. And I’ve thought of one and I’ll write it up as we go through it (no fair readers here learning before the students!).

But here’s a sneak peek at the hardware they’ll be using

(Assuming, of course, that I can get the sodding thing to do what it needs to do!)

Okay, I’ll grant you, it doesn’t look that impressive. That’s just the basic ‘Blinky’ first-step demo for the Keil MPC2400 board. Basic light chaser using the pot to set the speed of the blinking.

However, it’s a bit more fun when I note that the Keil environment was run from within Virtualbox on my Debian laptop and it still used the USB JTAG connection to connect to the board and it all worked without a hitch on the first try.

Apart from the obvious convienence this means to me (I don’t have to dual-boot to programme the board, I can run the exercises from within Linux, which I prefer), it’s just downright impressive that Virtualbox is that far along.

Well, maybe not to you young kids, but to someone who was in college when the web came along, this is impressive

So it seems that getting shot in the face by a robot can actually pay long-term dividends.

By which I mean that after all the time I spent building and debugging hardware in the now-defunct Computer Vision and Robotics Research Group, I’m now one of the decreasing handful of people in the CS department who knows hardware. Which sounds odd from the outside I suppose – most non-computer people I know seem to think that anyone with a degree in computer science or computer engineering knows how to do anything and everything to do with computers. It doesn’t actually work that way, the same way that a neurosurgeon wouldn’t be able to deal with a pandemic; the field is specialised in both cases to the point where specialists aren’t interchangeable anymore, at least at the deeper levels of specialisation.

That’s not to say that there’s no knowledge of hardware outside of the few people who’re working on hardware-level research; it’s more that those working in (for example) formal methods would be misspending their time if they spent time building hardware. It’s got nothing to do with what they’re working on.

At any rate, because of this, I’ve been assigned to teach the CS7004 course, which is the introduction to embedded systems on the Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing MSc course. I’ve done a lecture or two before, along with six years demonstrating to various courses and three years TAing for two other courses and teaching commercial courses outside of college but this is my first actual post as a college lecturer. I’m rather looking forward to it.

And we’ve got some nifty hardware to use as a platform; we’re moving away from the chips we used to use (68000′s, 8051′s, PIC chips, BASIC stamps, SunSpots and so forth) and several … Read the rest

Ferdinand von Prondzynski, the president of DCU, has written a few blog posts about ways to cope with the way the government has been slashing the funding for universities (usually on the quiet), but with the recent announcement of the proposed new college loans plan, he’s written more, and most recently this post discussing the levels of the fees for different courses, which he disagrees with, mainly because the universities haven’t been asked to the policy table from what I can see:

In the end, this is another aspect of any new framework for student contributions that confirms the importance of full consultation with the higher education institutions before any final model is put in place.

The engagement with the idea to the stage where its details are being debated is sufficiently depressing that I wrote a reply to his post, and I wanted to reproduce it here:

I still find it enormously depressing to see the reintroduction of fees embraced in this manner, especially by university heads, despite their being a suboptimal solution to a blatantly manufactured problem.

My father was the first in his clan to go to college, which he did as a mature student on a scholarship and money earned by my mother working sewing curtains for a furnishings shop. Once he graduated, my mother then became the first in her clan to go to college, supported by my father’s now higher income. And the year she graduated, I became the first child from either of our clans to go to college after finishing the leaving certificate course. We did not receive a single penny in grant funding for this; every resource available was pooled to fund that education, along with the initial scholarship which was the end result of five years of work by

… Read the rest

The markov diffusion process has an induced metric, and (Darling, 1998a) gives a connector; and Metric + Connection = GEOMETRY!!! Finally figured out what the hell he was talking about. This is a Good Thing™.

Ahem.

It may not actually make a lot of sense put that way though, I suppose

Basicly, RWR Darling wrote a few papers on a kind of filter called the Geometrically Intrinsic Nonlinear Recursive Filter in 1998 and for my PhD thesis I’m applying it to a specific area of robotics; but I’ve been having some problems with decyphering the maths (it’s somewhat past where engineering maths left off). And every so often, the four tons of math I’ve been chewing on in my head crystalises a little more and I get a better picture of what he’s talking about; and that happened tonight in the middle of writing a position paper for ICINCO’09. So yay!

Actually, today was the first day in a long while that I got to spend entirely on academic work. And I’d forgotten how good that felt; too many years of learning not to care about the work because the customer might change their mind tomorrow and cancel the project. But academic stuff, you decide to chase after the stuff that interests you, anything you produce and write up lives in the store of human knowlege forever (barring catastrophe, that is!), and if you’re very very good and a bit lucky, you might actually discover or develop something that lots of people benefit from.

I wish more jobs could be like that…