Archives for Academia

CS7004

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

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College fees

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

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Mini-Eureka

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 :D

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…

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