the old and the new

I’m just back from a 2 day residential Theo Murphy scientific workshop held in the Royal Society’s Kavli Centre at Chicheley Hall.  It’s my first visit there, and I can certainly recommend it as a marvellous venue for a workshop: great facilities, marvelous food, and friendly, efficient staff.  The science was great fun: I learned lots of new things, discovered links between seemingly diverse areas, and had interesting discussions over food and coffee.  I’m buzzing with ideas, which is the whole point!

I did the usual “photograph from my bedroom window” thing, which had a somewhat different from usual view:

first day of the workshop, view due east, into the rising sun

Oh, and then I took a photo from the other window in my bedroom:

first day of the workshop, view due south

Blissful.  I found an amusing view from the window half way down the main stairs:

A lovely formal garden, with lawns, paths, clipped bushes and trees, and, just visible at the vanishing point of the path … a wind farm!  The old and the new collide.

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a week in Taormina

I’ve had a glorious week in Taormina, Sicily, at the European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL).  Great weather (apart from a rain storm on Monday), superb food, and a marvelously stimulating, thought-provoking set of keynotes and presentations.  My head is buzzing with all the stuff I’ve been hearing about.

a complex fungus, spotted
halfway down one staircase

The town, the gardens, and the scenery were excellent, too.  The town is built on the side of a mountain, which makes for an interesting geography.  On the Monday morning, the hotel provided a map to help us find our way to the conference venue. Unfortunately the map had a tenuous relationship with reality. The geography mostly comprises a parallel bunch of roads running along contours, linked by an amazing array of staircases, of all widths and types.  The hotel map didn’t distinguish these, and everything from a main street to a three foot wide staircase had the same representation.  I got a better map, and navigation became rather easier.

Tuesday evening: a view down to the middle road from part way up one of the many staircases...

... and the view up the rest of the staircase.
There was another flight like this to get to the top road, then a shorter flight up to the hotel, then more stairs once inside up to my 4th floor room: I took the lift by this stage.

Evenings were spent in a variety of great restaurants, squeezed into little gap, some even laid out on the staircases.  Eating marvellous Italian food outdoors on a warm summer evening, having stimulating conversations with colleagues, is a great way to end each conference day. There were also wandering bands of musicians, who would play a few tunes, then send a collection jug round.  I’m not sure what the message was supposed to be the evening they played the jug around to the theme from The Godfather...

The walk down from the hotel to the conference each day was through the splendid public gardens.

Wednesday morning : the pagoda

Magnificent displays, from bougainvillea hedges...

... to cacti collections

Although the weather was warm and sunny, the skies were rather hazy at the start.  They cleared enough later in the week to see Etna, the summit obscured not by clouds, but by a faint trickle of smoke:

Thursday: the view at breakfast

Thursday: Taormina by night

A great conference, at a great venue.  Now it’s time to go home to cooler, cloudier England. Next year’s ALife conference is in New York, which will have a somewhat different vibe, I suspect.

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TRUCE at ECAL

One of the projects I’m working on is called TRUCE: Training and Research in Unconventional Computation in Europe. As it says on the TRUCE project website:

Unconventional computation (UCOMP) is an important and emerging area of scientific research, which explores new ways of computing that go beyond the traditional model, as well as quantum- and brain inspired computing. Such alternatives may encompass novel substrates (e.g., DNA, living cells, or mixtures of the two) as well as new paradigms which, for example, support combined information processing and material production (as living systems do). UCOMP researchers draw inspiration from a wide and diverse range of sources, from physics, to chemistry, biology and ecology. The field is growing quickly, and has the potential to revolutionize not only our fundamental understanding of the nature of computing, but the way in which we solve problems, design networks, do industrial fabrication, make drugs or construct buildings.

TRUCE provides an ‘umbrella organisation’ to help coordinate, nurture and develop activities within the UCOMP community in Europe and beyond.

We ran a TRUCE workshop this Monday at ECAL, the European Conference on Artificial Life. Workshops at conferences are often run as mini-conferences themselves, with presented papers and posters. But we wanted to do something different, something ... unconventional.

One issue with unconventional computation is that conventional computers have a 60 year engineering head start. Although researchers can do what are actually amazing things with their slime molds, quantum computers, chemical droplets, bacteria, DNA, optical computers, and what-not, it’s early days yet, and the applications aren’t a patch on a smartphone. What we would like to do is think about what things will be like in about 60 years time in terms of unconventional computing.

So we decided that we should get some scientists together with some speculative fiction authors, and tell narratives of possible futures. We made a call for story ideas a few months back, and got a bunch of submissions. I put one in, too, so that the project could have an “inside view” of the process. The authors looked through the submissions, and each picked out an idea they thought they could weave into a story.

The aim is that each author will write their story set in their chosen scientific background, then the scientist will write an afterword, explaining the science in a bit more detail (or possibly explaining where the author ignored the science to make the story work!) These will all be published by Comma Press some time next year.

There was some preliminary contact between authors and scientists via Skype, then we all met up at the workshop for in-depth discussions. The author-scientist pairs scattered around the conference venue for most of the day, sitting in little coffee-fueled huddles, talking through the story ideas, and the underlying science. One attendee said “that’s the longest I’ve ever talked to someone who isn’t my wife continuously on a single subject!”

In the late afternoon, we all got back together and presented the current status of our ideas. Not all of them turned out to be dystopias, fortunately, but authors tend to want an interesting plot, which usually means things going wrong! But that’s fine: we can give warnings of futures that we don’t want to happen.

So, the authors get some futuristic scientific ideas for their stories. What do the scientists get out of the process? Well, some of my work is with biologists, building simulations of complex systems, which requires me to understand quite a bit of their science, which means I ask a lot of questions. One thing they say is “I like working with computer scientists, because they ask such different questions.” Different questions are good: they make you think about things from different angles, giving a different view on the problem.

And I can now say, I like working with authors, for exactly the same reason.

We’ll be having a second call for ideas soon. So, if you are researching some aspect of unconventional computation, and would like some unconventional discussion of your work, why not submit an idea? The second round won’t get to go to Sicily – sorry! – but you will get all the other spin off benefits.

And for everyone else: look out for the book next year.

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Taormina

Monday: the first day of the European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL). Sunday was all travel: from home to ECAL‘s location in Taormina, Sicily, by taxi to the station, train to Kings Cross, tube to Victoria, train to Gatwick, shuttle to North terminal, plane to Catania, and taxi to Taormina, about 10 hours travel time.

It was dark on arrival, so my first view from the hotel window was in the morning:

looking out on the cacti

looking down to the hazy sea

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Unconventional Milan

I'm back from the conference on Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation (UCNC) in Milan. Excellent conference, with lots of great presentations, conversations, and food.

My Evernote experience was a success.  I managed to take the notes I wanted, using my Netbook.  Fortunately, the venue being a university, the rooms had suitable benching for resting the Netbook on -- no more bruises where the computer's little feet dig into my legs.  And there were enough power sockets around that I could recharge as necessary.

When there was a particularly useful or interesting figure on a slide, I took a photo of it, and added "[photo]" to my notes at that point.  Then, when I got home, I downloaded the photos, straightened them up, cropped them, adjusted the contrast, and pasted them into Evernote in the right places.  That worked even better than scribbling down a diagram.  But it did mean that I had to remember to sit near the front.

So now I have enough trials to be convinced Evernote is the right approach, for SF conventions, for seminars, and for conferences.  Legible, searchable notes are a boon.

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Unconventional Computation with Evernote

Today I'm off to the conference on Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation (UCNC) in Milan.  I'm running the CoSMoS (Complex Systems Modelling and Simulation) workshop there on the Monday, including giving a talk.  Then it's several days of listening to lots of interesting talks from the "here be dragons" end of computing.  On the Friday, one of my students is giving a couple of talks on his work.

This is the first conference I've been to where I'll be taking notes in Evernote on my Netbook, rather than with a pen in a lab book.  Last year, UCNC was in September, and I didn't start using Evernote until October.  I did use Evernote at the science fiction convention at Easter, where it worked really well, but this is the acid test: using it for the day job!  Like at the con, I've set up a bunch of template notes, one for each session, ready to start taking notes.

I hope there is somewhere to rest the Samsung Netbook so its sharp little feet don't bruise my knees like they did at the con!

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