Work Stuff

Work continues! Besides the travel to Prague, a few more things have been going on. Right now, the students are back so it's all got very busy - teaching combined with all the usual writing papers and grant applications and all the rest of it. Between all that, a few other things over the summer...

First up, a wee trip to KLM in Amsterdam. Just one day and a night but lots of promising discussions and we should be able to to some really nice work with them.

Exciting view from the office where we spent most of the day.

I enjoyed that the meeting room was "CAPTAIN KIRK"

 

Another anonymous hotel room and glamorous view!

At least we did see some of proper Amsterdam. Very pretty.

Next up, I was chair of a couple of events in Stirling. One was the SICSA PhD conference, where we had 150 Computing PhD students from all over Scotland for a couple of days of workshops and networking....

Me sitting next to one of the keynote speakers, a guy from BT who does work in AI.

Free conference bottles or bags anyone? We now have an abundant supply of these if you want one.

Just in case this is all sounding far too cool... here's the table numbering at the conference dinner.
Cue joke about there being 10 kinds of people in the world - those who get this and those who don't.

We also had a workshop specifically for people working in my field, evolutionary computation. The idea of this one was that people who had talks in international conferences could share them with other locals who wouldn't be travelling this year (particularly as about five conferences were represented, including the Prague one, one in New Zealand, and other far flung places). Here's me opening the event...

And now to more mundane things...

When I returned from my travels, these red light up X signs had been installed in the corridors where my office is.
Slightly terrifying!

I felt it was necessary to have somewhere to read and ponder in my office, so I now have this nice easy chair.
Lydia helped me take it in, and gave it a test run for me! 

A nice perk of the job, this is a thankyou beer (one of several) from a PhD student I've been helping supervise for the past year, who just passed his viva.

This pigeon was larger than it looks, and kept peering in through my window.