Category Academia

Karen Spärck Jones

One of the few female computer science pioneers, Karen Spärck Jones died in early April 2007, just a few short years after her husband, Roger Needham, passed away in early 2003. Read the CL obituary as well as this month's IEEE Spectrum's article on her life and work titled "A woman's work".

OLPC: Τι απέγινε η μανιβέλα;

Στο τεύχος Απριλίου 2007 του περιοδικού του ΙΕΕE, Spectrum, παρουσιάζεται το OLPC, σε ένα άρθρο που καλύπτει τη τεχνική πλευρά του εν πολλοίς καινοτόμου υπολογιστή για παιδιά, αλλά που αγγίζει και κάποιες κοινωνικές προεκτάσεις αυτού. Ένα βασικό χαρακτηριστικό του υπολογιστή, πέραν του ότι είναι ανθεκτικός στις κακουχίες, αδιάβροχος και σχεδιασμένος ώστε να μπορεί να λειτουργεί […]

Forget them puzzles and games

One of our best ways to combat the cognitive decline humans experience with age might be theatre, according to this article by Cognitive Daily.

SciGen: Automated CS Paper Generation

Getting a research paper accepted at a conference or journal can be a very funny process, if you don't take it seriously. Politics, abused-postgraduates forced to review papers they don't understand, senior academics who don't care and who are obliged to review papers they don't understand and so on, make modern academia the surreal experience it is. Some of us at Imperial, have been joking about having an automated paper generator for many years. Well, it seems some guys at MIT did it and one of their 'generated' papers was accepted as a 'non-reviewed paper' at a conference. :)

Peer Reviewed School Textbooks.

Here's an idea. Ignore the part where Jobs rants on teacher job security and how this drives the quality of applicants down; What's truly interesting is the opinion also expressed by others in the past: the replacement of textbooks by electronic, online, peer-reviewed information sources, offering up-to-date, widely accepted material to students. Something like Wikipedia (perhaps limited in scope and moderated) replacing what are obsolete and often partial textbooks.

Goodbye Professor.

This Friday I was informed that a member of my research group at Imperial and a friend, Professor Patrick Purcell passed away. I last saw him this past December while visiting London and, despite our efforts, we did not manage to meet, but for a few minutes in some corridor at the university. Our meeting […]

Google Techtalks

Further to my MURL article, the new kid on the block, Google, is now offering a series of -- admittedly very interesting at times -- scientific, engineering, current affairs, humanities and arts lectures that take place there.

Robert Morris at Cambridge

Robert Morris Sr. (the father of Robert Morris Jr. who made the 'internet worm' back in late 1988), ex. lead scientist of the NSA, is speaking at a seminar in Cambridge this Tuesday entitled "The cryptographic role of the cleaning lady". You can get more info here I am definitely going. :) Update: The Morris seminar at Cambridge was quite interesting, but mostly from a 'historical' point of view. Nothing much on the 'cleaning lady' apart from a few (some well-known) stories here and there. Nothing much on anything really. A bit disappointed in that respect. But it was a nice trip out of London.