Undergraduate students at IROS
The IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) is among the top two conferences for robotics (the other being ICRA). This year’s acceptance rate was 45%. My group including PhD students and undergraduate students submitted 6 papers in total and 4 papers got accepted. We were rejoiced to see a paper submitted by an undergraduate group with some support from PhD students were among the accepted papers. Another undergraduate student was a co-author of an accepted paper. This is a good encouragement to our efforts to give a World class experience to undergraduate students at King’s. Though the students who dared to submit papers to such a highly competitive international conference had to put a lot of extra effort than the norm, their achievement will put them ahead of their peers in the job markets. In the words of the students themselves, “the experience was awesome. We got to do advanced experiments, collect data, and analyze them in a professional manner we had never done before. Now we feel that we can face any design and experimental challenge and we don’t feel scared to embark upon new technical projects. It was a great experience!”.
I am pretty sure this attitude is what employers are looking for in a fresh graduate. I am sure more and more undergraduate students will volunteer to submit papers to competitive international conferences and journals and stay ahead of the competition in these tough times.
Dov Gabbay: You’re a legend!
Being Head of Department sometimes has its drawbacks, but kicking off the Distinguished Lecture Series of the Department of Informatics at King’s College London on 21 June 2012, and introducing our first speaker has to be one of the highlights so far. Emeritus Professor Dov Gabbay has had a remarkable career in Computer Science, and is rightly regarded as one of the outstanding minds in the area of logic. Dov retired in 2011, but I’m delighted that he remains with us at King’s as Emeritus Professor. Indeed, there’s no sign of him slowing down – he remains as active as he ever was.
As I said when I introduced his lecture, one of my prized possessions is one of Dov’s many volumes on logic in his series of handbooks. I acquired it as a PhD student way back, and have ensured that it stays on my shelf, despite being forced to downsize my book collection on several occasions. So it was an honour and a privilege to invite Dov to deliver his lecture.
Of course, the lecture was outstanding, both instructive and entertaining, and set a very high bar for those who will follow in the series of Informatics Distinguished Lectures (look out for future lectures!). We’ve recorded it on video, and I’ll post a link here (as well as several other places) once it’s available.
As Carlito’s nephew(?) in the film, Carlito’s Way, says to Carlito (played by Al Pacino), “You a ****ing legend, man!” I can think of no one to whom such a statement applies more than Dov.
24 October 2012: VIDEO LINK ADDED
Book pricing bots
A while back, we talked about automated pricing algorithms running amok on Amazon.com. Here is another strange and amusing tale about pricing bots on Amazon – this time regarding a book about computers – and the automated pricing of books which, when sold, need first to be purchased by the seller. (HT: RS)
Computation and Intension
The first programmable device was a Jacquard Loom, a textile loom invented by Joseph Jacquard in 1801 which used punched cards to control the pattern woven by the machine. Changing the punched cards meant the same machine could be used to weave different patterns. In the 1980s in a factory in Zimbabwe I saw a very similar manufacturing process – relying on punched rubber belts rather than on punched cards – to place bristles into floor brushes; this was on machines made in Sheffield in the 1880s.
As is so often the case in computer science, practice comes before theory, and often long before. Despite the widespread use of such programmable machines, a mathematical theory of programming languages only made an appearance in the 1960s. One of the ways we have to understand a computer program is to translate the statements made in the programming language into some other form, such as statements about mathematical objects. We would call these statements the semantics of the computer program.
It turns out the the process of doing this may also be applied to understanding human languages, and so there is an area of common interest between theoretical computer science, lingustic theory and the philosophy of language. This brief introduction is just to point to an interesting seminar series in this area of overlap taking place in London, organized by Walter Dean (of Warwick University) and Sean Walsh (of Birkbeck College, London). The series is called Computation and Intension, and the seminars will mostly be held on Friday afternoons.
Speakers in the seminar series include computer scientists, logicians and philosophers: Samson Abramsky (Computer Science, Oxford), Melvin Fitting (Philosophy, Math, Computer Science, CUNY), Peter Fritz (Philosophy, Oxford), Leon Horsten (Philosophy, Bristol), Kevin Klement (Philosophy, UMass), and Raymond Turner (Computer Science, Essex).
As always with the Humanities, no one seems able or willing to place the program on a simple web-page, only making it available as a document. (To read a document, we need first another application, and then we need to open the document in the application, with all the attendant risks and hassle. Why not use the browser instead?)
To do what the organizers themselves should have done, here is the program on the web:
Session 1: Friday 27 April (London Week 1)
Location: McFetridge Room, 14 Gower St., Philosophy Department, Birkbeck [map]
Seminar (13:15-14:45): Introduction: intension versus extension and the role of procedures.Session 2: Friday 4 May (London Week 2)
Location: McFetridge Room, 14 Gower St., Philosophy Department, Birkbeck
Seminar (13:15-14:45): Background on intensional logic (Frege, Church, Montague, Tichy).Session 3: Friday 11 May (London Week 3)
Location: McFetridge Room, 14 Gower St., Philosophy Department, Birkbeck
Seminar (13:15-14:45): Two-Dimensional Semantics and the Method of Intension and Extension (session led by Mahrad Almotahari).Session 4: Friday 18 May (London Week 4)
Location: McFetridge Room, 14 Gower St., Philosophy Department, Birkbeck
Seminar (13:15-14:45): Russell-Myhill Paradox & Tucker-Thomason on Paradoxes of Intensionality
Speaker (15:00-16:30): Peter Fritz (Oxford), TBA.Session 5: Friday 25 May (London Week 5)
Location: STB2 (basement level) Stewart House [map]
Seminar (13:15-14:45): Epistemic Arithmetic, Reinhardt’s argument, and Church’s Thesis
Speaker (15:00-16:30) Kevin Klement (UMass Amherst) “Russell’s Theory of Incomplete Symbols and the Paradoxes”Session 6: Friday 1 June (London Week 6)
Location: S264 (second floor) Senate House [map]
Seminar (13:15-14:45): The recursion theorems and domain theory
Speaker (15:00-16:30): Leon Horsten (Bristol) “Epistemic Church’s Thesis”Session 7: Friday 8 June (London Week 7)
Location: STB3 (basement level) Stewart House
Seminar (13:15-14:45): Around and about programming language semantics
Speaker (15:00-16:30): Samson Abramsky (Oxford) “Programs as data and intensional recursion”Session 8: Friday 15 June (London Week 8)
Location: G35 (ground floor) Senate House
Seminar (13:15-14:45): Moschovakis’ theory of algorithms, intensional logic, and synonymy
Speaker (15:00-16:30): Raymond Turner (Essex) TBA.Session 9: Friday 22 June (London Week 9)
Location: McFetridge Room, 14 Gower St., Philosophy Department, Birkbeck
Seminar (13:15-14:45): Kripke and de re beliefs about natural numbersSession 10: THURSDAY 28 June (London Week 10)
Location: TBA
Seminar (13:15-14:45): Fixed point semantics, bilattices, and PROLOG (session led by Jonne Speck)
Speaker (15:00-16:30): Melvin Fitting (CUNY) “Bilattices in Logic Programming and the Theory of Truth”
MathsJam London
MathsJam is a monthly meeting in a pub of people interested in Mathematics problems. The next London MathsJam is tomorrow night, Tuesday 17 April 2012, at 1900, upstairs at the Devonshire Arms, near Piccadilly Circus.
Bridging the Gaps
Great progress is being made on our EPSRC inter-disciplinary seed-funding research project, Bridging the Gaps, which aims to strengthen the many connections between Informatics and other disciplines at King’s College London. More information here. Please contact us if you want to be involved.
