As Luck Would Have It

Graduation Day, January 2012

2012-01-17T22:11:00.000Z

Yesterday at the Barbican Centre in London, the graduation ceremony was for held for our outgoing MSc students, and a semi-official launch to those graduating of the new array of King's Informatics social media sites. Despite the age of this blog, with still rather too little content, we are trying to ensure that we stay in touch with our alumni.

However, it's very much a maze out there, at least for me, but 2012 will be the year in which King's Informatics establishes itself in the social networking world. Well, here's hoping.

And if you don't know, here's the portfolio....

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kclinformatics

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/groups/KCL-Informatics-4190387

Google+: https://plus.google.com/110680673221221394793

Twitter: http://twitter.com/kclinformatics

King's Informatics blog: http://inkings.org/

King's Informatics website: http://kcl.ac.uk/informatics

Monday Morning

2011-12-05T08:04:00.000Z

A new week starts, 0700 Monday morning. The view from my office window!

Masterful Inactivity

2011-03-07T09:56:00.000Z

In 22 February's Guardian, Jonathan Wolff writes of the secret of being Head of Department: masterful inactivity. There are so many demands, and so many things to respond to as a Head of Department, that the best thing to do is to ignore the demands so that by the time you might get around to dealing with them, the need for them has disappeared, and those requesting them have forgotten.

This all because of the desire for change, which Wolff suggests is taken to be something valuable in its own right. However, "If the background environment keeps changing, you cannot predict the consequences of your actions," he writes, so that what might look sensible at one point in time, may not be so shortly afterwards. His advice: "If you cannot sensibly plan on other grounds, you should at least make sure that what you do is sound in intellectual, scholarly and pedagogical terms."

He is partly right. Change is not always good. But when it is done in support of these intellectual, scholarly and pedagogical objectives, then change can be a force for good. The challenge, of course, is to change when it is needed, and not otherwise. As a new Head of Department, I'm keen to change things, but only when it brings about valuable results in these terms.

How to write ...

2011-02-01T21:29:00.004Z

Reading the Guardian on my little gizmo on my way to work last week, I came across Tim Radford's column, entitled: A manifesto for the simple scribe – my 25 commandments for journalists. It's not just for journalists - much of what is there applies just as readily to more general writing, especially technical writing, and theses!

Alternative Agents

2010-06-23T21:37:00.003+01:00

It's good to see that The Economist is keeping up-to-date with research in multi-agent systems. A recent article in their 12th June Technology Quarterly covered the work of Louis-Philippe Morency, Iwan de Kok and Jonathan Gratch, (the latter being one of the AAMAS 2010 keynote speakers), as reported in the Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems journal, on interpreting human gesture, and in particular the nod. Unfortunately, the article in The Economist refers to the journal of Alternative Agents and Multi-Agent Systems! At least they tried.

AAMAS 2010 Workshops and Industry Track

2009-12-28T07:42:00.007Z

Meanwhile, in the background, the Workshop Chair, Kagan Tumer, set about issuing a call for workshops, and the list of accepted workshops is now available from the website, with many of these workshops already having issued their first calls. The deadline for workshop papers is 2 February 2010, so there's a good month to get papers ready after the New Year.

At the same time, the Industry and Applications Track Chairs, Jeff Kephart of IBM and Dominic Greenwood of Whitestein Technologies, have now received their paper submissions, and decisions are due out in early to mid January.

It's all shaping up very nicely.

AAMAS 2010 Papers

2009-12-28T07:23:00.001Z

I had intended to write this earlier, but the last couple of months have been hectic with lots of activity on various aspects of the conference. Still, it's a good time to take stock now that there's a little breathing space during the holiday period.

First, AAMAS 2010 received 570 papers submitted in the main track, 57 in the robotics track and 58 in the virtual agents track, giving 685 papers in total. This is a very significant increase on the number of submissions from 2009, and the Publicity Chair, Jordi Sabater did his job brilliantly.

Because I am late in writing this, the decisions are already out, with a huge amount of effort from the Program Committee and Senior Program Committee, and especially the Program Chairs, Wiebe van der Hoek and Gal Kaminka, who spent a very long week together finalising the decisions in Liverpool shortly before Xmas.

The results give 163 full papers (23.9%) and 136 short papers giving another (19.9%), broadly in line with the 2009 acceptance rates.

AAMAS 2010 Tutorials

2009-08-26T14:11:00.000+01:00

Progress continues on AAMAS 2010: last week the first call for tutorial proposals was published. Thanks to Kate Larson for producing it, and to Jordi for distributing it.

It will be added to the website shortly

EPSRC on Twitter

2009-08-10T15:59:00.000+01:00

I was going to write something a week or so back, when there was uproar in the cricket world as a result of Phillip Hughes (the Australian batsman) announcing on Twitter that he had been dropped by the Australian selectors before the team had been announced officially. And then the newspapers were full of countless other instances of cricket commentators, ex-coaches, current players, etc., using Twitter. It seemed to me to be a sudden explosion in use of Twitter.

Then, Darren Bent, the Tottenham football player, decided to have a rant on Twitter about delays in his transfer to Sunderland, abusing his employer in the process, and receiving a fine of £80,000 for his pains. Where would it all end?

The answer is that it ends with me finally biting the bullet as a result of an email received 10 minutes ago, stating that the UK's EPSRC is now on Twitter. Sigh!

AAMAS 2010 Website Goes Live

2009-08-03T16:34:00.000+01:00

Thanks to excellent work by a whole bunch of people, but Hojjat Ghaderi in particular, the website for AAMAS 2010 is now live. Previously, we just had the key dates and the initial Call for Papers there, but it's now looking might fine, consistent with what we're aim for in the premier international agents conference.

Meanwhile work is proceeding on several fronts, despite the summer months, and all is looking good as we move forward.

More on developments as they happen.

AAMAS 2010 Kick-off: the first call for papers

2009-07-21T10:17:00.000+01:00

So, after taking the baton from Carles Sierra and Cristiano Castelfranchi who organised an excellent conference in Budapest in May this year, the Ninth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems has just achieved its first visible milestone with the issue of the first Call for Papers. Much work from Wiebe van der Hoek and Gal Kaminka, the Program Chairs, resulted in a call which was distributed to a large number of email lists by the Publicity Chair, Jordi Sabater-Mir last night.

Behind the scenes, work continues aplenty, and Yves Lesperance is doing an excellent job in preparing things on the ground in Toronto in advance of next May.

The deadline for submission of papers for the main track is 8/13 October 2009!

Charisma in football managers

2007-08-25T11:11:00.000+01:00

I’m sitting on a train to Durham, and delighted to see that they have wireless internet. So, rather than do the work I should be doing to make use of the dead time, I’ve been reading random things on the net for the sheer thrill of doing so on a train. And in my effort to catch up with whatever the national press have published about today’s football (soccer if you’re reading in the US - does anyone read this?) I found myself looking at Russell Brand’s column in today’s Guardian.

Brand writes about his disillusionment with the national team, something many of the people commenting (and I) identify with. One (or is that two?) of the (3) reasons given for this relates to the England manager, Steve McClaren, who seems to react to what the press clamour for, and continues to bring back into the fold rather aged players. While I agree with Brand in finding this upsetting, I think there’s another more fundamental reason why McClaren will never win favour in the hearts of the nation: he’s dull!

If I think back over previous England managers, it seems to make sense, at least from the little information I have about this through TV and press. Steve McClaren has always been dull, as manager of Middlesbrough and now as England manager. I’m not saying he’s not a nice chap - indeed he might well be - but when I see him interviewed, I just don’t think he’d be a good bloke to have a night out with, or even to chat to over a beer. He just has that sad droopiness about him.

The same was true (though in a different way) of Sven Goran Eriksson. While he may have had a way with the ladies, this doesn’t make him interesting - if he hadn’t been England manager, I wouldn’t be leaping up to chat to him at a party. He’s just not got the charisma. I’m sure he’s very charming, and he seemed to have the loyalty of the players, but nothing carried over to me the TV viewer. And the press gave him a hard time for not seeming to do much or express much during England games.

Going back further, Glenn Hoddle was passable but a little barmy - he’d have managed if he hadn’t got into all that faith healing stuff. Graham Taylor was dull, though. I like him, and I like his commentary on the radio, but he doesn’t really have a spark that makes him top of a list to invite to a party. Bobby Robson was good - he was quirky, interesting, and a little bit odd, but generally, I think we liked him. Certainly, we liked him when he quit the job, and I think that even though we (the public) may have had our difficult moments with him, he engaged us, so he passes the interesting test.

Of course, the man at the top of the list, the one who many of us would still like to be England manager, is Terry Venables, El Tel. Even his nickname is exciting. He’s just a lovable rogue, a dodgy geezer, but one who seems to be able to try new things, get excited about the game, and engage with us as well as the players. We love him for the trouble he gets into, we love him because the FA don’t (and it gets better all the time), and we love him because he seems to know how to live life. Oh, and he didn’t do too badly as England manager. But, as is often the way with these things, the problem is that the powers that be can’t cope with someone so difficult and dodgy.

And this is the fundamental problem. There are able managers, but exceptional ones are hard to come by. When they do appear, they often have some curious characteristics Look at Jose Mourinho at Chelsea - clearly a top manager, but sometimes over the top in several respects. Excellence doesn’t always wear a grey suit!

Life begins ...

2007-06-27T11:10:00.000+01:00

… apparently. We’ll see!

Grammatical Sloppiness

2007-06-03T11:09:00.000+01:00

It’s that time of year again. Reading through and marking a pile of exam scripts is always a chore, because of the time it takes out of the week when there are other things that need doing, because of the tight deadlines that often need to be met, and because of the care and attention that one needs to put into it (quite rightly). Most of all, however, the thing that I find most difficult, is having to read through scripts by students who can’t spell or can’t write coherent sentences. This is not just something I encounter in exam scripts, but in all sorts of other documents produced by students at all levels, undergraduate and postgraduate.

So it is interesting to see that it’s not just academics who suffer. According to Recruitment and Employment Commission reports The Guardian this week (2 June 2007), “Around half of all CVs received by recruitment consultants contain spelling or grammatical errors, and these are most likely to be made by those aged between 21 and 25.”

The impressions left by well written or poorly written documents are so important that they can often have as great an impact as the content of the document. I advise all my students that they should take a huge amount of care over writing, but far too many turn in sloppy work.

So, a word of advice to anyone starting a course at university: in addition to studying your courses, work at your writing skills during your entire degree programme. There’s no point getting a degree if you can’t get people to read your CV and employ you. Impressions count!

Go

2007-01-30T11:08:00.000Z

I’m currently trying to move from Southampton to London, and it’s a pain having to trawl through the piles of stuff accumulated over several years. Many things have been thrown out, and should have been thrown out years ago, but some things are rediscovered on the process of moving. Like the game of Go (invented more than 2500 years ago in China), and the rather too posh set I bought myself only a couple of years ago. I decided that I wanted to play, to learn to play, properly, after having dabbled with it too many years earlier.

I gave the game a certain cachet when, as an undergraduate, I first discovered it, being played by two of my lecturers, John Washbrook and Simon Peyton Jones, at lunchtime. Only later did I begin to understand the inherent difficulty of Go, as opposed to other games like Chess, especially for machines.

And this week, coincidentally, I read in The Economist (27 January 2007) that the performance of machines is now improving, by using Monte Carlo techniques. For example, the MoGo system is apparently ranked 2,323rd in the world, and in Europe’s top 300.

Not sure it’s worthwhile learning to play now!

The Netflix Prize

2006-11-01T11:06:00.000Z

I’m intrigued by the announcement of The Netflix Prize. Already some of the students in the lab are keen to see if they can win the $50,000 or even the $1,000,000 prize!

From the website: “The Netflix Prize seeks to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences. Improve it enough and you win one (or more) Prizes. “

And from The Guardian:
“US online DVD rental service Netflix Inc has announced a version of the Longitude prize for film geeks - a $1m bounty to the first person to develop software to improve its movie recommendation system by 10%.

Currently, the system “learns” the individual taste of each of Netflix’s 5.2m subscribers by asking them to rate the films they watch. This data is then used to generate a list of suggestions or “recommendations”, unique to each user.

To win Netflix’s prize, the software program must demonstrably improve upon the current movie-recommendation system by at least 10%. The differences will be tracked by a program that quantifies how well the recommendation systems predict which movies will be liked or disliked by a profiled consumer.”