Lectures 9 and 10

Simon Short

"Through University and Beyond"

Simon Short is a University of Lincoln Graduate with a 3rd Class degree in Computer Information Systems, He has started up his own company, Templr, and is now in the business of Business Intelligence consultancy.

The main lesson learnt from his experiences is "The potential becomes the actual".

Salaries:

Junior consultant up to 40k

Senior consultant up to 60k

Principle consultant up to 80k

The basic premise of his job is 'data mining for business intelligence"

Gary Lefman

"Software Globalisation - Cisco Localisation Toolkit"

Localisation is the process of modifying a global software.

Unicode UTF-8 is the standard used wherever possible. This is to avoid any confusion when translations occur with different formats.

The placements of characters, decimal points, currency symbol placement and even the direction of reading is all taken into account when the product is translated.

The ToolKit has been developed as a tool for any software engineer to use to translate their software into all regions they wish to distribute to.

"The Cisco localisation toolkit is an extensible product agnostic, wizad-like tool to methodically localise Ciscos international products"

The main aims of this software:

• To enable engineers to create products themselves
• To extend into low return on investment countries
• Improve quality and turnaround
• Increase sales

The software requires authentication via a login username and password to identify who owns which project. This is a very good idea to avoid any plagiarism or other people stealing your work and claiming credit.

The overall goals of the system are to be:

• Simple
• Practical
• Adaptable
• Maintainable

Additional Lecture

Dr. John C. Murray

'Robot Sensor Fusion for Multimodel Tracking and Recognition of Humans'

The lecture covered ways in which a robot can detect human presence. Throguh face recognition and leg and torso detection, the three combined produce a fairly reliable source through which to gather data and predict if a human being is stood in front of it.

The camera is combined with a laser sensor, the camera for face and torso detection and laser for leg detection. Either legs apart, at an angel or close together can be detected and identified by the program. Through the use of the laser sensor the robot can also navigate through a complex environment by detecting other obstacles, which allows it to track the people it has detected.

Nicola Bellotto

'Closing the HRI loop: Two way emotion interaction in human robot interaction'

Human Robot Interaction is the core subject of this lecture. Though input is focussed on in great depth, feedback is never overly user friendly. For example, a number of beeps could represent the feedback, which is never novice-friendly.

Robots with facial expressions have been used in an investigation into new feedback methods and has been successful. ERWIN, Emotion Robot With Intelligent Networks, is such a robot. when a participant interacts with the robot the in built camera uses face detection to send a command to which emotion to show.

The results are promising and with research into this area of robotics, much more is likley to be developed.

Lecture 8

Mark Stow - 'The Interview'

Getting an interview is in itself a success. It means that you have already made a positive impressions on the employer. An unsuccessful interview is not a failure, but a learning experience.

Before the interview, ensure that enough preparation has been made:

Practical preparation:

• How long is the interview?
• Are there group exercises?
• Assessment centers
• Presentations
• Give yourself enough time to prepare
• What do you need to take?
• Where is the interview?
• What do you wear?

Mental preparation:

• Anticipating questions and responses
• Know yourself - How do you sell yourself
• Ask yourself why? what are your ambitions? Or skills?
• Know the job
• Know the organisation. Research its background (Size of the company, when it was established what they do, the structure and where it is based for example).

Psychological preparation:

• Nerves
• Practical and mental preparation is key
• The interview is a learning process.

If you are required to do a presentation, the the following key points are applied:

• Research
• Answer the question
• Practice
• Be concise
• Be aware of the time-scale
• Eye contact

The interview itself also has key points that should be followed for a better impression:

• First impressions
• Arrive early
• Eye contact
• Body language (Do not slouch or fold arms or legs)
• Dress cleanly and appropriately for the job

There are four main interview styles:

• One on One
• Panel
• Telephone
• Informal

The On on One and Panel style interviews are covered by the points already stated. For a telephone interview, the tone of your voice is very important. If you give an interview on the phone as if it were face to face, then the tone of your voice matched the interview style much better. An informal interview will also be like the first two styles, except it will be more of a general chat with the employer rather than a conversation with meaning (Chronological/Traditional style interview).

Main points to remember:

• Do not panic
• Take your time
• If you didn't understand the question, say so!
• If you don't understand at all, say that you don't.

Questions they may ask:

• Tell me about yourself
• Why Lincoln?
• What are your strengths/weaknesses?
• What would a friends description of you be?
• Where do you see yourself in five years time?

After the interview:

• Ask questions (The are relevant, not already been answered and not ridiculous!)
• Note the questions asked and your responses for future reference
• reflect on your performance
• reflect on the company

Lecture 7

Ben Kirman

Background: Used to be a researcher in Liverpool and has a background in developing prototypes.

The talk was on Representing Facebook users' social experience behaviour though a reflective playful experience.

This was brought about by 'PASION' (Psychologically augmented social interactions over networks) which has 17 partners in the E.U. and is a four year project studying mediated social environments.

What the FaceBook application, Familiars, does is mine social information shared by the user and display the social behavior data in a meaningful format. It takes information form three categories of information; Sociability, Attitude, Activity. These three categories are scored and placed on axis in a 3D matrix and 12 animals are assigned to different point of the matrix.

The categories are scored as followed:

Sociability - Social network analysis calculations (Higher = More information shared between different sources)

Attitude - Facial expression recognition (Higher = on average, happier expressions)

Activity - User activity (Higher = More interactions)

Additional category: Voting - Users vote for the animal they think their friend should be.

The evaluation of this system took place over and eight week period. The application is free to use on FaceBook and 40 English and 40 Italian subject were used. The total number of users increased to 268 over this period, with only 20 removing the application during this time.

From questionnaires given to the participants, 62% did not think the application invaded privacy, which 12% thought it invaded too much. Even with a total of 4000 interactions in eight weeks, the results were inconclusive.

What has been learnt from this, is that players can be categorised based on play style. The data provided to the applications can be mathematically calculated into a meaningful result. This could well be a major step forward in interactive environments in the future.

Lecture 6

Lecture cancelled due to guest speaker unable to make it.

Lecture 5

Guest speaker: Kofi Appiah

Kofi worked for the Robotics research group. He covered a brief history of computer processors, which included:

1970s - Semi-conductors

1980s - DRAM

1990s - Micro processors

2000s - DPS, the technology of FOCUS

The lecture mentioned the increase in chip speed, the speed of which hit a limit at 2Gz, as 4Gz was eventually deemed unfeasible. This was announced on October 4th 2004 by Intel when project Tejas, the 7Gz chip, failed due to overheating and melting of the chip.

This led to multi-core processor, which have a 30% -70% improvement on single core chips of the same speed. FPGA is a parallels approach to processing.

One project Kofi was working with using these processors was a smart camera, which tracks movement by locating new pixels in the current frame from the stored background image.

Lecture 4 - CV and Cover Letters

The workshop was a introductory explanation to how to write a good CV and cover letter. The main points that were covered are summarised below.

CV

Header: Name, Address, Contact details,

Objective: Clear, concise, detailing career path intended to follow, setting tone

Include: Degree, skills, examples.

Work history: 'Relevant' and 'Additional' categories, any work is valid.

Cover Letter

Include why you are applying, your interest in the role, work, employer or organisation, strengths and suitability for the job, refer to the CV and have a positive ending.

Links that were provided to help with CVs and cover letters were websites that were:

ulopportunities.co.uk

prospects.ac.uk/links/appsinterviews

hercomestheboss.com

Lecture 3

Guest speaker - Ken Blair

Ken works for a music production company as a location sound engineer. He mixes sounds, in the classical genre, which takes roughly half an hour to an hour. He uses digital work stations, which include Sadie and ProTools and there can be anywhere from 100 to 2000 edits in one song. He works in venues such as concert halls and arenas and works for record labels, music publishers and bands without a record label. He has had one year working in industry along with post-graduate work.

Lecture 2

Guest speaker - Wendy

Wendy teaches and works from home. The teaching job is self employed, of which she has her own, self designed, website for. 

Lecture 1

The lecture explained what will be covered in the Frontier Technologies module. This included guest speakers, assignments and mock interviews. Curriculum Vitae and cover letter training is also going to be covered later on in the year. Workshops will be the main source for this along with notes from the lecturers and guest speakers.

A mock job application and interview will also take place later in the year.