ByteLabs

Prof. John Hennessy, erstwhile Director of the Computer System Laboratory, now President of Stanford University, visited the University of Edinburgh to receive a Honorary Degree and give a public lecture on the Future of Microprocessor Architecture.

The lecture was very well structured and thrilling, especially the part about Thread Level Parallelism and a preview of SUNs upcoming Niagara Architecture. After having spent quite some time with a famous book written by Prof. Hennesy, namely Computer Architecture: A quantitative approach, I was really anxious to see this talk.

Prof. Hennessy led the RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) team at Stanford in the early 1980s and was a cofounder, in 1984, of MIPS Computer Systems, now MIPS Technologies. He is a recipient of the 2000 John Von Neumann Medal, the 2000 ASEE R. Lamme Medal, the 2001 Eckert Mauchly Award and the 2001 Seymour Cray Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, and he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

So all in all this guy has done quite some stuff for computer science!

Professor Alan Bundy has initiated a series of seminars on Computational Thinking. Thus every first Wednesday of each month at 4pm, one can attend some very interesting seminars from various fields of computational thinking. Today Prof. Vicki Bruce gave her talk ‘About Face’ and how our understanding of face perception has been influenced quite profoundly by computational developments. It was very interesting and I’m already looking forward to the next presentation which will talk about the area of ‘Computational Linguistics’.

The last couple of days of mid semester break, Christina and me had to do stuff for work. She had to prepare some lessons and I had to do Uni related things. But we weren’t just working, we also went up on Arthur’s Seat and got hit by a really bad rain cloud and lots of wind :(. Nevertheless we went all the way to the top where we made this impressive picture. As you can see it has already stopped raining and sun was coming out again juhuu, but we were already soaken wet.

After a pretty busy week it is time to sum up what happened. Well, just in case you wondered if I’m doing any actual work at Uni I can assure you, I am! There is a paper about Computational Linguistics I wrapped up this week which basically evaluates two statistical N-Gram Taggers. Well, if you don’t know what that is, nevermind, if you are interested though, you can go ahead and read the paper.

Time flies by and we are already at day 3! The weather doesn’t really like us because it is raining all the time and the weather forcast doesn’t get any better. But that’s the way it is in Scotland so we just cope with the situation. Yesterday (Sunday) we walked down Princes Street, Edinburghs version of Londons Oxford Street.

Today we went to see the Edinburgh Zoo. Even though the weather was very Scottish (rainy), it was a really cool trip. There are many different animals in the Edinburgh Zoo like: Penguins, Zebras, Meerkats, ... and Britians only Koalas. After the Zoo we went to Portobello Beach because instead of heavy rainshowers we only had light rain falling from the sky.

It was really pretty but we have to go there once again when it is not raining. As usual we made some pictures which are available at the obvious place.

Last friday afternoon I was anxiously awaiting Christina at Waverly Station. She arrived by train from Watford, where she is working as an assistant teacher at two schools. The first evening we went to the Bannermans right across the street and catched up on what was going on in the past 6 weeks.

After a real English breakfast we went to the Royal Museum of Scotland and had a wonderful day insinde, because outside it was raining!

Then we headed on to Edinburgh Castle and went down the Royal mile to Hollyrood Palace and enjoyed the Scottish flair of the city as Christina has never been here before!

Just have a look at it yourself.

Well, I wanted to go see Glasgow this weekend but I caught the flu and had to stay in bed since friday :(. At least I had the chance to check out the local health service and I must say it was better than expected. On friday I went to see the doctor and it was a really really nice lady trying to help as good as she possibly could!

Today I finally feel better and hope to be able to go to UNI tomorrow.

Well, I wasn’t just staying in bed and sleeping all time, I used some of my time to get a third of a two weeks assignment done in Inf2A (Processing Natural and Formal Languages). Part of the assignment is theoretical and the other part must be implemented in Python, a really easy to learn programming language.

I also fiddled around with a new window manager called wmii-window manager improved 2. So if you are working in a Unix-like environment and want to be able to efficiently use your window manager you should definitely check it out!

Today (Sunday), Christina is also leaving Austria to go to London as an assistant teacher! Good luck Chri!

Every tuesday night the ISC meets at the Bannermans and celebrates the so called international pub night. But this weeks tuesday wasn’t just an ordinary tuesday pubnight, Chrigl, my friend from Switzerland, celebrated his 23rd Birthday – Happy Birthday Chrigl!!

It was quite a lot of fun and I even met a girl from St.Valentin, Magda and 2 of her mates from Linz, at the Bannermans! It really seems that we live in a small world!!

Jakob has made a little blog aggregator which merges all the blogs from JKU students currently studying abroad! It’s nice, go have a look at it!

On Saturday we went to North Berwick, on Scotland’s east coast, about an hour’s drive from Edinburgh. North Berwick is the site of a dormant volcanoe, a quaint fishing village, the massive ruins of Tantallon Castle, the Scottish Seabird Centre, a picturesque beach and the impressive ‘Bass Rock.’ It was a relly nice trip and we even had beatiful weather.

I even got into the water since the locals were doing it but I couldn’t stay in there for too long because of the chilly water. As usual there are many more pictures in the gallery, enjoy!

Today I was really lucky to get a ticket for the Introduction of the Semantic Web Talk by Professor Sir Tim Berners Lee. It was a pleasure to sit in the lecture theater and listen to the ideas and intentions behind the Semantic Web. It was a very well prepared presentation and of course it was done in HTML.

The talk has been recorded, and the video recording will be made available in due course – so stay tuned!