Abstracts
Russell Prue
In trying to predict what we may see in the classroom of the future, I have inevitably
looked at where we are today. All around us there are examples of new technologies, which
have yet to make an impact on learning in secondary schools. My session brings together a
view of what these technologies may make possible in the future. All of the examples that
are used come from products and services that are available in some form today or are currently
in development.
If there is one clear reason why we shouldn’t try to predict tomorrow’s technologies,
then its graphically illustrated in this quote from Popular Mechanics from March 1949:
"Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30
tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1 1/2 tons."
Looking ahead, we imagine that a wide range of teaching and learning resources and processes
will move to an on-line environment. The geographical location of the pupil will become
immaterial to their access of a wide range of top quality materials - whether that is within
the classroom, within the school, within the home or outside of any of these. The Internet
will become a key method of enabling a new style of learning. The presentation will include real
examples of how this will be achieved.
Jim Gemmell
Many desktop videoconferencing systems are ineffective due to deficiencies in
gaze awareness and sense of spatial relationship. Previous works employ special
hardware to address these problems. GazeMaster takes a software-only approach.
Heads and eyes in the video are tracked using computer-vision techniques, and
the tracking information is transmitted along with the video stream. Receivers take
the tracking information corresponding to the video and graphically place the
head and eyes in a virtual 3D space such that gaze awareness and a sense of space
are provided.
http://research.microsoft.com/barc/mediapresence/GazeMaster.asp
Bio:
Jim Gemmell is a researcher in the Microsoft Research Media Presence
Group at the Bay Area Research Center (BARC) in San Francisco. His
research interests include personal media management, telepresence, and
reliable multicast.
http://research.microsoft.com/~jgemmell
Official Building Opening
Bill Langdon
Many common assumptions about the Evolvability of both human produced
and evolved programs turn out to be wrong. Even with modest sized
programs, the fitness landscape does not appear to be rugged. This is
contrary to oft stated opinion; small changes to programs can lead to
new programs with similar performance. However the landscape formed
by some small move operators appears to be riddled with neutral
networks. These hamper may hamper evolution as many changes lead to
the program yield no change in performance.
While it is very difficult to get rigorous results for every circumstance
we have investigated a few genetic programming (GP)benchmark problems and
have some proofs about the properties of fitness search spaces, which are
applicable to many automatically generated programs [Foundations of Genetic
Programming].
Potential practical implications for genetic programming and other forms of
automatic programming will be discussed as well as for other open evolutionary
architectures, including the utility of neutral pathways.
Ewan Birney
A genome, being the complete DNA of a species represents the underlying information which
produces a living organism. We have the vast majority of this information for over 60
genomes, including 5 "large" animals of which one of them is ourselves. This information
is stored as long strings of letters which stand for the 4 possible chemical monomers
in the DNA polymer that forms the genome. The challenge now is to decipher that
information, a field which blends traditional molecular biology and information orientated
approaches, perhaps more common in applied maths, computer science, electrical engineering
and physics.
In this talk I will give a short crash course in genomics so that I can present 5
probably solvable problems in this area. The hope is that these problems will be
a good fit to curious quantitative researchers from any of the above backgrounds and
encourage some people to have a look at this fascinating data set.
David Arnold
This talk and demonstration will describe the EU funded CHARISMATIC project
which seeks to populate reconstructions of heritage sites and events with
avatars capable of communication. It will focus on the work done by the
Virtual Environment group at UEA. Their research has two themes;
1) The rapid modeling of buildings using procedural methods.
2) The rendering of large urban environments at interactive frame rates
using integrated techniques such as ROAM, occluder shadows, scene graph
culling, 3D impostors and procedural textures.
Peter Buneman
Scientists, scholars and even ordinary mortals do not have much faith in the data they find
on the Web unless they know where it came from and how it got there -- its provenance. But with
the proliferation of databases on the Web, the provenance of data is becoming increasingly difficult
to record or even to characterise. In Bioinformatics, for example, there are literally hundreds of public
databases. Most of these are not source data: their contents have been extracted from other databases by
a process of filtering, transforming, and manual correction and annotation. Thus, describing the provenance
of some piece of data is a complex issue. These "curated" databases have enormous added value, yet they
usually fail to keep an adequate description of the provenance of the data they contain.
In this talk I shall describe some recent work on a Digital Libraries project to investigate data provenance.
I shall try to describe the general problem and then deal with some technical issues that have arisen, including
(a) a semistructured data model that may help in characterizing data provenance (b) carrying annotations
through database queries (c) efficient archiving of scientific databases.
Joint work with Sanjeev Khanna, Keishi Tajima and Wang-Chiew Tan
Markus Kuhn
The traditional techniques for remote unauthorized access to private and confidential
information -- tapping communication links, code breaking, impersonation -- become increasingly
infeasible as the use of modern cryptographic protection techniques proliferates. Those in the
business of obtaining information from other people's computers without consent -- criminals and
spies, intelligence agency and law enforcement technicians, private detectives, market
researchers -- are therefore increasingly looking for alternative eavesdropping techniques.
One class of alternatives utilises those unintentional information leaks caused by the physical/analog
underlying processes in computers and peripherals that can be sensed, amplified and decoded at a distance.
This talk provides an introduction, overview and demonstration of electromagnetic and optical
passive eavesdropping techniques for personal computers, focusing in particular on video display units.
It will present new techniques for eavesdropping liquid-crystal and cathode-ray tube displays and will
discuss the information-security threat posed by these, along with simple new protective measures.