Sign off?

Goes without saying I passed the viva. It's weird having people constantly assume you're super-happy about something, when really you're just relieved. Anyway I'm off travelling the Antipodes for a few months now; although I'm still occasionally plagued by that one dream where I haven't submitted yet, and I'm late, and OH GOD HAVE I EVEN WRITTEN MY THESIS? WHAT'S HAPPENING?

Maybe I should talk to someone. In the absence of a counsellor, I've got another outlet for my brain over at http://travellingmiserablist.weebly.com/. If you like.

Submit!!

Well that's that. Until my viva, anyway.

Eek

So much typing...

Doing corrections day in day out is pretty demoralising... I'm always torn between having noise in the background or seeing if I can concentrate without any. I tend to land in column A. Well in any case it needs doing, and the upside is I've read a decent number of recent papers that are pretty interesting, and one that I can't believe got published. It's a bit surreal seeing a publication that purposely ignores the work of your colleagues (and me too I guess, but I don't imagine I'm very sought-after).

Anyway this paper... let's call it "On decentralized coordination for spatial task allocation and scheduling in heterogeneous teams" because that's its name, is noticeably lacking in any mention of max-sum or its ilk. Very odd given its ubiquity.

Here's one last random thing. Threw these together to back up my literature review: they're examples of belief-data overlaid on spatial maps. It's the kind of thing you can create from crowd reports of building damage and the like, and shows nicely how you could use it to make path plans for a UAV to follow in those cases. There you go.

Belief maps, in various forms

Nearly done

Home stretch...

Updated my website recently to add my publications (two accepted... phew) and I'm a few corrections away from finishing—which is surreal. I think as a treat I'll start writing out my acknowledgements; something I'm taking quite seriously. Acknowledgements sections can be an absolute joy when they're not generic "Ooh I'm ever so grateful to ___ for being nice/reliable/trustworthy/there for me" statements in unending lists. I'd like something more personal than that.

More like this

Well here goes nothing. Oh and if anyone has any advice on how to make this image below more clear, do write in on a postcard.

Quick one

Just a quicky to say I've added a couple of download links to my personal site. Upcoming paper and transfer thesis. Got another paper under review at the mo.

http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cabb1g08/

XKCD's "Simplewriter" presents, my research

The chances are good (since you're reading a blog about PhD research) you're at least vaguely familiar with the excellent xkcd webcomic, and you may know that the creator recently started producing books of labelled diagrams of various types described entirely with only the thousand most-common used words in the English language. If you're not familiar, check this out first. If you are, you'll be delighted to know there's now a simple filter that you can use to try your hand at the art of minimalist explanation. I attempted to explain my research. Here's what I came up with:

My work, using only the the ten hundred most used words in our language: "I am a computer using person, and I work on writing computer-words to make small flying machines (with no person doing the flying) fly around. I want them to fly in a not-stupid way so that if there is a bad event in the world, they can make a group of flying machines and look all over the place where the bad-event happened to find people who are in trouble. They need to be not-stupid so that they find the people quickly, or they might die. It is hard to do because they only have little computers on them and so can't do hard number-work, and they can only talk to other flying machines a little bit (and not all the time). Sometimes there might be a map of where people are and where bad-things are, and we can use this map to help the flying-machines go to the best places where there are people in trouble."

I wrote this on Facebook, but I thought I'd put it here too

It almost came out like a melancholy poem... Well anyway:

Writing a new programme... is like building a machine.
From scratch.
Out of matchsticks and paperclips. 
And you build this massive machine, and some of it has never been built before and you just have to remember how it’s done because you can’t draw; and no one else has ever attempted it.
And you think you’re finished and you step back to admire it, flip the little “on” switch you made and it whirs and clanks and bits spin around and then it prints out a bit of paper with a picture of a duck.
And what you really wanted, was a list of the names of former US presidents...
but you have a duck.
And then you think... Why is it a duck? What part is making it a duck? Is it the printer? Or the bit that sends the instructions to the printer? Or the bit looking in the encyclopaedia? Maybe it got confused and looked up ducks. Or maybe it’s not even looking in the encyclopaedia and it’s just found a duck photograph inside the leaves of a book, and used that? 
So you ask it some questions. But all it can do is print out numbers. The numbers tell you about what it’s trying to do, but it’s a machine and so it’s very bad at explaining.
And you take it apart, and you look at every piece...
and eventually...
after hours...
you find the problem.
You put a toothpick in the wrong place.
ONE toothpick....
and you move it 6mm to the left, and you see from the numbers that... ahah! It’s looking at the correct pages now! No more ducks!
And you put it all back together,
and flip the switch,
and you get a picture of a hat