Students blogs

21 Giugno 2009 - UMAP 2009 Day 1

I'm in Trento, Italy for the second conference of my academic career: UMAP (User Modelling And Personalisation) 2009. The first was back in November at DIGITEL 2008, in Banff, Canada, but someone convinced me not to take my laptop and typing a blog entry on my phone was too much hard work!!

Conferences are an important part of the research world, as they are where academics present their work to their peers and receive feedback. Therefore as PhD students it is important that we go to conferences to get experience of them. It's really part of our training as researchers.

I really hate travelling. It used to be the actual act of flying: after a bad exerience as a kid, for many years the thought of planes made me feel sick. But I'm over that. Now I just dislike all the planning and worrying that something might go wrong. Fortunately, though, today's journey went really smoothly. I got a lift to the airport (thanks dad!), went straight through security as I'd already checked in and printed my boarding pass online and got on the plane last, through choice as I hate queuing.

Once I'd landed at Verona-Brescia airport, I dashed off the plane and escaped outside without any hassle as all my luggage was carry-on. Outside there were coaches to both Brescia and Verona, so I grabbed an €11 ticket to Verona and was first on the bus. The coach took me straight to Verona Porta Nuova train station, where I navigated the computerised ticket machine to buy a ticket, therefore avoiding having to speak Italian! The machine was great as it had English language and told me what time the next train to Trento was.

Even though my Italian friend Ilaria told me to avoid the second class 'regional' trains, they were the only ones running this evening, so I had to get one. They were fine though; no worse than a slightly old UK train and probably more comfortable. Also, the price was only €5.40 for the hour and twenty minute journey from Verona to Trento, which cannot be scoffed at. A similar length journey in the UK (Southampton to London) costs over £50 these days!

The train journey was fine, though I began to feel sleepy and was worried I might fall asleep and miss my station. Luckily I stayed awake and then found my way from the station to my hotel with the help of some hastily printed Google Maps (thanks Alex :-) After I checked in I watched a little American TV (Worst Week – really good) dubbed into Italian (not so good), then went out to discover the town.

I took a walk down to the Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), which is where the conference is being hosted, so that I could memorise the route ahead of tomorrow. The direct route is straight through the shopping area of town and just past one of the main squares. There were a lot of people out in town, but I'm not sure if that is typical of a Sunday evening or if the celebrations that are happening this week in Trento have begun already. There was lots of music, people eating in and around the centre and people selling paintings on the street! Seems like a fun place to be.

I found the FBK, so I know where I'm going tomorrow. It has a kebab van outside! Afterwards I walked back toward the hotel to get some dinner. No, not a kebab! I stopped a restaurant by the hotel and had my first pizza of my visit to Italy. I won't bore you any longer, and will update you tomorrow after the first day of workshops and tutorials.

22 April 2009 - InterFace 2009

InterFace 2009

One of the things that has been keeping me busy recently is being on the organising committee of a conference: InterFace 2009. My friend Leif (who I met on a training course way back at the start of my PhD) is doing a PhD in ECS department, but with a co-supervisor in Archaeology, due to the nature of his topic. With his colleague in History, and a Professor in Modern Languages, they conceived an event that would foster research collaboration between the fields of Humanities and Technology.

The committee consists of equal numbers of people from Humanities and FESM (Faculty of Engineering Science and Maths) so that we have a balanced approach, as well as a couple of members of staff who are kindly giving up some of their time to help organise InterFace.

The approach we have taken with InterFace is quite an interesting one. Although I've called it a conference, it doesn't have the same configuration as most of the conferences I've seen so far. Most conferences in Computer Science will have attendees submit long, short or poster papers, in order to be accepted to present long or short presentations, or posters. However, as our key aim is to foster new ideas for collaboration between Humanities and Technology, we are asking participants to submit a short paper presenting an idea for how their research could be used by the other discipline. At the conference, these ideas will either be pitched on a poster or as a two minute 'lightning talk'.

To further promote collaboration, we will have a session inspired by speed dating, where each Humanities attendee will get to chat about their ideas with a Technology attendee for a couple of minutes, before moving on to the next person.

In addition to collaborating to generate new ideas, participants will be treated to a great deal of keynotes, workshops, insider's guides and talks about successful projects which will help improve their knowledge of the skills required to get interdisciplinary projects off the ground.

If you are interested in this conference, please visit the website: http://www.interface09.org.uk/. The Call for Papers is linked from the front page. The paper is quite short (only a couple of pages) and this should be a really useful and interesting event. Get going!

19 September 2008
What I Did This Summer: Part I

There was a long period over the summer where I didn't write a blog entry, and it all stems from what I spoke about in my June entry: my 9-month report! What happened was that I worked fairly heavily on it during June to get it completed for the end of the month. During this time my supervisor, Hugh, was off sick for a while, though from my perspective this let me knuckle down and really get some writing done.

When Hugh returned, we had a meeting to judge my progress and discuss what needed to be done next, and lots of interesting things came out of this meeting. Firstly, I had a fair bit more to do before handing it in. Secondly, Hugh would be at two conferences, with some holiday in between, during July. Thirdly, I mentioned that the deadline for submissions to the DIGITEL 2008 conference was coming up at the end of the month. And finally, it turned out that we were both going to the Glastonbury festival the week after the meeting.

Ok, that seems a bit of an unrelated mess of facts, so I will try to weave together what the outcomes of the meeting were. To start with, it was clear that I would not finish the 9 month report and get feedback from Hugh before he went away for July. Therefore the hand in and viva for this was postponed until early August. To make best use of the week Hugh was here, we decided to write a poster paper for the DIGITEL conference, discussing the scope of adaptive digital games. Lastly, we decided to meet up for a few pints of cider while at Glastonbury!

Writing the poster paper was extremely fun. Let me explain what I mean by 'poster paper', in case you're a little confused. I wrote a 3-page paper to present my research so far and convince the conference organisers that they should let me present an academic poster at the conference. The other typical options are to write a full or short paper, which would then be presented orally to the attendees of the conference, or proposal for a workshop or a panel session. At this stage in my research, a poster is definitely most appropriate, as I do not have much in the way of experimental results to present. I will instead be presenting my work so far and what I plan to do.

Because of the impending deadline, and the fact that Hugh and I were both going to be at Glastonbury, I had about a week to write the paper, get some feedback from Hugh, revise it and submit it. Somehow I managed it. I guess 3 pages is not a great deal to write, but structuring my ideas and condensing them into that space was a bit of a challenge. Hugh was pretty happy with what I had written, so it was time to submit.

However, the paper had to be submitted in a MS Word document, based on a particular template. I had written the paper in my fellow PhD student's web-based collaborative authoring system CAWS, using the IEEE template to check what it looked like. However, despite DIGITEL being promoted as IEEE, the submission format was different.

I learned my first lesson of submitting papers: don't make assumptions about the submission format!!

This resulted in some of my references spilling over onto the next page, resulting in a 3.5 page paper :-( Luckily, with a little restructuring and removal of a few superfluous words here and there, I managed to get it within the page limit, moments before hitting the long road to Pilton! More about that, and the following few months next time...

2 September 2008

Lots has been going on. I will tell you about it due course! However, my topic today is planning, organisation and motivation. The plan is mostly to share some resources that I have found.

I have a problem with planning. I am really good at making plans, but have difficulty sticking to them. Maybe it's a result of overestimating what I can do, but then doing enough of it to satisfy whatever my targets were, by the *hard* deadline. Although I guess with all tasks, some sub-tasks are essential, and some are expendable if time constraints are reached. However, ensuring the highest quality of the final output requires some management and prioritisation of these sub-tasks.

Although I have had a paper-based calendar/diary for the past couple of years, when I got a new mobile phone with a better calendar application and interface than any phone I'd had before, I decided to move to using that instead (especially when I found a way to sync it over-the-air with a web calendar).

Through periods of heavy work, when deadlines are looming, I appear to accumulate many scraps of paper with to-do lists scrawled on them. Although my previous experience with electronic to-do applications, such as those on PDAs, has been disappointing to say the least, today I decided to have a bit of a hunt around for a web-based to-do list.

There's plenty of comparison articles, if you search around yourself (though the two I've looked at are Do More: Online To Do Lists Compared and 25 To Do Lists to Stay Productive). Ta-da List looks pretty basic, and might be simple enough for me, though I've yet to experiment with how it handles multiple tasks and deadlines.

Orchestrate looks very swish, and has what I think is the most important of Web 2.0 features: a front page, guest-user demo. I find that with all of these web-based applications, I am wary of signing up for an account unless I know exactly what it does and meets my needs. Otherwise I'll end up signing up for 10 different accounts, of which I'll only ever use one (maybe more sites should implement OpenID?) It's certainly an option for organising the many tasks I have on the go at once.

Finally, the online ceo introduced me to the fantastic idea of the Printable CEO. The idea here is that you get points for completing tasks that contribute to important business objectives, with the number of points relating to the importance of that objective. The points are then added up, for daily and weekly totals, allowing you to compete against your scores and maximise your output. Although a superb concept, I think it may be a little oriented towards running a business, as opposed to doing a PhD, though maybe I can adapt some of the ideas to suit my cause.

Well I think that's more than enough of that. I will probably trial two or three of these, and then report back once I've chosen one. I'll be back soon to document the hectic summer months that have just passed!

5 June 2008

If I have any 'regular' readers (though the only feedback is from my dad!), then I must apologise for my lack of activity on this blog in recent months. June is the time for the first piece of assessment, of sorts, in my PhD, so I have been building up to and working on this.

The hand-in is the nine-month 'Progress Report', and although the only piece of work that determines whether or not a PhD is awarded is the final thesis at the end of three years, the nine-month report is an important milestone that lets your supervisory team and the graduate school ensure that you are on the right track towards a PhD and have the correct scope and aims for the following two years.

Therefore, I am in the midst of writing this document, which has a word limit of 4000 words, in case you were wondering, and had excused myself from blog writing in case it sucked up all my creative writing tokens for the day! However, in an act of procrastination I decided this would be an ideal topic to write about. After all, maybe some potential PhD applicants might be reading this wondering what they will be doing eight-nine months after they begin?!

Right, I've gotta get back to it! I'm going to finish a couple of paragraphs about existing adaptive game systems in my literature review, get some chocolate and then catch up with some of my fellow 1st year PhD students in the SUSU Bridge Bar. Tune in next week, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel!

1 February 2008

Thus far I have been concentrating on looking at existing uses of video games in education, but I have not investigated virtual worlds as much. There is some research looking at using MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games), and their predecessors, MUDs and MOOs, in education, but less so in the area of non-game 3D virtual worlds. The best known example of these systems is Second Life.

Somehow I currently seem to have a bit of time on my hands - I don't know why this is, but it's probably because the undergrads are doing exams, so there's no lectures to go to and less demonstrating to do; and because I've completed most of the postgraduate training. Nevertheless, with more time and my new PC (which comes as part of the PhD package in ECS), I am beginning to investigate Second Life.

Now this seems far from work related to those walking past, so I don't feel that comfortable doing it during office hours, but it is related, so I thought I'd have a go. Anyway, the first thing you do is edit your appearance. When I first loaded it up briefly a few weeks ago, I noticed I was stark naked, but fortunately this time I'd gathered 'Sexy Nightclub Male' clothing. However, this is hideous so I was trying to change it. As I'm still learning the interface, I was wary of changing the trousers, lest I was left with a naked-from-the-waist-down man on my monitor!

I spent about half an hour or so trying to fix up my hair, though most of that time was spent attempting to remove the old 'wig'! (This is done by opening the inventory, finding the Hair that is being worn and right click to choose 'Take off' - this isn't always there, sometimes you have to 'Take off' the whole group of items) After my hair, and changing shirt (I determined a virtual naked man's chest isn't nearly as embarrassing as his Ken-doll-like bottom half), I finally plucked up the courage to try changing the trousers (or 'pants' as it's in US English).

The odd thing is that clothes seem to stack on top of each other, so having chosen to 'Wear' some trousers, and seen no effect, I tried removing the old trousers. "No worry", I thought, this virtual strip-show will only last a few seconds while I scroll up the list to pick a new pair. To my horror, the new trousers would not go on! I clicked 'Wear', but the image didn't update! I tried putting the old pair back on. I tried every pair of trousers! None of them would take! Now my avatar (one's virtual self) is permanently trouser-less! What a nightmare - I'm not sure I like this virtual world lark anymore...

17 January 2008

My next two monthly reports

November was a month of more training. This started with the ECS Induction sessions which introduced us to reading groups, gave us the chance to practice making a conference poster and panel sessions with existing PhD students and with PhD supervisors, allowing us to interrogate people with varied perspectives on PhD life.

The middle of the month was consumed with preparing for and participating in the FESM Generic Skills Intensive Training course. I'm normally happy to do training, but a combination of other people's negativity toward the course, the amount of preparation required and the onset of a cold turned me a little cynical toward the whole idea. It turned out to be around half good, half not-so-good. The presentation day was particularly good, with good content, great workshops and useful practical sessions (being recorded for watching back and self-analysis)! Other parts of the course sometimes felt a bit like filler to make the course last a week (a negotiation exercise), and some were just pointless (creating a conference poster on flipchart paper using a marker pen - very bland)!

The first ECS Research Methods course was the final bit of training in November, but was as a course runs until June. While the content will probably be useful as a whole, some of it was covered in the FESM training, and the teaching style was a bit too interactive. I think I prefer to learn by absorption, rather than have to think of answers to questions I don't know the answer to.

Work more closely related to my PhD this month included finding out about Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational objectives, primarily in the cognitive domain, though I plan to follow up his work in the affective domain too. The other major work involved reading Alex Frazer's nine month report. As his PhD is in a similar area to mine, it was very good to hear some other perspectives, gain some more useful references to follow up and also contributed to the preparation for the Research Methods course.

December was a short month, as I took the end part as holiday to spend Christmas with my family. However, it was still a reasonably eventful month. As all the correct parts for my lab PC finally arrived, I took to time to plug in the new graphics card, install Windows and migrate my files and settings over from my temporary machine.

This month I was also able to get my reading in the games arena off to a flying start. I found that the Communications of the ACM published a special issue in July 2007 with the title "Creating a Science of Games". Three of the articles turned out to be about using games in education and training, which was particularly useful. Although the papers were not all relevant to my research, it was a good opportunity to practice my reading and note-taking skills, and learning how to condense down what I read into a format that I can present to my supervisor in our meetings.

Along with Joe Price, I was trained to operate the seminar video recording system. This ensures that someone should be available to record all of the LSL seminars, and takes this load off of Dave Tarrant. December also saw the first real meeting of the Games Reading Group, where Charlie presented a paper on the Facade narrative generation system.

PS. Happy Birthday Dad!

12 November 2007 - My First Monthly Report

One of the interesting new things that has been introduced to ECS postgraduate life this year is an element of personal development planning and regular reflection. These are techniques and processes recommended in educational literature and also government teaching strategy. Having read about these ideas during my Individual Research Project last year, I felt I had missed out on something as they were not used during the course of undergraduate degree, so it will be interesting to see how they help during my PhD.

The current head of the ECS graduate school (Vladimiro) is spearheading these activities and has requested that we write a report of our progress at least once a month and perform a learning needs assessment at least once a year. To comply, I plan to blog at least once a month about my progress and also submit this as my monthly report. Killing two birds with one stone, so to speak...

October 2007 has been the first month of my PhD, and has primarily been filled with administration, meetings, inductions, seminars, training, demonstrating and lectures. In the spare few hours that I haven't been doing these things, I managed to begin reading about some learning theories as a basis for my research into education in virtual worlds and video games.

Administration has involved lots of forms to be filled in, and I've returned all of these. I have also ordered a PC from the budget allocated to me for a machine to research on.

The meetings have mostly been with my supervisor (Hugh) and the seminars have been given by my group, LSL (Learning Societies Lab). These seminars are compulsory for members of the group, but have thus far been extremely interesting covering topics such as collaborative authoring of documents (CAWS), live speech recognition for lectures (here) and the concept of web literacy and illiteracy.

I also did some demonstrating this month. Demonstrating is the University of Southampton term for 'teaching', although what I did was not entirely teaching in the lecturing sense, and was more in the vein of 'assisting and marking'. I demonstrated for the lab sessions of COMP1004 Programming Principles, covering for a couple of other post grads who were ill ("Freshers' Flu" hits post grads too!).

Training and lectures have helped supplement my knowledge and skills to improve my ability to complete a PhD. Attending lectures is at the discretion of your supervisor and I've been advised to attend Hypertext and Web Technologies and Research Methods in Computing. Fortunately these are not assessed (meaning I do not have to do the coursework and exams) otherwise I'd have no time for anything else! The training courses I have been on this month were the first part of the ECS-run induction event, the media training event I blogged about a while ago, 2 LASS sessions ("Starting out your PhD" and "How to Manage Your Supervisor") and the FESM-run Introduction to Demonstrator Training.

That leaves a small paragraph of what I have researched! I have read the important parts of a book by Diana Laurillard, concentrating on the Conversational Model of teaching that she describes. I have also investigated Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, primarily in the cognitive domain, but with a brief glance at the affective domain.

To wrap up, the first month has flown by, with lots of distractions from my research. Hopefully, as the required training becomes completed, and the administration dies down, I will be able to concentrate more fully on the task at hand.

6 November 2007 - UCAS Visitor Days

I am writing this post now because next Tuesday is the first day (of many!) that the UCAS students come to visit ECS to be convinced that Southampton is the best place for them to come to study.

The process of applying to university generally involves submitting a form to an organisation called UCAS. On it you provide the details of your grades at GCSE and AS-Level (or equivalent), your extra-curricula activities and achievements, a personal statement and usually a reference from the teaching staff at your school or college.

On the form, you also choose up to 6 universities to apply to, and your application is replicated and distributed to each of the institutions you have applied to. If you pass their basic tests (though I'm sure this is some form of voodoo!) which probably involves checking your GCSE grades meeting a minimum requirement and skimming your personal statement, you may be invited to an interview.

Within ECS, as well as having an interview (read: chat with a lecturer), you get a couple of talks from various people within the department, some lunch and a tour of the campus. So, where is this all leading, you ask? Well, I help out as one of the existing ECS students who give the tour of the campus, and take the UCAS visitors to lunch and attempt to answer any of the questions they may have.

I love doing this as I get to meet lots of new people and chat to them about the university. Although there is occasionally a UCAS student with lots of questions, most of the visitors are quite shy, which makes my job difficult! I cannot respond to their queries if they do not ask me anything :)

So this is a rallying cry to anybody who has applied for an ECS degree course (Computer Science, Computer Science with X, Software Engineering etc.) and is browsing these blogs while preparing for their visit: please think of a question to ask me about ECS, Southampton or University in general!

It doesn't matter how silly you think it may be, just think of one. It will help you consider why you're applying to university, what you want to get out of it and prepare you for how much fun it's going to be.

It will also make my job easier and give me a bit of an ego boost to think that anyone even reads these blog entries! In fact, if you've read this, start your question with "I was reading your ECS blog and ..." If you give me permission, I can even post your question and my answer on this blog for all to see!

Don't forget, if you wish to ask me or any of the other bloggers a question, you can always send an e-mail to ask-a-student@ecs.soton.ac.uk. I hope to see some of you during the UCAS days!

24 October 2007 - Media Training Event

SOUTHAMPTON, 24th October 2007 - Computer Scientist discovers how to speak to press and avoid a media fiasco!

Joyce Lewis, in association with the Faculty of Engineering, Science and Maths (FESM), took over the brand new lecture theatre in Building 32 to host a Media Training workshop. This wonderful event combined audience-led activities by two experienced academics-turned-journalist-turned-media-trainers (Dr Jon Copley and Dr Claire Ainsworth), a brilliant talk by BBC Online Technology and Science correspondent Jonathon Fildes and advice from PR guru Hélène Murphy.

What I gathered most from the day is that it is important to understand the way journalists work and hence tailor everything you do to help them do their job effectively. In particular, they are under extreme time pressure, so if you can provide them with all the information about your research discovery and supporting materials (interesting pictures or videos), it will make it easier for them to write a compelling story, and hence make it more likely that they will run the story at all!

It was in this sense that Jonathon Fildes' presentation was most useful: before I saw it, it did not occur to me that he has to arrive at work very early in the morning and write up to 4 full stories before the lunchtime rush, which is when most people read stories on the BBC News website.

Now clearly you can prepare as much of this information as possible, but unless you can convince journalists and news editors that your story is the most interesting, it will never even be considered, let alone written. Hélène Murphy stepped in here, with hints and tips on how to grab a journalist's attention with a press release.

Importantly, timing is an issue as to be 'news', your story must relate to some event. This may be the start of a conference or the publishing of your paper in a journal. Also, if your press release can make a bold claim and link itself to some matter of human interest, then it is more likely to be 'picked up'.

Jon Copley and Claire Ainsworth sandwiched the other two talks, one of which was a workshop session that involved some audience participation and some group work to help us really understand how hard it is to summarise and describe our work to other people, especially those who are not experts in our field. Finally, they wrapped up the afternoon with a talk about the things that can go wrong with press coverage of academic research, what to do if it happens to you, and how to avoid it in the first place!

All in all, it was an excellently structured and informative afternoon, and as there was room for 3-4 times as many people in what must be one of the biggest lecture theatres on campus, I would highly recommend that my postgraduate and staff colleagues contact Joyce and sign up to attend the next session on 16 January 2008. Some time in the next few months, there is an intensive follow-up session that I will hopefully be attending, so look out for my reflection on that event in early 2008.

4 October 2007

Today was my first day of a new challenge. I have returned to study for a PhD in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton and today was the time to register my attendance.

In the end it was an entirely exciting and interesting day, but I was a little anxious leading up to it due to what I perceived as a slight lack of information.

Over the summer months I had a number of letters offering me a place, detailing funding and confirming my acceptance. However, the only thing I was told about "The Beginning" was that I had to appear at the admissions office on Thursday 4 October 2007. I was somewhat worried that come the start of term I might be without a desk or a computer and unable to meet with my supervisor to find out what to do.

Along the way I also received a panicky e-mail stating that I needed to enrol within a few days, otherwise I would not receive my first studentship cheque. Enrolment is a short process that can be performed over the web, so its completion was not immediately concerning to me. If I had been told in advance that it needed to be done before the middle of September, I would have done so, but as far as I can tell this was not made clear at any stage.

Fortunately, these issues resolved themselves quite easily, and I spent the remainder of the day filling in forms, chatting to my supervisor, finding my new desk (with thanks to Charlie, who I happened to bump into whilst queueing for my new ID card) and catching up with some friends who have also decided to remain in ECS to do a PhD (it's not just me that is this crazy :)

My final tip is that if you are an undergraduate at Southampton and stay to do a PhD, get a Replacement ID Card form (Zepler reception) as it is much quicker than waiting for a 'new' ID Card during these extremely busy times.

22 June 2007
Degree Results Day!

8.50am - I'm going low-tech today: I am handwriting this blog entry on paper as I'm going to be in Zepler reception awaiting my final degree grading and I do not have a laptop to type this live!

9.29am - Excitement! I just arrived at Zepler and there was a fire engine and all the staff standing outside! Fortunately there was not a real fire but the time spent outside will certainly delay the publication of results...

10.02am - A lecturer and one of the system admins have informed me that results will not be posted until midday. We were told "before lunchtime", which seems to conflict a little. I think I'll stay to make sure I'm here as soon as they're available, and to soak up the atmosphere: I'm sure one will develop as more people arrive!

11.11am - A group of 4 of us have now gathered to wait. We're all in good spirits and there's no sign of nerves! I think it's mostly because it is out of our hands. In previous years our results would indicate how hard we'd have to work the next year!

Apparently results will be ready by 12.30pm! They have to be signed by one of the Heads of School, and they're busy talking to Boris Johnson on the scaffolding of the Mountbatten construction site. Interfering politicians!

12.23pm - The room is seriously buzzing now. There are lots of people milling around: the results must be available soon! Ooh, the upcoming, new Head of School, Professor Harvey Rutt has just returned from the roof of Mountbatten, to rapturous applause. He just has to sign the results before they can be posted.

Around 1pm - I'm now writing this after the event: everyone was swept up in the emotion, and I didn't have time to write down what happened. Basically Professor Rutt and the Student Services team brought out the degree listing sheets, now signed in the HoS's illustrious handwriting! They were attached the boards painstakingly slowly, and after about 5 minutes there was a senior-school-style 'bundle' of people towards the boards!

Having spotted my degree grading (Note from ECS – Rikki got a First!!, the first ECS blogger to do so!), I asked my friends what they had got, popped off to phone my dad (who is sunning it in Porto - ok for some!) and asked the wonderful Student Services team for my mark break down for each of this semester's modules. Most importantly, we hot-footed it to the Crown Inn for our pre-planned celebratory pub lunch! After some well deserved food and drinks, we strolled back to Zepler to double check that we hadn't mis-read our grading and have a nose around the other lists to see what some of our other peers achieved. In all, a very exciting day, and a nice way to round off five years of hard work!

14 June 2007
XNA UK Users Group Competition (3)

Now yesterday things really started coming along in our XNA Game. When we left it on Tuesday, we had our Sea Turtle spinning based on keyboard input. Next important stage was to get it moving around the Ocean Odyssey.

Chris managed to bodge this after a fair few hours work. We struggled with a concept we have not used before: quaternions. XNA wraps this difficult mathematical concept up into a single C# class, so we thought it would be easy. However, not knowing what was going on made it more difficult to work out why it was not working! I'm still not sure we're doing it the correct way :S

As well as this, Leander wrote some code to randomly populate the world with food and enemies. Meanwhile, I was hunting down importers and exporters for gmax so I could try out as many of the free 3D models (at www.turbosquid.com/xna) as possible. Also, toward the end of the day, I fixed up our enemy code so it swims around the sea - as the enemy is a shark, it's actually quite daunting! Similarly, Chris managed to get some firing code built into the engine, so we can now attack the enemy!

What is left now is a lot of moulding and tidying. We need to put in the actual game dynamics so that the player can collect food and is punished for colliding with enemies, and to make the game become gradually harder. Aiming for firing at enemies is as yet unimplemented, and we need to add some on-screen display items and a menu system. Hopefully we can add most of this before Friday when the extra art and sound assets become available for us to integrate, although tomorrow night's Graduation Ball could get in the way a little! Check back tomorrow to track our progress :)

13 June 2007
XNA UK Users Group Competition (2)

Welcome to the second entry in my mini-series tracking the development of our entry to the XNA UK Users Group game building competition. Having decided the theme and type of our game, we started building the engine. We set our sights at having a working engine by the end of the day!

During the first day of development, we managed to use Chris' ported input code to map key presses, mouse movements and controller buttons to actions. Then we found out how to load and render a 3D model, which turns out to be reasonably easy in XNA, as long as you can get the 3D model in the correct .X format! Leander also created the base classes for the enemies and food, as set up some collision detection code based on bounding spheres.

I spent a large proportion of the day creating a 3D sea turtle in gmax (a free 3D modelling program), though due to my seriously mediocre artistic skills it is quite cartoon-like. Once this was done, we were able to load it and render it in the game, and make it spin based on keyboard presses. The next challenge is to make it 'swim' around our Ocean Odyssey.

So that was all we completed today. Not the full engine, as that was a bit over ambitious, but a fair basis for building on. Come back tomorrow to find out how much further we get!

12 June
XNA UK Users Group Competition

I thought I'd run a mini special feature this week. With the help of a couple of my colleagues, I am entering the XNA UK Users Group competition. The aim is to create a game using Microsoft's XNA Game Studio Express, preferably using the art and sound assets created by the first round of the competition. The twist is that those are not available until this Friday, and the final game has to be submitted on Sunday - 48 hours of mayhem!

As we're at a bit of a loose end this week, while we wait for our degree results, we thought we'd give it a go! The core of our team are Leander Hambley, Chris Lovell and myself, and up until Friday we are going to try to build the bulk of a game, with the hope that we can drop the art and sound in right at the end.

I plan to write a short update each day detailing what we have been up to, to hopefully document our game design progress. So here goes: today we did two things. We set up Visual C# and XNA Game Studio Express on the lab machines in ECS and we decided on a game design. We decided that our main aims, given that we are trying to win the competition are as follows:

- The game must be easy to pick up and play.

- It should be an arcade game rather than a story-based adventure.

- We should enforce a few, basic game rules and allow complex gameplay to emerge.

- We want to avoid having to create a lot of 3D models, other art and level data, so we would like to procedurally generate as much of this as possible (the 'level' data at the very least).

Having decided this, we brainstormed some ideas to fit within the theme of the competition: 'Ocean Odyssey'. This produced ideas as wild as a rhythm action game where you control the performance of a dolphin/whale show like those seen at SeaWorld, to a real-time strategy game allowing different sea creatures to be 'created' and unleashed on your opponent's underwater base!

I think I'll keep the idea we decided on under wraps for a couple of days, but I will keep you updated on our progress: tomorrow we hope to get some way with the game engine and I may discuss some of the design of our code and the system architecture. Look out for another post tomorrow!

5 June 2007

So that's it. It's all over. It's been a fantastic five years since I started at Southampton University and yesterday I handed in my last piece of coursework - Interactive Entertainment Systems. I also had my last exam on Friday, for Intelligent Agents. It's massively strange, but our last ever lecture just passed us by in a hail of coursework: in previous years, there was a little bit of time to celebrate the last lecture, as even though exams loomed, there was still quite a bit of time to prepare for them. The strange format of the fourth year means there are not many lectures, and they finish quite early to allow us to concentrate on finishing all of the coursework assignments.

Alas, I now have lots of time, with just the Graduation Ball, IRP conference and possibly a viva (depending on how close to a degree grading boundary I am) to fill the anxious moments between now and receiving my final results on June 22nd! I was looking forward to completing all my hard work and being able to rest, but now I'm finding it difficult to cope without a mountain of coursework to be doing! Shocking eh? I'm now dependant on work; hooked on the adrenaline of having to meet a deadline. I think I need help...

Of course this lack of pressure has allowed me time to reflect. Unfortunately this just makes me sad as I reminisce about all the good memories and how it's all over. This is my weakness I think: as a child I always used to get upset at the end of big events like the Olympics and the World Cup or at the end of holidays with my family. But I guess that's testament to how great it has been at Southampton and even just the University experience in general. If you are reading this and are not sure whether to go to University at all, I must urge you to reconsider.

University gives you the opportunity to learn so much, both about your chosen subject and life in general, it lets you meet so many different people and try so many new activities you may not have even considered before. If I were given the opportunity, I would love to carry on learning forever! Although I do not know what studying at other universities is like, I can assure you that doing a degree at Southampton has been five of the best years of my life.

25 May 2007

I said I would talk about the guest lectures that were on last week, so here goes. Actually, first let me say 'hej' to my aunt Ulla, who as far as I know is my only regular reader - I promised I would and I thought I should do it before the end of term :)

So, last Tuesday we had the excellent pleasure of attending a lecture by the phenomenal Rodney Brooks of MIT. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the name, he is one of the leading researchers in the field of robotics and has been for well over 20 years. The title of his lecture pitched it as a discussion of the emerging field of robots in the home, but was actually much more involved than that. Making comparisons with the exponential development of many areas of technology (most famously encapsulated in ‘Moore's Law’), Dr Brooks explained that with similar improvements in robotics, combined with how sophisticated (if slightly clumsy) they are already, in 15-20 years time robots could fulfil all of our science fiction dreams!

Talking about the future of robots certainly got me thinking, and I wonder what media furore may face robots and their designers in the coming years. I raise this issue as it is a potent one in the video games industry currently. Over the past 2 years there have been headlines such as ‘Slaughter!’ and ‘Killed by PlayStation’, as the mainstream press massively over-react to anything vaguely related to computer games. However, this is no different to the way people reacted to violent films being available on VHS during the 1980s. I can foresee robots, and their misuse or malfunction, causing similar headlines, and being the next technological advancement, that possibly takes the focus away from video games. It certainly is an interesting time to experience!

In all, seeing Rodney Brooks was a massive treat for myself, after battling with the Sony AIBO robot all day, every day for the past three weeks, as my group worked hard to complete our coursework for the Biologically Inspired Robotics course. But let's move our discussion onto last Thursday!

Now, when I grow up, I really, really hope I can grow up to be as eccentric as Ted Nelson. Although he may not be everyone's cup of tea (although if the reaction of the crowd was anything to go by, it seems to some people he is their tea, saucer and biscuit...), I thought he was great. I would love to summarise his lecture, but it would be nigh on impossible. In a style that some would consider rambling, Ted took us on a journey of 'intertwingledness', from the history of language across Europe to exploding planets, via non-linear education, eating cigarettes and pooeys (PUIs)! Ted's thoughts on note-taking and freeing up learners to choose what they want to learn both rung very true with me, having been studying ePortfolios during the past few months for my Individual Research Project.

I'm not sure he'd appreciate the comparison, but this talk reminded me of time spent surfing Wikipedia - I learned about something I'd never considered before, then all of a sudden, *click* onto the next, vaguely related, but almost arbitrary topic to continue fulfilling my curiosity.

To sum up, we are extremely lucky in ECS that the staff manage to arrange such fantastic guest lectures, giving us the opportunity to hear from some of the greatest minds in the world. Seeing Rodney Brooks and Ted Nelson has proven this to me, and shown that these events aren't just a chance for PhD students to get some free wine! ;-)

16 May 2007

Argh! My Individual Research Project is due on Thursday, I have a thousand or so words left to write and my keyboard just stopped working! Ok, don't worry, it's wireless - I just need to put new batteries in it. Uh oh, new batteries and it's still not working! Hmm, this happened in the first year, but luckily it was still within warranty, and I didn't have a deadline looming that could shape my entire future (ok, so maybe I'm exaggerating)! And it was Mouse's fault in the first year for trying to play a DVD - this time I was in the middle of editing a LaTeX document.

Handily, I still have the wired keyboard I bought to replace this one last time it broke, so at least I can get on in the mean time. OH NO! Keyboard still does not work. It's plugged in, and the Num Lock light comes on, but I type and I type and nothing appears on the screen.

Finally it dawns on me: it's the application. The keyboard works to move the text cursor about, but for some reason it's refusing to accept input. Close that file, open another, victory against the machines. So that, kids, is why you shouldn't use LaTeX.

I'm just kidding. In the first year, first semester there is a taught module called Professional Issues, in which you get to build bridges and do group presentations. We were also lectured on the merits of using WYSIWYG word processors against using a typesetting tool such as LaTeX. It is obvious to anyone who sees the output of a LaTeX document that it is superior to WYSIWYG word processors, but that quality comes at a price.

Proponents of LaTeX state that there is a high learning curve to using it, but I think it goes further than that. It is just quite difficult to use all the time. Of course, writing the bulk of your document is easy and keeps your mind focused on the content, but getting that document to output well based on a particular class (style) file can be fiddly. Nevertheless it is a useful skill and experience to have.

It has made me realise the slight gulf between the tools people choose to work with computers and how strongly they feel about them. Some people are staunch advocates of Windows whilst others refuse to use anything other than Linux machines (and a few like Macs :S) However, despite this minor difference of opinion, ECS and Southampton are massively inclusive institutions. We are fortunate enough to have people from all over the world and from every background, which makes meeting new people much more interesting and allows you to learn a lot more than just that taught by the lecturers (though that is important too!)

Anyway, must get back to writing my IRP. On Thursday I will hopefully tell you about the exciting guest lectures that are on this week - stay tuned!

27 April 2007

Previously I talked about doing a year out, including the advantages and consequences, but I did not really talk about the details. As I said before, I had not originally planned to take a year out, but I was extremely lucky to get a dream placement in the Technology Group of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE).

For those who do not recognise the name, SCEE are the European (and Middle Eastern and Australasian) arm of the Sony division which manufactures, markets, supports and sells the PlayStation brand of video game consoles. The Technology Group is in charge of helping developers of games for the PlayStation platform in as many ways of possible. This occurs in many different ways, from writing samples and demonstrations of certain graphical and audio effects, to answering questions direct from game developers.

As a member of the Developer Support sub-department of Tech Group, I performed a wide variety of tasks (such as helping to develop presentations, creating samples and communicating with Sony QA), though our primary objective was to ensure all questions from developers were answered as efficiently as possible. This may sound like technical support, but the users we were supporting are already highly technically skilled, so many of the questions required lateral thinking and problem-solving. All of this gave me the chance to learn a lot about cutting- edge and market-leading technology such as the PlayStation 2 and the PSP.

Outside of work there were yet more opportunities and experiences that truly enriched my year out. As SCEE are based in Soho, in the West End of London, lunchtimes were spent savouring flavours from around the world, eating at restaurants with cuisine from China, Korea, Italy, Holland and more! The nightlife was massively varied and a lot different from university nightlife (by different I mostly mean more expensive ;) I also had the joy of commuting into London every day, which is a torture worth suffering if only to know what is is actually like.

SCEE themselves were excellent for providing entertainment. When a new game is launched, they have parties to celebrate, to which all employees are invited. I was also lucky enough to go on the company conference to Malta to learn more about the company as a whole. They also have perks such as staff sales which allow employees to buy Sony products at a discount and enjoy reduced gym membership.

Finally, my year out exposed me to a whole new set of people, which allowed me to make many, many new friends who I still keep in contact with and visit whenever I can. My year out was so enjoyable that it is difficult to say whether I prefer working life or academia. Ideally my life would be split equally between the two. Doing a year out at least takes a step towards this, and I would fully recommend it to anyone!

19 March 2007

I had never intended to take a year out. In fact, at Southampton, although it is alluded to in promotion material, the truth is there is no structured year out like some other universities have, so there was no pressure to do one. On the 4 year MEng courses, it is recommended that students do 10-week placements over two of the summer breaks. So why did I do a year out? I decided to do the year out because I found a great placement that suited exactly what I wanted to do.

However, it is equally possible that a student may want to do a year out (parents, siblings and peers can all have an influence) but not know where, and the reasons for wanting to do so are excellent: it's great to put on your CV, it gives you experience of working life, you get a well deserved break from formal education and you earn a bit of cash to alleviate the student debt! In this situation, the School has great support channels for finding gap year placements. E-mails are sent around almost weekly with details of companies looking for placement students, and one of the lecturers has a box hanging on his door with tons of placement opportunities.

The Careers Advisory Service also have lots of information on placements, and even hold regular recruitment fairs where you can meet multiple actual employers and discuss your options. The application processes vary from job to job, but are essentially the same as applying for any job, and in particular, for graduate jobs, so this is again great experience for the future. The processes range from the lengthy and complicated common in large technology companies and investment banks (which involve several interviews: on the phone and in person; 'assessment days' with teamworking exercises and interviews; and psychometric tests), to a simple CV and cover letter application.

I enjoyed my year out immensely. I made a lot of new friends, had a lot of fun and got some great experience. The hardest part was returning to university after a lot of my friends from the first two years had graduated :( Fortunately, a couple of good friends had taken years out, so it was not too bad, but I also took it as an opportunity to throw myself into clubs and societies, which I haven't regretted for a moment.

It seems I've overrun a little, so I'll save the details of my year out for another entry. Keep you all in suspense of sorts... :)

5 March 2007

There's an epidemic. Not a medical one, but a technological one. I guess it has always been there. It's the struggle between users and administrators. However, my qualm is with a specific type of user: the clueless technology user who knows how to complain.

Now spam is a problem. No-one enjoys receiving it, but unlike its real-world equivalent, junk mail, it is possible to hide it from oneself using extremely clever pieces of software (check out Naive Bayes classifiers in the AI module and Adaptive Modelling of Complex Data). However, as e-mail becomes almost entirely ubiquitous, it brings into the fray the members of society who are unable to deal with their technology problems rationally (at least in the first instance) and escalate the issue to the highest power. Rather than communicating with the administrator, they instead go to the administrator's boss to get the administrator in trouble.

Ok, so let me be more specific. Just about every sports club and society in the University runs a mailing list so as to communicate with club members, and crucially, with potential club members shortly after the Bunfight. At the Bunfight the clubs market themselves to Freshers (new students) and so that they can contact them after the insanity of the Bunfight, as potential recruits for their e-mail address. The clubs then add these e-mail addresses to the mailing list so the Freshers can find out when the training sessions and socials are.

However, transcription errors and people just plain lying about their e-mail address appears to result in a number of people being added to the list erroneously. The mailing lists used always explain how to unsubscribe (remove oneself from the list), and reminders of this are regularly posted. If in doubt, there is always a human to e-mail, and their address is freely available. However, over the past few months, I have noticed a worrying trend of people skipping over the regular channels (such as removing themselves or contacting the administrator) and complaining to the highest power.

On the archery club mailing list, one person complained to our Athletic Union rather than us. This was resolved, though communication post-complaint did not really establish why the complaint went above our heads. The issue that pushed me over the edge into writing this was when heard this morning of someone complaining directly to the Ski and Snowboard Club's website hosting company! Worryingly this indicates that the complainer has the nous to discover the hosting company of a website, but is incapable of e-mailing any of the numerous e-mail addresses on the website itself.

Unfortunately, we have moved into a time where people consider just about everything spam, without taking the time to rationally consider the source. We need to move onto the next step of educating these users to be a little more discerning as to what they complain about, as sometimes unsolicited e-mails are accidental rather than commercially driven. However, it just goes to highlight the risk and precautions we need to take when administering systems such as mailing lists.

26 January 2007

This XNA Game Studio Express is getting right on my nerves. I downloaded the beta in October, but my on-board graphics card was not good enough to run even the basic tutorial code (I'm more of a console games player, so don't have any need to upgrade my graphics card!) Anyway, as I did the Advanced Graphics Course, I had to upgrade my graphics card so it could support OpenGL 2.0 with its shaders and what not (check out my project at http://elec6025rfp102.ugforge.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ if you're interested). So now the full release is available, I thought I'd give it another go. After all, it's always good to try new and different technologies, and it would be cool to eventually see some of my code running on a 360.

I wish I hadn't bothered! The Visual C# 2005 Express Edition is a bit clumsy compared to Visual C++ 6: it doesn't seem to have a Run button. There's debug options, but what if I just want to run it? Also, the toolbar has no Stop Debugging button, so after dismissing the error message in the debugger, having realised I forgot to change the dummy filename to a real one, I tried to reinvoke the debugger and it all went to pieces. It gave me an error that seemingly had nothing to do with compiling the code, and more to do with the fact the program itself had broken :S

I think I'll give up and use the PS2 Linux set up in the undergraduate labs. That's right, the labs have a PS2 set up next to the big plasma screen! All in the name of experimentation. There's also tons of PCs, half with Windows, half with Linux (and you can access Windows Terminal Server from these, too), and a handful of Macs, for those with only one finger (I still can't get used to only having one mouse button!) As well as the well stocked labs, there's tons of other gadgets and gizmos that can be borrowed from Stores and, in some cases, friendly lecturers. For example, my friend borrowed the Augmented Reality goggles for his graphics project: an AR Game! It's a very cool experience, if a little disorientating.

16 January 2007

Again, sorry for being a bad blogger this past month. The two weeks before the Christmas break were absolutely consumed with GDP (Group Design Project).

I thought I'd had intensive lead ups to coursework deadlines before, but the challenge of doing all the end of project necessities as part of a team was insane. Getting code to work when multiple people are editing it is tricky, though using a code versioning repository such as Subversion helps immensely. Documenting the project is even harder! After combining each members' sections, the report had to be read and re-read to ensure it flowed well despite having different writing styles, that there was no repetition and, most importantly, that nothing had been left out.

To say the Christmas break was a relief is somewhat of an understatement. I spent the first week trying to make a dent in the coursework I have to submit now. Then I had a few days off over the Christmas period: being able to relax and not worry about work was amazing :) It really was much more enjoyable having worked so hard, as I could appreciate the time off. I wish I could have more time off though!

Fortunately after this week, exams begin. "What does he mean 'fortunately'?" I hear you cry! Well the fourth year is primarily coursework based, so I only have one exam. Although I will be revising for that, I should hopefully have some more time to blog, and enjoy university life a bit more.

That's the only problem with university: you become a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde. For a good proportion of term you can enjoy the societies, going out and relaxing in the lovely city of Southampton, but when deadlines are looming, it's time to lock yourself away in front of your monitor to get the coursework done.

Look out for some more interesting blog entries in the next couple of weeks, readers!

27 November 2006

Oh dear … it has been over a month since I last posted a blog entry - sorry! I must admit, I don't think I've stopped long enough to sleep in the past month, let alone write anything. My course is ticking along nicely, with work slowly getting done, hopefully at the rate it should be!

In our final year Professional Issues course, we play the Software Management Game, where we have to make staffing and environmental decisions, in an attempt to deliver a project on time, to a high standard, and on budget. Somehow our group finished six 'months' early. Slightly over budget, but not too bad. We just have to see how the other groups go to see if we 'win'. Now I just have to finish all my other work early!

Lots of activities have been happening in the past four weeks as well. I was lucky enough to go to the National Sports Centre at Lillieshall, with the Archery Club, to be trained by an ex-national coach. Last weekend I also shot two competitions in a day, which was fun, but tiring. Around those, I went outdoor go-karting at Thruxton with the Wessex Motor Club and I also attended a kendo competition at Mumeishi in London, which was an exciting new experience!

Culturally, I have been quite active as well, seeing two ballets (Alice in Wonderland and the Nutcracker) at the Mayflower Theatre, a stand comedian (Marcus Brigstocke) at the Nuffield, and the Southampton University Philharmonic Choir (amongst others) at The Anvil in Basingstoke. Basically my message is that University is the opportunity to try and experience all of these activities and more (especially as you often get great student discounts!) and there are few, if any, places that give you as wide a choice of clubs and societies as Southampton University.