Another week of my internship is flying by and since it is summer, another conference. All day yesterday many members from different faculties, DigiTLE, and I took part in a meeting of minds called the 2007 Cabal (pronounced co-ball). I find this name particularly funny because the Cabal was a group of genetically modified soldiers from the future on the most recent Star Trek series “
Enterprise”. None the less, this Cabal was a technology oriented conference. There were four rooms in which presentations were being given, so I wasn’t able to see everything. The topics were so varied though, that there was bound to be something of interest to just about anyone at any given time. I had made my decisions about which presentations to attend the day ahead of time and as lunch was provided, I was completely unburdened by my usual work backpack for the whole day.
I arrived at the Cabal at 8:00 which was a little on the early side, but the bus I usually take to work arrives at campus around quarter to 8, and I was told that the first 100 or so people got free geek oriented swag. Really, I think that’s the reason a good chunk of the people there even showed up. Haha. Seriously though, there were a lot of goodies to be gotten just by arriving early. Cloth bags, key chain flash lights, various stickers, lapel pins, golf Tees, T-shirts, pens, and Intel was giving away toy cars for some reason. After collecting my bag of things and reflecting on what a great day it was turning out to be over coffee with the rest of the DigiTLE members, we headed off to our respective first presentations.
The first speaker I saw was talking about the future of super computers in
Canada. Apparently there is quite a big change coming very soon with regards to universities getting funding for bigger and better super computers. This sort of thing really wouldn’t affect most people in their day to day lives, but it is a pretty big deal across many research fields. At the
University of
Alberta we use super computers to do everything from atmospheric modeling to calculations of statistics for every word in the English language to simulating molecular interactions in Chemistry and Physics. These things will ultimately lead to greater understandings of how the world and universe work as well as how we comprehend and organize knowledge and language within our own brains. In short, the better super computers we have access to, the faster we can gain all of these new sorts of knowledge. Time really can be quite an issue as well. In the Cognitive Linguistics lab where I did a course called Psych 496, a single simulation do to statistics on English words could take 8 hours to do. Doing this once wouldn’t be such a bad thing, but when you must do hundreds of simulations to get a result worth publishing time really starts to be in short supply. Back to the talk though… The man spoke of the future of super computers and their funding in
Canada, and asked for everyone to fill out a survey that would be coming out in the near future to ensure that the U of A was recognized as a serious Canadian super computer user. It was a good and informative presentation, but the end turned into a bit of a desperate call for help. If I get the opportunity to do so though, I will fill out this survey as I have had a lot of classes that have helped me recognize how badly more research is needed in many fields.
The second presentation I saw tied in nicely with the first. It was made by a friend of mine from the Cognitive Linguistics lab I mentioned above. His name is Cyrus Shaoul, and he uses super computers quite extensively for his work determining exactly how humans learn, comprehend, and store words in our brains. As of yet there is no good model to explain this characteristic of people, and it is hoped that through this kind of research we will be able to understand and applying better types of learning elsewhere as in more advanced computers and robots that can learn by themselves. A lot of Cyrus’ talk was devoted to exactly how he obtained all of the words to do his analyses on and what manipulations the super computers did to them. It was very interesting and gave a good frame of reference to understand exactly how much data linguistic researchers are really dealing with. His basic set of words that he pulled off the internet is 80 gigabytes and from that is generated a table that has 5,000,000,000 entries in it. The computer must then take that table and run correlations between the various columns. All of this takes 10 CPUs about 8 hours to do. Cyrus could be a poster boy for intensive super computer usage in the most unexpected places.
Sadly, after the first two presentations the quality of the presenters took a bit of a dip. The next presentation I attended was entitled “Library Resources, new methods of research in the 21st century” or something along those lines anyway. Oddly enough, the presenter talked about different kinds of GPS units and how they stacked up against each other for a half hour. It was confusing, but still a nice presentation to listen to as I have been interested in GPS technology for quite some time. After that was lunch, so I couldn’t complain about that now could I?
Unfortunately again, after lunch the presentations didn’t really pick up much from before lunch. The first talk I went to was supposed to be talking about reinforcement learning in robots which combines both my interests of Psychology and robots. The presentation gave a brief overview of reinforcement learning and did talk about using computers to simulate in it…but robots weren’t mentioned even once. There didn’t even really seem to be anything new compared with other intelligent agents I’ve seen a couple of years ago. They did have an agent within a computer that made its way around a grid to a goal, but even after 5 years of psychology, their explanation of the rules they were using completely baffled me. It didn’t help that the presenters (in this case there were several of them) didn’t appear to be comfortable presenting in front of a group. Either way. I didn’t learn much from that presentation.
The next was on Moodle, the open source version of Web-CT I mentioned a few weeks ago. A man presented who has been using Moodle at the
University of
Mexico. He had some very interesting and positive things to say about his experience. It really made the whole thing seem a lot more viable as a WebCT substitute. He was a good speaker except he said “When I was teaching at the
University of
Mexico…” a few too many times for my taste. All right. We get it. You taught in
Mexico…moving on.
The last presentation I went to was on Elluminate. That’s right. Elluminate, the piece of software that I was having so much trouble with a while back. Unfortunately, the makers weren’t there, so I couldn’t ask them questions. The presentation was being given by two women from the faculty of Education with 4 other people taking part over the internet via Elluminate. It was a very descriptive talk about what sorts of features the various instructors used and how effective they thought it was. In general, everybody had positive things to say and it was a nice light presentation to end the day on.
Finally, on the way home I was splattered by several large rain drops while waiting for the bus. When the driver got to the university to take us back to St. Albert he had said that there was quite a downpour going on in St. Albert and that there was hail. In some cases there had even been puddles so deep that the water level was higher than the floor of low floor busses and had started seeping through the doors. Drivers had to park their cars in some places the water was so high. I’ve seen a flash flood type storm or two in my day, but I’ve never seen one that was quite this quick and severe. I made it home safely though, and that’s why I’m here to write this for you all today.
Take care, and enjoy your Wednesday. There are no doughnuts this afternoon, but yesterday’s conference more than made up for it.
