Monday, January 17, 2011

Weeknote #32 (w/e 16/1/11)

A (belated) Happy New Year to my tens of readers!

I spent a lovely evening last Monday, as the guest of the Bollington SciBar. This event was set up by Naomi, and took place in the civilised surroundings of the Vale Inn. I spoke for about half an hour on synthetic biology to a gratifyingly large audience, before we opened things up for discussion. There were many insightful questions, and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. The drive back was much less fun, due to the failure of my windscreen wipers, but that's another story.

Just before Christmas we said goodbye to Jose Cecilia (Chema), who was visiting the group from his University in Murcia, supported by Andy Nisbet and his participation in the HiPEAC Network of Excellence. Chema spent three months working on an implementation of ant colony optimisation for the GPU, and we've just had a conference paper accepted (preprint version is here).

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