Weeknote #44

I can't quite believe that the summer has gone, and that we're about to launch into another term. The first year students are already here, and I spoke to them today about the importance of research, not just to academics, but to the University as a whole (and, of course, to them, as students and members of that community). I talked about some of the work we've been doing on swarm intelligence, and pointed out that much of that stuff has originated in student projects. I cited Matthew, my Ph.D. student, as an excellent representative of the "grow your own" ethos we're trying to develop at MMU; his SimZombie project led to Ph.D. studies, and he's now developing that work in parallel with his "proper" research. If anyone's interested, I've made my slides available here (warning: 15Mb PDF).

We had a research away day last week, and I also attended a meeting in London to hear about the panel-specific aspects of the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework. An unexpected bonus was the chance to chat to my old mate Dave Corne, with whom I used to work at Exeter.

One of the important points to come out of our internal REF workshop was the need to increase the visibility of our publications, both past and present. With that in mind, I've slightly revamped my own publications page. When I was a Ph.D. student, one of the most soul-sapping aspects of writing was the construction of the bibliography, so I've added BibTeX entries for the majority of my papers and books. I've also managed to dig out PDF versions of several publications I thought I'd lost for ever.