These weeknotes are turning into
monthnotes, but I shall persevere...
Lots to report, starting with a trip down south at the end of April to visit the
Bristol Robotics Laboratory. This is a joint venture between the Universities of West of England and Bristol; I was in touch with the Director,
Chris Melhuish a few years ago in relation to some ant work, but I'd never before had the chance to visit. One of their most high-profile projects is the
EcoBot, an energetically autonomous robot that uses microbial fuel cells, and the meeting was semi-related to that. I was there at the invitation of
Ioannis Ieropoulos, who met our post-doc Angel and forged a connection between our respective groups. The meeting went very well, and there will definitely be much to discuss in the coming months.
The beginning of May saw a number of
COBRA project members in Budapest, for the European Commission FP7
FET11 conference. We organized a
special session on "biological and chemical IT", which was well attended. We're currently drafting a summary paper for the forthcoming open-access meeting proceedings. The next COBRA event will be another
special session, this time at the European Conference for Artificial Life, held in Paris this August.
This month has also seen a lot of activity on the
DIYbio front, with the initial
"swabfest" (taking samples from Manchester bus stops in order to ascertain the level of bacterial contamination) closely followed by a
session at the hugely-influential
FutureEverything conference in Manchester. We showed a couple of movies during the presentation, and these will hopefully be made available shortly, as well as footage of the event as a whole.
I'm very excited by the announcement of a new volume of fiction, to which I've made a small contribution.
Litmus is edited by Ra Page at Comma Press, and has the subtitle "Short Stories from Modern Science". From the blurb: "This anthology draws out and distills science’s love of narrative from a wide range of scientific disciplines, weaving theory into very human stories, and delving into the humanity of theorists and experimenters as they stood on the brink of momentous discoveries: from Joseph Swan’s original light-bulb moment to the uncovering of ‘mirror neurons’ lighting up empathy zones in the human brain; from Einstein's revelation on a Bern tram, to Pavlov’s identification of personality types thanks to a freak flood in his St Petersburg lab.
Each story has been written in close consultation with scientists and historians and is accompanied by a specially written afterword, expanding on the science for the general reader."
Our story was written by the BAFTA-nominated novelist and scriptwriter
Jane Rogers, and it focusses on an often overlooked aspect of the work of Alan Turing; his studies of
morphogenesis.
The only other big bit of news is that I've accepted an invitation to coordinate the computer science research activities of our
School, in preparation for the 2014
Research Excellence Framework. I'll be responsible for our return in the Computer Science and Informatics Unit of Assessment; we did pretty well last time around, in 2008, so the pressure's on.
In terms of papers, today Angel and I submitted a revised journal version of our
population-based oscillator paper, and last week we submitted an abstract to the ECAL workshop (on a different, but related subject). I'm also working on a BACTOCOM technical paper, as well as a short paper on a fun topic (a proof of the NP-completeness of a game I've
studied in the past).
Saturday saw us fly back from a week in Madrid, where I'd been on BACTOCOM business. I was there to talk to Alfonso, our computational collaborator, and to give a series of lectures on molecular computing and synthetic biology to the M.Sc. and Ph.D. students. I've made the slides available here (3.8Mb download).
