Meeting re. Climate Change Project

Today I had a meeting with John Willott from the International Faculty. He had been cc-ed on the approval of my international travel authorisation, as he is interested in climate change and its consequences. He and Paul Wetherly (also International Faculty) are leading the TQEF funded project "Embedding Climate Change in the Curriculum", and he was interested to hear about the project in which I was involved. I explained the scope of the project "Voices of Yorkshire and Gujarati Rivers", and he was keen to provide some of his vugraphs about climate change.

We agreed that it might be a good idea to bundle the activities at Leeds Met regarding climate change, considering that environmental issues are high on the agenda at Leeds Met. We discussed the idea to create a kind of working group, maybe with an online repository to make resources and information about climate change (e.g. data, references) available to all interested people.

Networking at Rugby Match

I had been invited to join a Rugby game on Sunday afternoon: Leeds Carnegie vs. Manchester. Also other guests have been invited, to have informal lunch nibbles in the Hirst Rhodes suite. Among them was one of the Directors of CISCO, responsible for partnerships and educational activities. We talked about technology and possible collaborations. Also present at this meeting was also a consultant who is working on a project regarding the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sotchi.

"India Project"

On Saturday, Brian Lewis and I visited the sources of the river Aire in Malham, to create a few items of documentation for the project "Voices of Yorkshire and Gujarati Rivers". I took pictures, especially with respect to the creation of photosynths, and filmed a few video clips of the scenery.

I plan to involve L3 students in this project, by proposing at the networking day on next Wednesday a student project which would create multimedia material from all the video clips, pictures, and head-related audio segments.

Meeting with IP Specialists

Together with Prof. Rod King (Carnegie Faculty) I met with two intellectual property consultants to discuss the project "Virtual Runner" and its commercialisation. We discussed implications of publication and analysed the various methods of bringing this product to the market. One immediate way is to use it as teaching material for a text book. This would not require any patent protection. Another way of commercialisation would be to file a patent on potentially more advanced uses in training.

European Doctorate: Collaboration with International Faculty

Today I had a meeting with two PhD students, both of whom participate in the European Doctorate program at the International Faculty (contact: Claudio Vignali). My role in this PhD program is to provide general research methods guidance, and provide the German language expertise (as their thesis will be written in German).

ISMAR conference: 15.-17.9.2008, Cambridge

The annual ISMAR conference resulted back in 2002 from the merger of the Japanese ISMR conference (about Mixed Reality) and the ongoing ISAR conference (about Augmented Reality). In 1998, the first IWAR (International Workshop on Augmented Reality) workshop was the predecessor of this ISAR (International Symposium on Augmented Reality) conference, and I am one of the three founders of this workshop / conference (the other founders: Dave Mizell, and Gudrun Klinker).

This conference was the 7th event. I am in the steering committee, but am retiring as an active member, since I had been in this committee for 10 years. This year, I was the finance chair of this conference. The conference had single-track presentations, poster sessions, demonstrations, and an industrial tracking competition.

Specific notable highlights, relevant for Leeds Met:

• Paul McIlroy, Technical Director of the company HawkEye gave a presentation about their tracking sytem for sports games (tennis).
• Diarmid Campbell (Sony) gave an impressive demonstration of the Sony Playstation with software using computer vision tracking and augmented reality gaming.

I used this opportunity in Cambridge to meet with entrepreneur Alan Barrell who attended the Cambridge Enterprise Conference. He introduced me to two investors from the Cambridge Capital Group.

Ideas Factory Award

At the Staff Development Festival Launch, a "Not-The-Dragons'-Den" event was held as a competition for the Leeds Met "Ideas Factory". Submissions for this Ideas Factory had been requested a few months ago, and each faculty had selected two entries. Mine had been a project about using Google Maps to enhance our Leeds Met website. At Innovation North there had been 14 entries, and originally my idea had not been selected to be among the two going forward.

However, in mid-August I got a notification that I now should submit my entry, and that it would be presented. As it turned out, at the actual Ideas Factory event there were 4 entries from Innovation North, and only one other entry (from the Faculty of Health).

In the end, my pitch won the Ideas Factory award. I assume this had to do something with the fact that the European Director of Google was in the jury... a fact that I had not known before, when I formulated this idea!