Attending a Creative Networks Event

On Thursday evening, an event was held at the Leeds College of Arts and Design, organised by the "Creative Networks" organisation. Facilitator was Steven Smith (Leeds College og Arts and Design) who had also participated in the round table consultation meeting in York 2 weeks ago. There was also Bill Boffin from Yorkshire Forward. Furthermore, from Kooji Creative there were Johnny Gallagher and Katherine Moss (our partners in the "Virtual Runner" project with Prof. Rod King).

The evening program started with 4 pitches: Timande Gustafson (AXIS), Andrew Earnsha (Message4It), Diane Crossley (Peripheral Partners), and David Mawdsley (Mawdsley Williams Furniture). The main talk was given by Gary Townsley, from the Business Outreach and Education Dept. of the IPO: he talked about various issues re. copyrights and trademarks.

Conference Paper Reviews for CHI

I had been asked to be in the review committee for the international conference CHI 2009. Three reviews were due by 29.10., and I was able to complete them in time.

Virtual Runner Commercialisation

This Wednesday I had a meeting with Prof. Rod King (Carnegie), and we discussed the changes and additions which I had put into the bid documdnt which we will submit to Yorkshire Connect. The deadline which Andrew Marran (Business Development Manager, Leeds Met) had been negotiated with Yorkshire Connect, is 2.December. In the meantime there will be a meeting the textbook editor who is interested in publishing this TEL tool.

Ideas Factory: Putting Leeds Met on the Map

Today I had a meeting with Rana Gangari who had been working on the Virtual Tour of Leeds Met. I discussed with her the porting of those 32D models into Sketchup, for use on a web site with Google Earth. She will explore this and let me know how fast this is possible.

The next step would be to convert all 3D models into the Google Earth format and then prepare a few templates and Javascript functions for allowing to place the models on a map.

Meeting; C3KE Conference Planning

On Tuesday a meeting was held in Huddersfield, in order to discuss and plan a conference which would conclude the C3KE activities. This conference is supposed to be the final project in the C3KE, as a final milestone, showing sustainability and involvement. Participants in the meeting were: Derek Hales (U.Huddersfield), Patrick Allen (U.Bradford), Freda Shafi (U.Bradford), myself.

There is a potential to host this conference here at Leeds Met, together with the Staff Development Festival - this needs to be explored further.

Meeting at the OBH

Rebekka Kill from the Faculty of Arts and Society has been very active lately: an article of her was published in the Times Higher Education, she had written a reflection and was referenced by the VC, and she had visited the FLT meeting a few weeks ago. Now Peter Cullen (INT) with whom I had worked on a TQEF bid for exploring the MAHARA software, had pointed me towards her, as she would also be interested in MAHARA.

Rebekka is setting up a new MA: Creative Enterprise. For this she wants to use 4 case studies, and she has obtained funding for this. The students working on these case studies would have to report and share their work - and MAHARA seems to be a very positive platform for this. So we agreed that I would mention her project in the meeting with Ruth Pickford which I will arrange in 3 weeks or so, to clarify the TQEF bid.

Guest Lecture: DARPA Grand Challenge

This Monday I gave a guest lecture in John Elliott's Master class for Artificial Intelligence. This was the 3rd time I did this lecture in the past 3 years. I gave a viewpoint from a practical application-oriented perspective, showing the applications of AI in autonomous driving. From my past experience as a participant in the US DARPA Grand Challenge 2004, I showed video footage to demonstrate examples of autonomous vehicle behaviour.