CHIS-ERA conference 2011 in Cork

While being in Ireland, I had the great opportunity of attending the CHIS-ERA strategic conference 2011 in Cork. Never heard of it? Neither have I. It’s a conference of European academic funding bodies to project and discuss future work and the direction of the work to be funded. Hence, it had many academics or industrial research people that talked about their vision for the next few years. If I got it correctly, the funding bodies wanted some input on their new “Call” which is their next big pile of money they throw at research.

The two broad topics were “Green ICT” and “From Data to Knowledge“. And both subjects were actually interesting. But due to the nature of the conference, many talks were quite high level and a bit too, say, visionary for my taste. But it had some technical talks which I think were displaced and given by poor Post-Docs that needed to have a presentation on their record to impress their supervisor or funding body.

CHIS-ERA Flower
However, for the Green IT part, almost all the speakers highlighted how important it was to aim for “Zero Power ICT”, because the energy consumption of electronic devices would shoot up as it did the last decade or so. But it hadn’t necessarily been much of problem, because Moore’s Law would save us a bit: We knew that in a couple of month, we could place the same logic onto half the chip which would then, according to the experts, use half the energy. However, that wouldn’t hold anymore in a decade or two, because we would reach a physical limit and we needed new solutions to the problem.

Some proposed to focus on specialised ICs that are very efficient or could be turned off, some others proposed to build probabilistic architectures because most of time a very correct result wouldn’t matter or to focus research on new materials like nanotubes and nanowires. The most interesting suggestion was to exploit very new non volatile memory technologies using spintronic elements. The weirdest approach was to save energy by eliminating routers on the Internet and have a non routing Internet. The same guy proposed to cache content on the provider as if it wasn’t done already by ISPs.

After the first day, we had a very nice trip to the old Jameson Distillery in Midleton. It started off with a movie telling us the story about Jameson coming to Ireland and making Whiskey. It didn’t forget to mention that Irish Whiskey was older and of course better than the Scottish and the tour around the old buildings were able to tell us what makes Irish Whiskey way better than the Scottish. Funnily enough, they didn’t tell us that the Jameson guy was actually Scottish πŸ˜‰ I do have to admit that I like the Irish Whiskey though πŸ™‚ The evening completed with a very nice and fancy meal in a nice Restaurant called Ballymaloe. I think I never dined with so many pieces of cutlery in front of me…

CHIST-ERA D2K visualisation
The second day was about “From Data to Knowledge” and unfortunately, I couldn’t attend every lecture so I probably missed the big trends. When I heard that Natural Language Processing and Automatic Speech Recognition were as advanced as being able to transcribe a spoken TV or radio news show with a 5% error rate, I was quite interested. Because in my world, I can’t even have the texts that I write corrected because I need to use ispell which doesn’t do well with markup or other stuff. Apparently, there is a big discrepancy between the bleeding edge of academic research and freely available tools πŸ™ I hope we can close this gap first, before tackling the next simultaneous translation tool from Urdu to Lowgerman…

CCCamp 2011


It happened again! The Chaos Communication Camp took place a couple of weeks ago near Berlin. I was all excited to go although I had to miss the last days of the Desktop Summit.

The weather was mostly nice and the atmosphere, especially at night, was really fantastic. Everybody was really nice and there was so much creativity all over the venue that it was really hard to not start to make or hack on something.

While it had many very interesting things to be seen, I think to most amazing machine on the ground was a “Crepes printer”. Some austrian dude built a machine which would make you a fresh crepe. Including some chocolate sauce! Just right next the that were some friends that intend to launch a sattelite and already had their radio equipment ready. With their massive antenna they spoke to the moon and measured the reflections coming back.

The participants also got a fancy badge called “r0ket“. It’s an amazing device and people did awesome stuff with it immediately. Given the presence of 3D printers and lasercutters, people added all sorts of extensions to the r0ket. But some enhanced their r0ket with good old knitting goodness.

The whole CCCamp, taking place on an old russian airbase, was themed very aeronautical so everything was somehow related to space travel or rocket science. It also had many talks on those subjects which I didn’t attend a lot. I was too busy hacking or socialising.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teiwdhHYIQk

You can only see a tiny fraction of the many artisty stuff it had on the ground. But you do see an old MIG which got pwned along with a spacy car. He got trolled quite well, I’d say but decide for yourself:

You can try to grasp the atmosphere by looking at these areal shots:

You can see some more pictures and press articles in the CCCamp Wiki. The next Camp will be “Observe. Hack. Make. 2013.” and I’m very much looking forward to attend it.

Spare Thinkpad x60, x60s, x61 or x61s anybody?

Dear Lazyweb,

my beloved laptop broke down πŸ™ It’s an x61s and its backlight is not working anymore. I replaced the inverter card and the LCD cable to no avail. It can now only be the last and most expensive part: The LCD panel.

Hence my question: Do you know where to get hold of a spare x60, x60s, x61 or x61s with a working LCD panel? If so, please contact me.

Thanks.

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