Co-organiser, Smart Data Hack
University of Edinburgh
Reprised my role as very-stressed-person and just about pulled off another successful week with around 100 students including (!!) business and design students; smartdatahack.org.
university of edinburgh (8 out of 8)
Co-organiser, Smart Data Hack
University of Edinburgh
Tried backing away for this year's SDH; co-opted some undergrad minions to delegate to, and handed off the website to CompSoc. Still ended up doing quite a lot, but managed to salvage enough time to also write a paper in the run-up, so delegation: successful.
Attendee, Summer School for Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web
Presented poster "Active Digital Content Creators and the Semantic Web". Learnt lots, slept little. Worked on a mini group project about measuring serendipity. Won the best video prize, with "Summer School for Semantic Wizards", featuring a wizard who turns water into wine using SPARQL.
Co-organiser, Smart Data Hack
University of Edinburgh
Dropped the ball on my PhD for months to wrangle sponsors, set up the website, recruit participants and generally get shit together. It went well, with feedback from students like "easily the most useful and fun week I've had since I started uni".
PhD in Informatics
School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
Something something linked data something social profiles something context-aware self-representation on the web doodah online personas social machines uhhhh decentralisation.
I guess I'll update this when I'm feeling more sure of myself.
Graduation expected: July 2016 (funding runs out) / late 2017 (more realistically)
Publications: See /pub
Humoured Supervised by: Ewan Klein and Dave Robertson.
President, SocieTea
University of Edinburgh
At SocieTea we sit around on Thursday evenings and drink fancy teas, make tea puns, and don't force anyone to socialise who doesn't want to. I'm proud to have facilitated this. Even though I'm no longer in charge, I still host a suitcase of tea, cups and saucers, and a tea urn, under my desk in my office.
Developer and research assistant, Community Hacking Project
Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh
Created a location-constrained community noticeboard as part of a hyperlocal digital newspaper (via a Wordpress plugin). The cool part is, you read and write to the noticeboard through scanning a QR code that's on a giant wooden totem pole in the middle of a field. I can't take responsibility for the totem pole.
MSc by research Interdisciplinary Creative Practices
Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh
Core classes taught concepts from architecture, philosophy, art, sociology, media theory, political sciences, choreography, design, history, literature... and who knows what else. My eyes were opened to a million new ways of thinking about the world. I started to understand 'research by practice' and the value of play. There was still a lot of artsy crap I couldn't accept, but it was mostly okay. I took electives inside my comfort zone, from the School of Informatics (Advanced Natural Language Processing and Multi-agent Semantic Web Systems). I worked on group projects with an awesome and diverse bunch of people from whom I learnt a lot.
Thesis: Location-aware literature
(I cleverly wrote this thesis in Google Docs, but I might translate it to HTML and link to it one day).
I worked with a couple of people in the English Literature department to build Palimpsest, a web app (with Python and JavaScript on Google AppEngine) that shows you historical texts based on your location as you walk around a city. I spent most time on the authoring interface, for plotting texts onto a map. The project is still going, though it's morphed now and outgrown the code I wrote. I'd intended to develop this into a full blown interactive fiction engine and authoring system that let you draw the world map onto a real map, so that players could navigate the story by moving around IRL. I didn't pull that off, but I mocked it up.