2 w/c 31st October: Peak Teach again!

One of the ironies of blogging is that at the times when you are doing your most interesting stuff, you just don't have time to blog about them. So it has been the past couple of weeks. This is the period we know as "peak teach" - that mid-term point where all the stuff you set in the early part of term comes back for marking, and all the stuff for the last part of term needs finalising. Of course, one always knows it's coming, so after a decade, it no longer catches me off guard.

Nor does it mean that research has fallen completely by the wayside: far from it, in fact. The last two weeks have been busy for a variety of reasons on the research front, for a good few reasons. As you will know if you've taken a look at my Twitter feed (one of many reasons why I like mirco-blogging!).

First up, part of the Augmenting the Body team (Stuart Murray, Sophie Jones, Amelia de Falco and myself) took a trip to visit Tony Prescott and Michael Szollosy at Sheffield Robotics. It was particularly interesting, because they do a different type of research than my colleagues at Leeds - they are firmly focussed on Human-Robot Interaction, rather than novel technologies, and are using systems such as iCub and NAO, which were both exciting to see (and see Figures 1 and 2, below). There are lots of information about these systems available, so I won't go into detail here. Suffice to say it was a very informative and thought-provoking trip.

Figure 1: iCub, learning what a toy chicken is.

Figure 2: Stuart Murray with NAO.

Of course, part of the reason for doing that was the second Augmenting the Body seminar, this time on Redesigning the Human, featuring Tony Prescott and Andrew Cook (from Dundee). I'll try to write this up in more detail, but there were some really good questions raised about the future of technology and how it fits with humanity and society.

On a related note, I then gave my seminar at the IDEA (Interdisciplinary Ethics Applied) centre on the subject of Who are we engineering for? Again, it generated a lot of discussion, which was really useful - you can see the detail of my arguments in my previous blog post, and I'll try to write up some post-seminar thoughts in the future (time, as ever, permitting).

I attended a Centre for Disability Studies reading group on some of Margrit Schildrick's work. It was good fun, with some lively discussion, though I'm not sure how far we got through the ideas in the paper. On the plus side, at least everyone seemed non-plussed by some of the philosophical language: I was a bit worried that everyone would be off into complex discussions that I couldn't follow, but not a bit of it. I've now been tasked with reading Delueze from an engineer's perspective. Just the tricky question of which Delueze that should be...

Finally, a red letter day for the Postural Sway Assessment Tool: first build of the new design is up and running! Just got to get it cased, now, and then we're off gathering data! Exciting times, as long as the inevitable bugs aren't too onerous!

Anyway - onwards! Still lots to do. It may be a while before my next "non-update" post, but I'll do my  best!