Month in Review: June 2018

Well, the wheels are definitely off in terms of my two posts a month target! We'll see if I can catch up an do four posts in July!

It goes without saying that June was a busy month. It's not quite as brutal as May (particularly since I'd finished my marking), but it's exam board season. We're much more efficient than we used to be (what was about 14 hours of meetings has been trimmed to 7 or so), but the deadlines are absolute. Things have to be ready for the external examiners come hell or high water (did I say that in my last post? Well, it's true!). All marks need to be finalised, students with coursework extensions' work marked , marks uploaded and coursework  samples selected.

Of course,  it was made extra busy by the British Academy Summer Showcase preparations, and prep for New Designers and the upcoming SUITCEYES consortium meeting taking place in Leeds this month. Also our taught MSc conference, where we spend a day with every taught postgraduate presenting their dissertation. Busy and hard work, but a great way of finding out about the range of projects going on.

I have two Laidlaw Summer students, one returning to work on FATKAT (the Finger and Thumb Kinematic Assessment Tool), and another working on haptic feedback in VR and SUITCEYES. The Leeds SUITCEYES team is finally complete, with Zhenyang Ling (known as Yang), Research Fellow in Haptic Communication and Navigation starting.

There are some big changes afoot for CAP (the Cognition-Action-Planning lab I am part of), as we do our annual stocktake of where we are and where we're going. The most obvious change is our increasing focus on Immersive Cognition. It doesn't mean a lot of change in what we do, but reflects the fact that our work is increasingly oriented around Virtual, Augmented or Mixed Reality. The lab will be rebranded as ICon (for "Immersive Cognition" - ICogn seemed a bit opaque). It's exciting times with Leeds' new centre for Immersive Technologies coming online.

July promises to be another busy month! We have the aforementioned SUITCEYES consortium meeting taking place in Leeds, we are now ready to start conducting our first interviews, and with Yang getting stuck into the technology side,  we're really hitting our stride. And, of course, teaching prep. I always aim to have handouts ready by the end of July, so I can print in good time and can't make last minute changes.

Busy times - still,  it keeps me out of trouble, eh?