The Life And Times Of HTTPS by Marks Polakovs 5th November (Autumn Week 6) watch on YouTube
This talk focuses on technical writing, which covers everything from quite long documents to code comments, but much of it is useful for any context where you need to get information from your brain into someone else’s as easily as possible. My talk will break down the process of writing into three steps, each of which I’ll explain in sensible and approachable terms: It’s about writing better, and feeling less anxious while doing it. It’s not about writing perfectly (there isn’t any such thing). I’m a working information architect, and I’ve been teaching my techie colleagues to write for a couple of years. (Often followed by, “no, not like that!”) Which is a shame, because there are actually specific step-by-step methodologies for writing for humans! It's usually just "go write something and hand it in".
But not everyone gets taught how to write in any structured way. Tech isn't just about writing code for computers to interpret - you need to write for those pesky humans too. Lerning to rite gud! by Abi Sutherland 29th October (Autumn Week 5) watch on YouTube Finally, I will show an example and talk about the practical complexities of actually implementing mapping in robotics. I will discuss the state of the art, with particular focus on novel approaches using swarm robotics and sparse data which each pose unique problems for localisation and mapping.
In this talk I will introduce the concepts behind mapping in robotics, and by extension some of the concepts behind localisation. While they are simple tasks for most humans, they are relatively complex and computationally expensive tasks for robots, particularly those with limited sensors or limited computational power.
There are several problems which must be solved for navigation, two of the core problems being localisation and mapping, that is, knowing where the robot is in a landscape and knowing that landscape. Navigation is one of the core challenges of any form of robotics (at least any form which requires movement). Dispatches from the Computing Titanic by Jacob Allen 9th June (Summer Week 9) watch on YouTube This talk will give a brief overview of the history of Scheme standardization over the last five decades, compare the initial ‘small’ version of R7RS (intended to carry on the tradition of versions of Scheme intended for use in teaching, research, and embedded environments) to previous standard versions of Scheme and assess its success so far, and review current progress on the ‘Large’ version of the standard (which is intended to be practical for developing large, real-world applications) and the difficulties of standardizing a practical but usable version of ‘the world's most unportable programming language’. After decades of being used almost exclusively in teaching and research (with some exceptions), Scheme is now in the throes of a second attempt to expand the standard language to make it practical for use in production environments, R7RS. Scheme is a small but influential dialect of the Lisp programming language which has been standardized in multiple more-or-less compatible versions since its creation in the late 1970s.