Tag Archives: education

Going Back to University

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A couple of weeks ago I had the enormous pleasure of returning to Exeter University where I studied for my degree more years ago than seems possible.  Getting involved with the uni again has been something I've long since wanted to do in an attempt to give back something to the institution to which I owe so much having been there to get good qualifications and not least met my wife there too!  I think early on in a career it's not necessarily something I would have been particularly useful for since I was closer to the university than my working life in age, mentality and a bunch of other factors I'm sure.  However, getting a bit older makes me feel readier to provide something tangibly useful in terms of giving something back both to the university and to the current students.  I hope that having been there recently with work it's a relationship I can start to build up.

I should probably steer clear of saying exactly why we were there but there was a small team from work some of which I knew well such as @madieq and @andysc and one or two I hadn't come across before.  Our job was to work with some academic staff for a couple of days and so it was a bit of a departure from my normal work with corporate customers.  It's fantastic to see the university from the other side of the fence (i.e. not being a student) and hearing about some of the things going on there and seeing a university every bit as vibrant and ambitious as the one I left in 2000. Of course, there was the obligatory wining and dining in the evening which just went to make the experience all the more pleasurable.

I really hope to be able to talk a lot more about things we're doing with the university in the future.  Until then, I'm looking forward to going back a little more often and potentially imparting some words (of wisdom?) to some students too.

Natural Language Processing Course

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Over the first few months of this year I have been taking part in a mass online learning course in Natural Language Processing (NLP) run by Stanford University.  They publicised a group of eight courses at the end of last year and I didn't hesitate to sign up to the Natural Language Processing course knowing it would fit very well with things I'm working on in my professional role where I'm doing more and more with text analytics and continuing my work in speech to text.  There were others I could easily have signed up for too, things like security or machine learning, more or less all of them are relevant for something I'm doing.  However, given the time commitment required I decided to fully commit to one course and the NLP one was to be it.

I passed the course with a grade of 85% which was well above the required 70% pass mark.  However, the effort and time required to get there was way more than I was expecting and quite a lot more than the expected time the lecturers (Chris Manning and Dan Jurafsky) had said.  From memory it was an 8 week course with 10 hours a week required effort to complete the work. As it went on the amount of time required went up significantly, so rather than the 80 hours total I think I spent more like 1½ times that at over 120 hours!

There were four of us at work (that I know of) who embarked on the course but due to the commitment of time I've mentioned above only myself and Dale finished.  By the way, Dale has written an excellent post on the structure and content of the course so I'd suggest reading his blog for more details on that stuff, there's little point in me re-posting it as he's written such a good summary.

In terms of the participants on the course, it seems to have been quite a success for Stanford University - this is the first time they have run courses in this way it seems.  The lecturers gave us some statistics at a couple of strategic points throughout the course and it seems there were around 40,000 people registering an interest, of which around 5000 were watching the lecture material and around 2000 completed the course having taken part in the homework assignments.

I'm glad I committed as much as I did.  If I were one of the 5000 just watching the lectures and not doing the homework material I don't think I would have got as much out of it, but the added time required to complete the homework was significant so perhaps there's a trade-off here?  It's certainly the first time I've committed this much of my own personal time (it took over the lives of myself and Dale for quite a few weeks) as I was too busy at work to spend many business hours working on the course so it was all done in evenings and weekends.  That's certainly one piece of feedback I gave at the end of the course, Stanford could make the course timing more flexible but also allow more time for the course to be completed.

My experience with the way the assignments were marked was a little different to the way Dale has described in his post.  I was already very familiar with the concepts of test, development and held-out sets (three different sets of data used when training NLP systems) so wasn't surprised to see that the modules in the course didn't necessarily have an exact answer to them or more precisely that the code your wrote to perfectly analyse some data on your local system may not get full marks as it was marked against a different data set.  This may seem unfair but is common practice in all NLP system training that I know of.

All in all, an excellent course that I'm glad I did.  From what I hear of the other courses, they're not as deeply involved as the NLP course so I may well give another one a go in the future but for now I need to get a little of my life back and have a well earned rest from education.

Why Doctor Who Confidential mattered

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Behind-the-scenes documentaries, like Doctor Who Confidential, matter. They matter because they show viewers, in particular children still deciding what to do with their lives, that it takes more to produce a high-class TV programme than just a few actors who become famous. It shows what other creative and/or technical jobs there are in television.

A couple of weekends ago, we went to the Doctor Who Official Convention (#dwcuk) in Cardiff. While one of the three main panels featured the three stars, Matt Smith, Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill (along with executive producers Stephen Moffat and Caroline Skinner), most of the other scheduled events were focused on how Doctor Who is made.

Danny Hargreaves makes it snow indoors

At the very start of the day, we went to see Danny Hargreaves blow things up talk about the Special Effects on Doctor Who. In his Q&A session (after making it snow indoors), the first question asked was “How did you get into special effects work?” and, between questions like how he blew up the Torchwood Hub and how he makes the Doctor’s hands and head fiery during a regeneration, a later question was “When did you realise you wanted to work in special effects?”. Attendees were interested not just in the fictional stories and characters but in how the programme is made and the interesting careers they might not otherwise have come across.

Old harddrive on the TARDIS console to make the spinny thing spin.

Throughout the day, I heard audience members ask how to become costume and prosthetics designers and how to become script writers. Danny described how his team designs and creates the effects, assess the risks of blowing things up, and who they work with to make it all happen. He also explained how he came to be a trainee in the nascent world of special effects before studying Mechanical Engineering so that he could build the devices they need for Doctor Who (and the other shows he’s worked on, like Coronation Street). Directors of photography, set designers, executive producers, writers, and directors went on to talk about what their own jobs entailed day-to-day and how it all comes together to make an episode of Doctor Who.

These discussions continued the story that used to be told after each new episode of Doctor Who by Doctor Who Confidential on BBC3. Doctor Who Confidential started in 2005 with the return of Doctor Who. As well as talking about some interesting perspective on making that night’s episode of Doctor Who, it featured interviews with, and ‘day-in-the-life’ documentaries about, the actors (including showing the less glamorous side of shivering in tents and quilted coats between takes), the casting directors, the producers, the writers, the choreographers, the costume designers, the special effects supervisors, the monster designers, the prosthetics experts, the directors, the assistant directors, and many, many others. It also held competitions for children to write a mini episode and then see the process of making it, which would’ve been an amazing experience!

Yes, it took a slightly odd turn in the last series when it turned a bit Top Gear by showing Karen Gillan having a driving lesson and Arthur Darvill swimming with sharks; possibly a misguided attempt to increase its popularity before it got canned anyway to cut costs.

I think it’s a real shame to lose Doctor Who Confidential and its insights into the skill, hard work, and opportunities in TV and film production.

Cool photo of Danny in the snow by Tony Whitmore.

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Bridge building with local students

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Last week saw the start of a new year for IBM Hursley’s MentorPlace programme. The idea of MentorPlace is to connect people from the lab with female students from local schools who might be interested in pursuing a career in one of the STEM areas (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). We work with the girls over the course of the year, providing a weekly email mentoring session, and run some activities on-site to build up their knowledge of different topics and work together in teams. The idea of engaging more with students to help them to learn more about technology and careers is something I’m personally passionate about, and I wrote about it on my own blog last week.

It’s a lot of fun, and I think the people from the lab get as much out of it as the girls do! Last week’s activities at Hursley saw 48 students learn some Java coding in the morning, and in the afternoon to build bridges using paper, string, tape, and craft sticks – they had to support a number of text books in order to be successful. The girls were divided into teams named after different inspirational women in science, technology and other areas of achievement. Here are some of the resulting pieces of work:

All of the bridges performed to the required specification and it was left to the judges to decide which one was the most creative and successful design – tough job! Looking forward to working with the schools during the academic year…