Imagine Cup Festival

I've said before that you can regard the Imagine Cup as a kind of alternative reality where you are surrounded by people passionate about technology, the food and drink is free and you are in some amazing location. I think the time also moves faster too, since I can't believe that we have already been here nearly a week. Anyway, today everything is rounded off with all the students showing the projects for everyone to see, business leaders and high powered politicians dropping by to take a look and the announcement of all the winners.

The whole setting was amazing and it was really nice to get a chance to look at some of the projects that I hadn't had a chance to see during the judging process. I also had some good chats with teams that I had seen, who were very keen to know what I thought. The best thing for me was that everyone I spoke to was determined to come back next year and do it all again. And these were people that had been without sleep for the best part of a day and a half and sweated and strained to get the best possible project and presentation into the competition.

The festival itself was hosted by Joe Wilson, who seemed as surprised to be wearing a suit as we were to see him in one. I've put loads of photos up on Flickr, I'm sure the Imagine Cup website will have some better ones.

Finally the results of our deliberations were announced and Project Soak was revealed as the winner. This entry from the Australian is an innovative watering system with the ability to make sure that plants get precisely the right amount of water and no more. It considers all the angles, from the current soil moisture, the needs of the crop and even the current weather forecast, to make sure that no water is wasted.

The team already have a farming estate signed up to prove that their idea holds water, so to speak. With a good looking and functional interface and a realistic development plan it is a very strong winner, and we look forward to seeing it achieve great things in the future.

After the presentation we all went back to the hotel to get ready for the final night party. At this point there was nothing left to play for, and everyone was keen to relax and have a good time. So we did.

The party itself was held at an amazing place just under one of the bridges of Paris. With a DJ specially flown in from the 'states, lots (and I mean lots) of really good food and drink. I only managed to last until 11:00 (my excuse is that I have to be up early tomorrow) but it was great just to meet up with the team members and chat about life, the universe and everything.

Power Presentations

This afternoon finds me as one of the distinguished judges at the Imagine Cup Software Development Challenge finals. This is being next to the Louvre in the centre of Paris. A good place to make an exhibition of myself methinks.

The  setting was fantastic. The whole hall had been decked out with moving Imagine Cup logos and video screens, plus this really cool little camera on a boom, which gives all an excellent view of the hardware projects. In the middle of this we have the student teams who now step up from presenting to a handful of judges in a little room to performing in front of an audience of many hundreds.

First up were the embedded challenge finalists. These presenters not only had to deal with an unfamiliar stage with camera crews milling around but also the scary prospect of giving live demonstrations of their systems. They were all excellent. The subjects varied from remote robotic environmental sensors to systems to protect animals crossing highways, preventing them from becoming road-kill.

My personal favourite was the Irish entry, which uses a cunning combination of hardware and software to allow a standard diesel engine to run on ordinary cooking oil. This system was so effective they had even managed to drive all the way to the venue on fuel they picked up at the local supermarket.

Then it was on to the Software Development finals, and my turn to shine, quite literally as we had to sit in the glare of the TV lights when we posed our questions to the presenting students. It is quite un-nerving when you are trying to think of something sensible to say and you glance up to see a huge image of yourself, looking sweaty and harassed, on the video screen above the stage.

Anyway, I managed to get to the end without asking anything too obviously stupid, and then we were ushered out to complete our deliberations. The judging is based on categories set down in the competition rules, and so we all filled in our numbers, passed them on to the organisers and then were pleasantly surprised to find that we were in broad agreement about the winners.

I said in the final that I love watching presentations and I hate deciding who has won. Every project had its own merit, and all of them were presented with spirit and style. One of the judges, a battle hardened venture capitalist who has seen many pitches from aspiring entrepreneurs, commented that several of the presentations were better than ones he has seen in the course of his job. And these were delivered by students on technical subjects, who are not expected to be good at this kind of thing. So, fantastic job everyone.

I'm sworn to secrecy over the results, which will be revealed tomorrow at the grand presentation.

Climbing the Tower

This morning there was a tiny lull in the Imagine Cup proceedings, and so we went off to climb the Eiffel Tower. The queue for the lifts was huge, but there was nobody waiting to climb the stairs, so off we went. Of course I had the camera with me.

Looking up from underneath

Even at the first level the views were amazing.

I've actually got a a confession to make. At the first level you can transfer to the lift (which is actually worth knowing, and a way of beating the queues on the ground) and so we took a lift to the next stage.

Telescope

Waiting

Impressive sky

And more so

At this point we kind of ran out of time, because we had to head off to the Imagine Cup finalist presentations. So I never quite made it right to the top. But I will next time.

Imagine Cup Dinner Cruise

Tonight we were all invited on for a boat trip. Free food. Free drink. On the Seine. In Paris.

Sign me up.

The boat was huge, I couldn't believe that they would get everyone on board but they did. I took the big camera, and loads of pictures (there are a bunch more on Flickr).

All aboard

Kite from a bridge

Nice sky

 

The tower by night

The whole thing was excellent. At the end I staggered back to the hotel and collapsed for the second time in a day...

The Future of Computing

If there is one person who should have an idea of where computers are going it is Andrew Herbert. As Managing Director of Microsoft Research he gets to spend a lot of time thinking about the future of this business. I was very pleased that I woke up from my impromptu nap just in time to go off and hear his talk to Imagine Cup students where he gave a brief exposition of the way he thinks things are headed.

Very interesting. He made the very good point that even though computer use has changed massively since he started in the field, with personal computers now commonplace, and everyone carrying around huge amounts of processing power in their phones, cameras and laptop pcs, the processors inside these devices work in fundamentally the same way as the first ever computer. The rise of increasingly clever and friendly systems has been on the back of the continuous improvement in processing power that has made more advanced software possible.

The bad news is that the way we build solutions in the future is going to have to change, for two reasons.

Firstly we are running out of scope to improve the speed of computers. The processors themselves, and the memory they use, cannot be made to work faster in the future. Instead we are going to have to build systems which get performance by providing extra throughput from multiple processors, rather than a single chip that goes more quickly.

Secondly it is becoming increasingly hard to create and deploy software with the level of complexity that is expected today. Many large developments end up being abandoned just because we cannot produce something which solves the problem, or can be made reliable enough to be useful.

All this points to massive change in the way that computers will be programmed in the future, with a need to mathematically prove that crucial software always works, and new programming languages being created to allow code to make better use of the new arrangements of hardware that will become commonplace.

Programmers of the future will have to use different ways to express their solutions, and develop new techniques of building, documenting and proving the correctness of what they write. The model of computer use itself is also changing, with distributed systems being used to access large centralised services via the network, leading to even more change.

The great news is that nobody in the room seemed particularly scared by these prospects. They didn't seem to regard them as things to worry about, but as a whole new set of challenges and opportunities to make their mark and do great things, which is just as it should be.

If you are looking for a field where what you do can have the greatest impact on the largest number of people and how they live their daily lives, I think you will be hard pushed to find one more interesting than computing just now.

Shopping for Fleas

Today is a rest day. I thought it might be fun to search out the Paris Flea Market at Porte de Cligancourt and so off we went.

Here comes our train

During the journey a bloke turned up with an amplifier and microphone and serenaded us for a while. Dennis and Nannette don't seem that impressed to be honest.

This was the view from the place we had lunch. I could have bought a rug, but in the end I didn't. The food was great though.

The market was huge. We were there for a while, and we only saw a tiny part of it.

Got some nice presents here.

Then we wandered back to the metro, ambled back to the hotel by way of a pavement cafe and I sat down on the bed for a second and woke up an hour later....

Seconds out, Round Two

Today was the second day of judging. All of the teams gave their presentation in front of another group of judges. Then, from all the teams a set of 12 were picked as going into round 2. The round 2 then repeated their presentations and then the final 6 are going to be selected for the grand final on Monday. That means that over the day I've watched 10 student teams strut their stuff.

And loved it.

The teams in the second round were doing their talks for the third time. If they were tired of the material it certainly didn't show. They were excellent. As one of the judges I then had to put numbers to all the performances (that bit I really hate, as I wanted to give everyone full marks) and then these are fed into the system along with all the scores from all the other judges.

Where it all goes down..

The final six will be announced tomorrow. After all the presentations the students took over the auditorium here to show off their projects. I took a wander around with the camera.

The embedded solution produced by the UK team. I'll grab a picture of the team at the big Expo on Tuesday.

The UK Team (Dominic Green and Ben Nunney) flanked by their mentor Tom Randell on the left and Ed Dunhill from Microsoft on the right. Their entry is an innovative game to raise awareness of environmental issues . You can find out more about it here.

An overhead view of the booths.

The Irish embedded team who used their project, a system to make an ordinary diesel powered car run on cooking oil, to actually bring them to Paris. On the way over a wheel came off (no - really) but they were still here this morning demonstrating their engine modifications.

The sunset from my room tonight. Very nice.

Tomorrow is a rest day, I'm hoping to actually be able to leave the hotel complex for a while and take a look outside.

Here Comes the Judge....

No pictures today. Not had time to upload any. I've been too busy having fun watching students give presentations about their projects. And there have been some excellent ones. Anybody concerned about the future of the planet, and the general decline of the way things are, should come to an event like this and watch young people speak so well, and with such passion, about the big problems that we face.

I can't believe that I get to come and do this for free. It is just so nice to be a part of the whole enterprise. The only hard part is deciding what marks to give at the end.

Eight more presentations tomorrow. I can't wait.

Imagine Cup Open for Business

I've been lucky enough to go to quite a few Imagine Cup finals. Each host nation works really hard to give the contestants the best time ever, and this time it is the turn of France. I was looking forward to this. If there is one thing the French are good at, it is having a great time.

First off we boarded the bus to the opening ceremony, which was being held at City Hall. I had been told this place was pretty impressive. We shall see...

On the way there we drove straight towards the Eiffel tower, which was nice.

City Hall is impressive. Very impressive. The ceilings in the entrance staircase were good enough, but when you got into the main rooms things got serious.

The poshest ceiling I've ever seen. We got to mill around and take pictures (I took lots - there are more on Flickr). It was nice to meet up with old friends from previous finals.

Each team got to walk up the "stairs of fame" into the competition, to a round of applause from those in the hall. This is the UK team having their moment of glory. Then we had a few speeches.

This is the Deputy Mayor of Paris, the chap on the right is his interpreter. I'm quite proud of the fact that I understood some of the bits that he said in French.

Jean-Phillipe Coutois very cool He talked about computers from way back when, stuff that I actually remembered using. Young developers have it so easy these days....

Joe Wilson made the very good point that this is probably the largest gathering of international students there has ever been. With teams from 61 countries here, there has never been a gathering like this before. That in itself makes the Imagine Cup pretty special, before you even look at the entries.

Finally Eric Boustoulier rounded things off by reminding everyone that we actually are going to go out there and build something of the future.

Once the ceremony had completed, and the competition was underway it was time for some food and a look around Paris.

Our train back to the hotel.

Tomorrow the judging gets underway.

Return to Planet Imagine Cup

Set off today to Paris, for the Imagine Cup world final. I've again been appointed as a judge, which is great. I thought I'd take the train.

Hull Trains to London

St. Pancras Station (spelt correctly for a change)

The streets of Paris

Taking the taxi

I've just got to my room, next step is to bounce back out again for he opening ceremony.

Strawberry flavoured milk at St. Pancras

Did you know?

In the UK strawberry flavoured milk and petrol cost exactly the same per litre. But I know which tastes better.

Flower Power

The Lily in the garden is out.

..as is another, as yet unidentified (at least by me) flower.

FreeSat Fun and Poor Sports

The man came today to fix my FreeSat. FreeSat is a new service in the UK that delivers high definition TV from a satellite. And, now that I have a shiny dish pointing in the right direction, it works.

The only real problem is a lack of content. The only reliable source of High Definition TV  is the BBC channel, which fortunately tonight was showing just what I wanted to see, which was the Wimbledon match between Andy Murray and Richard Gasquet.

The picture was truly amazing, with fantastic detail and no compression artifacts. The game itself was great to watch as well, apart from the braying idiots in the Wimbledon crowd, who shouted, booed and took flash photographs during the points. I hate it when people cheer if the person they've decided is "the opposition" makes a mistake. I ended up rooting for the french player, just because it would really have upset the people watching in the stadium.

If you are thinking about FreeSat it is definitely worth a look. However, remember that there is not that much to look at just now (even Channel 5 is presently missing) and that things like recording programs are presently not possible. However, if they keep developing it and adding new channels it could well become a must-have.

Server Quest

This is fun, in a cheesy retro kind of way (some of the questions are a bit hard though).

Hewlett Scrapyard

Just had over an hour of "the wrong kind of fun" courtesy of an HP printer. Under normal circumstances I have a lot of respect for HP products. Their printers give good, reliable, results and I've never had one of their ink cartridges dry up on me. Always a bonus. When people ask me which kind of printer to buy I used to say "HP" out of reflex, because I reckoned they would get a good device that will not let me down.

Until now.

Dad got an HP "all in one" disaster area with scanner, printer, colour screen, card reader, WIFI, Fax and some kind of personality module that is permanently on stupid. During my tussles with the darned thing I explored the very limits of disbelief that something could be so stupidly over designed. The printer software installation itself takes around half an hour on your computer, then you start to grapple with the printing process.

The initial problem was that the printer buffers incoming printing, so that it can receive a lump of data over the network and then print it. Nothing wrong with that. It even stores the data in non-volatile memory, so that it can recover from power outage. Nothing wrong with that too. But if the printer is given a partially completed, corrupt, file to print this stays in memory for ever. Each time we turned the printer on it tried to print the file, and then locked up. There is no command to flush the printer buffer, no way to get around this and it means that if data sent to the printer is damaged or incomplete it turns into a noisy, expensive paperweight.

I've written embedded code myself in the past. One of my golden rules was that it should never, ever, be possible for your device to lock up. There must always be a button that can be pressed to get control back. My devices never got stuck. Not once. Never.

HP are not in my league. Not close. We ended up playing a game of skill where we had to cancel the print before it crashed the printer. Fortunately my video game powers came in handy and so we got past this duff job, at which point the idiot device pumped out every failed print job since then. We ended up putting the same pages back into the input tray again, to save paper. Of course it probably cost us a bit on ink....

So, finally the printer was working. But no. Now when you printed a page it produced it many times, over and over, like the bit from the Sorcerer's Apprentice, where Micky can't stop the brooms from fetching water. At this point we felt like taking an axe to the printer as well...

So, we gave up on network use (the main reason why we bought the printer in the first place) and went back to USB. Which when I left (at speed) was working OK.

I'm not sure which printers to recommend any more.

Splitting Fibres

I've just found a very neat solution to the problem where you have a single optical input on your HIFI, but you want to plug more than one device into it.

These people will sell you a splitter and a couple of optical cables for around a fiver which you can then use to share the one input with, say, your Xbox 360 and a Freesat box. And they work a treat.

Spot the Graduate

Somewhere in this picture of Durham is hidden a recently graduated "Master of Mathematics". See if you can use your skill and judgement to pick him out.

Kudos to number one son. Well done sir.

Building Works

Our department is being seriously done up. We had a taste of this a couple of years ago, when we made our new open area, but this time the whole building is getting the treatment. This means nothing on the floor or ceiling and a lot of drilling and hammering.

But it will be nice when it is finished.

Sailing the Amazon

I've now taken advantage of the Amazon Connect service to add a little bit of Rob to the pages of Amazon.com. Hapless viewers of information about my books on the Amazon site will also get excerpts from these hallowed pages, as well as a link to my new Amazon blog with book related content.

To celebrate this I've uploaded the second section of Simple Simon, an XNA pattern matching game which has nothing to do with pies, to verysillygames.com.