Monthly Archive

As part of my trip back to the UK I has also arranged a follow-up visit to the Bristol Robotics Laboratory.  I visited for the first time about a year ago, and received a slightly bemused reception, although my visit turned out to be very interesting and worthwhile.

This year I offered to give a lunchtime seminar, before going round to spend time with the various project teams in the laboratory.  I based my presentation on a summary of my research that I had prepared as a lecture last year for teaching in a Communication Studies unit at UWA.  My seminar was very well received, by an interested audience who proceeded to ask lots of good questions.  I definitely found that talking to people in the lab this year was even more fruitful than last year, because they had a better idea about where I was coming from and the direction of my own research.

I was encouraged by the response I received, and have since tried (although, thinking about it now, not tried hard enough) to set up some joint research with members of the lab.  I should really follow this up again, now that I am feeling more positive about my own research.

This year the British Society for Literature and Science conference was at Keele, and I had a particularly good time because I had arranged a panel with my friend from Canada, and therefore had someone to discuss all the papers and panels with, as well as someone to team up with for dinners and drinks.  Of course, we were both heavily jetlagged in opposite directions, so neither of us was exactly the life and soul of the party, but we had a nice time nonetheless.

The panel, Beauty/Aesthetics in Science and Literature, went really well, and people seemed to enjoy all of the papers.  It was lucky that we presented when we did, as John Bryden came up to me in the lunch break and introduced himself.  It turned out he was giving a paper about a dancing robot in a panel the following day.  I’d never have known this if John hadn’t told me, because only the paper titles were available in the programme.  Anyway, crisis averted, I went to the paper, and it sounded like an excellent robot

(Writing all of this so long after the date just reminds me that I really need to contact John again to ask him for more information about this robot!)

The conference also included excellent plenaries from Helen Small, Frank Close and Steven Connor.