Category Archives: Staff profiles and activity

News, Staff profiles and activity, Students

BSc Games student presents swarm game at major AI conference

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A third year paper by BSc Games Programming student Michael King has been accepted for inclusion in the 2017 AISB Convention. In this post he and his supervisor discuss Michael’s work.

Dr Mohammad Majid Al-Rifaie, Lecturer in Natural Computing

Throughout history, nature has been a source of inspiration to mathematicians, physicists and technologists. In computer science, for example, swarm intelligence is inspired by ant colonies, bird flocks and fish shoals, where interactions between individual members (or agents) create an ‘intelligent’ global behaviour. Evolutionary computation subjects algorithms to mutation and natural selection, resulting in ever-fitter generations of ‘child’ algorithms.

In my third year module Natural Computing, students learn about nature-inspired techniques, and then apply them to real-life challenges such as medical imaging, protein folding, statistical analysis, economics, art generation and analysis, and engineering.

Following Michael’s choice of Natural Computing as one of his third year modules, he decided to continue working on what he has learnt. Now as part of his final year project, he has prepared an elegant academic paper which has been accepted for presentation and publication for the AISB 2017 Convention in AI & Game Symposium.

Michael is likely to be the only undergraduate student who will be presenting his work amongst PhD students, researchers, and professors. The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB), which hosts the event, is the oldest Artificial Intelligence society in the world, and the largest in the UK, so this is quite an achievement!

Michael King

My paper represents the theoretical side of my third year Natural Computing project, a virtual reality drawing game. In this game, the user creates a drawing within a VR space – and then small spherical agents recreate it. For this to work, the game uses two algorithms, Dispersive Flies Optimisation and A* Pathfinding, to build organic-looking structures based on a simple input.

  1. Dispersive Flies Optimisation, developed by my supervisor Mohammad Majid Al-Rifaie, is an open source algorithm that mimics how flies swarm around food. I’ve used DFO to identify the next place for an agent to explore. [Download DFO]
  2. A* Pathfinding is an efficient and reliable algorithm for finding a path from one place (or ‘node’) to another. For my project, I modified the algorithm so that each node was actually an agent. This, coupled with DFO, allowed structures to be built in a rather organic and unique looking way.

swarm1

In the two pictures above, the green spheres are agents that are still moving, while the red spheres are agents that are locked in place and form the structure. The larger yellow sphere is the target/food for the agents and the red cube is the ‘best’ position for the agents to start building from.

Related links

Dispersive Flies Optimisation is an open-source algorithm. Download DFO here

Events, News, Staff profiles and activity, Women in Computing

Win Science Museum ROBOTS exhibition tickets

We’re giving blog subscribers four free tickets to the Science Museum’s latest exhibition ROBOTS, which runs from February to September 2017

COMPETITION NOW CLOSED

ROBOTS takes you on an incredible journey spanning five centuries, illustrated with robotic artefacts from around the globe, from a 16th century mechanised monk to the very latest in robotic technology straight from the lab, and some of film’s most iconic robotic creations.

Focusing on why they exist rather than on how they work, this blockbuster exhibition explores the ways robots mirror humanity and the insights they offer into our ambitions, desires and position in a rapidly changing world.

We are especially excited about the exhibition, as it includes Robotic Skin by Dr Perla Maiolino, one of our research and teaching fellows. Tickets are £15 (£13 concessions) – or free to the four lucky winners!

COMPETITION NOW CLOSED

Closing date: 11pm Sunday 5 March 2017. We’ll pick four new subscribers at random, and email them on Monday 6 March 2017 with details of how to claim their free ticket.

Inspiration, News, Staff profiles and activity, Students, Videos, Women in Computing

Report from Goldsmiths’ Sex Tech Hackathon

room-insta

Back in December 2016, student society Hacksmiths teamed up with Goldsmiths’ Dr Kate Devlin to run the first ever Sex Tech Hackathon.  In this blog post, Creative Computing student Kevin Lewis reports what happened.

Kevin Lewis
Kevin Lewis

Hackathons are invention marathons – where attendees build creative solutions to a challenge set by organisers. One of our tutors, Dr Kate Devlin, wanted to run a hackathon around her area of research – artificial sexuality and the ethics of artificial intelligence – and we couldn’t wait to jump in and help.

Running creative events is not new to Hacksmiths (Goldsmiths’ student-run tech society). Every year we run several large hackathons, but this felt different. We had an exceptional group of attendees from a much wider range of backgrounds than ever before at something we’ve run, and with it came a range of experiences and viewpoints which made the projects at Sex Tech Hack all unique and valuable in their own ways.

Bop It
One team converted children’s toy ‘Bop It’ into a remote control for smart sex toys

For two days we had over 50 talented developers, designers and industry experts join us in St James Hatcham to build innovative new sex technology.

Only in Goldsmiths would you assemble a group of individuals so awesome that they create a combined 14 projects which are so different from one another.

From our very own Dr Sarah Wiseman building a physical computing project to improve communication between partners around kinks, to a group of students with a 3D-printed fist whose vibration intensity changes based on historical data from multinational finance company Goldman Sachs.

No, really, we saw it all – generative erotica, beat-controlled vibrators and a cryptocurrency based on ‘pleasing’ the network. We had quite a few prizes, but the overall best was awarded by our panel of judges to Lovepad – a soft robot specifically designed for non-binary users. The hackers mixed their own silicon in the church over the weekend and it was the more weird and wonderful thing we could have had.

We’ll be running this event again towards the end of 2017 – we want to make it even bigger and better than last time (not that size matters in the slightest). If you want to register for updates, head over to sexhack.tech.

Events, Staff profiles and activity, Women in Computing

Science Showoff cabaret returns this March

stand-up

What happens if you fill a pub with clever and lovely people then invite loads of amazing Goldsmiths scientists to entertain them?

Join us on Wednesday 15 March for a chaotic science cabaret in the Amersham Arms, featuring a line-up of Goldsmiths experts who will delve into the weird and wonderful side of computer science and psychology.

Expect laughs, serial killers, Brad Pitt, a high-tech smart glove, facts that sound totally made up but aren’t, and loads of terrible PowerPoints. Compered by comedian Steve Cross. The line-up:

  • Mark d’Inverno (Computing): Why machines can never be creative – the history and future of creativity
  • Hadeel Ayoub (Computing): Let’s have a talk… glove to glove
  • Sarah Wiseman (Computing): People are weird: Why we shouldn’t experiment on students
  • Caoimhe McAnena (Psychology): The psychology of the Croydon Cat Killer
  • Ashok Jansari (Psychology): What’s the difference between Brad Pitt and a Super-cop?
  • Robert Chapman (Psychology): Why science reporting isn’t funny

When: 6:30pm for 7pm start, Wednesday 15 March 2017
Where: Amersham Arms, 388 New Cross Road, SE14 6TY
Tickets: £6 (£5 for Goldsmiths staff/students). Buy online

Part of British Science Week. All proceeds from ticket sales will go to CARA, the Centre for At-Risk Academics.

EAVI, Events, News, Staff profiles and activity, Videos, Women in Computing

EVENT: Film Sound Performance in Brunel Tunnel Shaft

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A festival of experimental sound, film and performance – co-curated by Goldsmiths and London College of Communication – takes place in Rotherhithe this December.

On Saturday 10 and Sunday 11 December, the dark and uncanny Brunel Tunnel Shaft space hosts a festival of experimental sound, film and performance, curated by Goldsmiths’ Embodied Audiovisual Interaction and LCC’s Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice groups.

Where: Brunel Museum, Railway Ave, Rotherhithe, London SE16 4LF
When: 7pm Saturday 10 December // 7pm Sunday 11 December
Tickets: Saturday £10 // Sunday £10 // Both nights £18

Saturday 10 December

Guy Sherwin >> ‘Sound Cuts’ – 4 projector performance
Sherwin’s film works often use serial forms and live elements, and engage with light, time and sound as fundamental to cinema. Sherwin was guest curator of ‘Film in Space’ an exhibition of expanded cinema at Camden Arts Centre. His films have screened at  Hayward Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, Tate Modern and Tate Britain.

Alice Kemp >> live art performance
Kemp works with dream-image-language and subtle trance states to create live-art performances and audio compositions. Her practice involves composition, public and private rituals, doll-making, drawing and painting. Her performances have been described as hypnotic, intense, unnerving, beautiful, dark and reflective, aggressive, confusing, meditative, pointless, brave, sensual, baffling, delicate, and absurd.

Simon Katan >> ‘Conditional Love’ – participatory networked device performance
Katan is a digital artist with a background in music and a strong preoccupation with games and play. His work incorporates hidden mechanisms, emergent behaviour, paradox, self-reference, inconsistency, abstract humour, absurdity and wonder. He is a researcher and lecturer at Goldsmiths’ Embodied Audio Visual Interactions group.

Heather Ross >> Domestic Dawn Chorus
Ross is concerned with how human experience is mediated, by exploring the tensions between reality and representation. How do the technologies of reproduction and representation affect the way we understand the world through our senses? Dealing with themes of alienation, melancholy, remoteness, disembodiment and longing, her work conjoins realities and fictions, to convey ambiguous environments, spaces and forms.

Claire Undy & Bill Leslie >> Video work
Claire Undy is an artist and curator, working largely with performance, video and time-based media. She graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 2016, and co-founded the curatorial project Skelf. Bill Leslie is a visual artist whose work draws on Modern abstract sculpture, 1950s B-movies, as well as Russian Constructivism and modern architecture. Concerned with the relationship of sculpture and the photographic image, his works develop through transformations of scale, context and media.

Sunday 11 December

Lee Patterson >> Amplified devices and processes
Working across various forms, including improvised music, field recording, film soundtrack and installation, Patterson attempts to understand his surroundings through different ways of listening. Characterised by revealing subliminal and barely audible sound materials within commonplace things, his unorthodox approach to generating sound has led to collaborations with a host of international artists and musicians.

Áine O’Dwyer >> DJ set with field recordings
With a background combining Irish traditional music and contemporary performance, Áine O’Dwyer creates multi-layered, experiential work that begs questions of historicism and the social proximities of the everyday, as well as the presumed nature of records themselves. For this DJ set, she will play her collection of field recordings, drawing on her knowledge of the acoustics of the Brunel Tunnel from her two year residency there.

Howlround >> Live tape manipulation on 3 reel-to-reel machines, tape loops stretching across the space…
Howlround create recordings and performances entirely from manipulating natural acoustic sounds on vintage reel-to-reel tape machines, with additional reverb or electronic effects strictly forbidden – a process that has seen their work compared to William Basinski, Philip Jeck, Morton Feldman and the sculptures of Rachel Whiteread.

Wajid Yaseen & Anthony Elliot >> Oscillators, Extended vocal performance, drawn circuits
Anthony & Wajid’s ‘Crossing Lines’ recently opened the Tempting Failure festival. An improvised vocal and sound-drawing performance, it involved Wajid Yaseen’s experiments in extended vocal techniques with Anthony Elliott’s sculpture-sound-printing rheostat to explore a balance between all-gate square wave generators that allow on-off vocal input. A contrast in frequency and sound texture generated by the two performers and two systems was suspended between the systematic and the unplanned.

Where: Brunel Museum, Railway Ave, Rotherhithe, London SE16 4LF
When: 7pm Saturday 10 December // 7pm Sunday 11 December
Tickets: Saturday £10 // Sunday £10 // Both nights £18

Events, Staff profiles and activity, Whitehead Lecture Series, Women in Computing

Goldsmiths Computing events in Nov-Dec 2016

november-events

This November promises to be a month full of events – most of which are free (or cheap) and open to everyone. Here’s what’s coming up…

6.30pm Thursday 3 November
Goldsmiths Showoff: Strange days
Comedy and cabaret in the pub featuring a line-up of Goldsmiths experts including Kate Devlin on the algorithms of online dating, Sylvia Pan on virtual humans, Sarah Wiseman on the quantified self, and Dee Harding on so-called experts.

4.30pm Monday 7 November
Lecture: What can Deep Neural Networks learn from music?
Douglas Eck (Google Brain) discusses Magenta, a project to generate music, video, images and text using machine intelligence.

4pm Wednesday 9 November
Lecture: Linguistic and perceptual colour categories
Christoph Witzle (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen) discusses his work investigating how linguistic colour categories may be related to colour perception.

4pm Wednesday 16 November
Lecture: Cultural Computing: Looking for Japan
Renowned media artist Naoko Tosa discusses the role of information technology in enabling new understandings of a multicultural world.

4pm Thu 17 Nov NEW!
Lecture: The Hearing Body
Talk on using of sound to change people´s experiences of their body and the surrounding space, as well as its impact on emotion and behaviour.

6.30pm Thursday 17 November NEW!
Talk and performance: Unreal-time improv and actual-timeline composition
Composer and improviser Panos Ghikas discusses his research developing a live performance interface for navigation through audio-timelines with the purpose of re-sequencing audio gestures.

Friday 18 – Sunday 20 November NEW!
I am human: precarious journeys
Featuring interactive design by Goldsmiths Computing and music by Brian Eno, Sue Clayton’s multimedia installation traces the journeys of refugees as they navigate the perils of the sea, the national border and the camp.

Sat 19 – Sun 20 November
AdventureX: Narrative Games Convention
Now in its sixth year, AdventureX is a free event bringing together developers & gamers with a passion for interactive storytelling. Encompassing everything from retro pixel-hunts to rich, branching narratives, AdventureX is celebration of creativity, indie development and geek culture.

3pm Thursday 22 November NEW!
Innovation Lecture Series: Kate Russell (BBC Click)
Kate Russell writes about technology, gaming and the Internet reports for BBC technology programme Click. Her book Working the Cloud is aims to help businesses better use the Internet.

4pm Wednesday 23 November
Characterising human imagination through art and science
Sheldon Brown (Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination) shows artworks that aim to engage components of cognition that make up “the imagination”.

4pm Wednesday 30 November
Lecture: Attention and cross-cultural differences
Eirini Mavritsaki (Birmingham City Uni) discusses her use of computational models to observe differences in visual attention in East Asian and European American cultures.

4pm Wednesday 8 December
Lecture: Composer, Performer, Listener
Jason Freeman (Georgia Tech) explores real-time music notation, live coding, laptop ensembles, mobile technology, and open-form scores.

Friday 17 – Saturday 18 December
Sex Tech Hack NEW!
A 24-hour hackathon exploring sex tech hardware, interfaces and apps, working on the themes of intimacy, companionship and sexuality.

Monday 19 – Tuesday 20 December
Conference: Love & Sex with Robots
In this 2-day conference, academics and industry professionals discuss their work on intelligent sex tech, teledildonics, ethics, gender and sex robots.

News, Staff profiles and activity, Women in Computing

Goldsmiths project gets more girls into computing

girls-in-computing

Lecturer Dr Sarah Wiseman reports on a Goldsmiths initiative to get more girls studying and working in computing.

An issue common to computer science departments throughout the world is the gender inequality in the student population. Almost wherever you look, the majority of students are male. For the past 10 years, just 15% of students accepted to computer science degree programmes were women – though here at Goldsmiths, the figures are a more healthy 31%.

To tackle this inequality, there are many initiatives being set up to try and encourage more women to consider computer science as an option for further education. These can range from peer support groups for women in university (such as the Hoppers in Edinburgh) to dedicated programs aimed at educating young girls (for example Black Girls Code) and women (for example Code Liberation).

Not all initiatives are successful however. Do you remember Hack A Hair Dryer? IBM set out to encourage women into computing and engineering by suggesting they create things using their hairdryers – a message that could easily be considered pretty patronising.

This year at Goldsmiths, we wanted to approach the problem by doing something that would benefit both boys and girls who were might be interested in computer science; we wanted to provide school children with strong female role models.

We decided to run a series of workshops that would do just that, whilst also showcasing the exciting and diverse range of topics that come under the term “computer science”. We invited 100 pupils aged between 12 and 15 from schools within the local area to come to Goldsmiths and get involved in one of four different computer science-related workshops run by women within the department.

celebrities

The first workshop looked at problem solving. The aim of this session was to give the kids an idea about the types of puzzles you can solve in computer science. The pupils learnt about encryption by sending a chained up, locked box file between groups. The contents of the box, decided by the students at the time, ranged from Justin Beiber’s new album title to nuclear missile launch codes (both equally sensitive information). Other tasks included arranging celebrities in alphabetical order for the red carpet (using sorting algorithms) and designing a city layout using graph theory.

girls-in-306

In other workshops, children programmed Arduinos to send Morse code, and created a servo-powered fortune teller. In our Game Design workshop the children considered how games can be designed to be fun and engaging, and designed their own board games and rule sets. The process isn’t as easy as it seems, no matter how many coloured pens and tokens you have available to you!

The final workshop looked at machine learning, and how you can use the webcam on your computer to create an instrument. Rebecca Fiebrink showed pupils how to use her fantastic Wekinator tool to create drum machines controlled by moving in front of the webcam. The noise from that lesson was quite incredible, from the strange and wonderful noises coming from the instruments, and from the students’ excited conversations while they learnt about machine learning.

At Goldsmiths, we want 50% of our Computing students to be women. And one of the ways of doing this is by working with the generation of children who are just beginning to think about what they want to do at GCSE and ‘A’ level. This project engaged 100 kids – and we’re looking forward to meeting more of them next year.

Thanks to Harris Academy Peckham, Harris Girls’ Academy, Eltham Hill School, Streatham and Clapham High School and Chislehurst School for Girls.