Students

Student profile: Terence Broad (BSc Creative Computing)

Terence is in the second-year of BSc Creative Computing at Goldsmiths. His project, Mediated Perception, is currently shortlisted for DevArt, a competition run by Google and the Barbican Centre to source the best new digital art for the Digital Revolution exhibition.

How did you arrive at Goldsmiths?
After my art foundation in Newcastle I studied sculpture at Camberwell College of Arts, but I dropped out after a year. I was getting really interested in programming, and was frustrated with what I was being taught at college. I felt they were only teaching us about sculptors who made sculptures about sculpture. It was such a relief to come to Goldsmiths because I just wanted to get on and do stuff. In first year we made our own versions of Pong – it’s great that you can just get on with designing stuff that’s interesting.

What are you studying?
BSc Creative Computing is a combination of lectures and labs on core computer science (learning how to programme, and to build databases and websites) and creative computing, which is all about experimenting with graphics and audio. Things like building your own synthesiser and creating 3D graphics, but also looking at the maths behind how people perceive images and sound. I’ve always been interested in Photoshop, so in my first year at Goldsmiths I wanted to learn more about manipulating images, and ended up creating my own version of Photobooth for my end-of-year project (see video).


Terence’s Photobooth project

Tell us about your current project
Over the summer me and my flatmate got really excited about a new virtual reality headset called the Oculus Rift. They’re not available to the general public, so we had to pretend to be games developers to be able to get hold of one. My flatmate, who’s studying Photography at London College of Communication, wanted to use it to create a virtual art gallery. But I was more interested in discovering what it would be like if you could mess with people’s perceptions.

Instead of the user seeing a virtual reality, I attached two webcams to the front of the headset. By feeding these onto the VR screen the user gets a replica of their normal vision. And then once you’ve sorted that out, you can distort and manipulate the ‘reality’ that they see. I’ve been experimenting with using it as a synaesthesia simulator – using music to trigger visual effects like colour shifting, wobble, blurring and temporal layering. But you can also trigger perceptual distortions using head movement, changes in brightness, or the detection of motion and faces.

The low, medium & high audio frequencies control colour shifting, wobble, blurring and temporal layering.

Are there any real world uses for this?
I want to keep an open mind. There’s a lot of people working on augmented reality but it’s mostly about adding information like Twitter feeds, which isn’t that interesting. I’m much more interested in building things and then experimenting freely.

I saw a BBC documentary called The Creative Brain: How Insight Works that features a Dutch researcher who puts people in virtual reality environments where weird things happen, stuff that’s impossible in the real world, like objects floating. Then when the users do a creativity test afterwards, they score much higher than average. So letting people experience things differently for a short time could be beneficial. Maybe my mediated perception project could be a valuable experience. But, as I say, I really don’t know yet.

Have your tutors been supportive of your project?
Mick Grierson, who teaches the Creative Computing course, has been really supportive. He’s encouraging me to make the craziest things I can.

I’ve been working non-stop on this project for the past month or so, but three weeks ago I got very close to giving up. I broke the cameras by accidentally ripping a load of electronics of a circuit board with a hacksaw, and I just went crazy. I’d been working incredibly hard but I had nothing to show for it, so I was completely ready to give up. When I told Mick, he was really distraught and encouraged me to keep going. I pulled myself together, got back to work, and then two weeks later my project was chosen to feature in the DevArt competition! If I win first prize, Google and the Barbican Centre will give me £25,000 to develop my project for an exhibition that tours around the world.

www.terencebroad.com

Careers, Women in Computing

Open letter: to a new female student studying computing

by Dr Kate Devlin, Department of Computing

Dear ________,

Welcome to the world of computing! I hope it is all that you hoped. It may not be quite what you expected.

As you will no doubt already know, women are under-represented in computer science: that includes industry as well as academia. By taking this step you are helping to change things. As women, we consume technology. We use mobile phones, laptops, tablets, mp3 players. We are a voice on social media, we are comfortable and familiar with apps. We take digital photos, we upload videos and our writing is online. We are consumers. We can also be innovators.

You may have a few concerns about how you fit into a degree and a career in computing. When Belinda Parmar, founder of Little Miss Geek, went to talk to a class of 14 year old boys and girls about the tech industry, she asked them to draw a picture of someone in the IT industry. Most, inevitably, drew a stereotypical, overweight, geeky looking person with glasses. Every single member of that class, both boys and girls, drew a man.

Take it from me, though – that’s not really how it is. Sure, some of those types of people exist but most are‚ well‚ normal. The men I have encountered in my time as a computer science academic and a programmer have, pretty much overwhelmingly, been supportive and encouraging (there are a few exceptions, but then there are assholes in all walks of life). The problem is not, the men‚ per se. The problem is the biased set-up. The problem is the social expectation. The problem is the lack of opportunity. The problem is the stereotyping.

Women have a valuable role to play. If you’ve ever been told that there are few great women computer scientists, consider that it could be because only a few women have ever been given the chance. Since we were children, the opinions of others have influenced – subtly or unsubtly – how we dress, act, behave and work. Even if we actively shun these opinions we are still susceptible to the unrelenting messages so implicit in society about what our role should be. We learn, as girls, what we are supposed to like. We learn that if we digress from this stereotype then we face problems, not least that we will have to battle to be accepted.

I hope that it is not like this for you. I hope that the degree programme you’ve joined breaks those stereotypes and gives you exactly the same chances and opportunities that your male colleagues have. That is what we aim for as educators.

Women are behind the greatest inventions in computing: programming, compilers, wifi. Women are taking lead roles in massive tech companies – Sheryl Sandberg, chief of Facebook, and Marissa Mayer of Yahoo! to name two prominent figures. There is a long way still to go but by starting your career in computing you are already making a change. We can offer support: here at Goldsmiths we have a Women in Computing network, we offer bursaries, and we have a wide and varied intake from all walks of life who each bring their own valued perspective. Computing is a subject with wonderful opportunities. From programming to web design, from wearable technologies to gaming, and from robots to music, computing opens so many doors to the career of your choice.

You can shape the field of computing.  You don’t have to listen to the stereotypes or stick with the tried and tested. Think about what you want from technology ‚ and then go out and make it.

Dr Kate Devlin
Department of Computing

First published on Goldsmiths Academics

Staff profiles and activity, Women in Computing

Electronic music pioneer

As well as running the Creative Computing programme at Goldsmiths, Mick Grierson directs the Daphne Oram Collection, an archive of audio, code, photographs, scores and papers relating to the electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram.

Daphne Oram (1925 – 2003) was one of the central figures in the development of British experimental electronic music. As co-founder and first director of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, she is credited with the invention of a new form of sound synthesis – Oramics. Not only is this one of the earliest forms of electronic sound synthesis, it is noteworthy for being audiovisual in nature – i.e. the composer draws onto a synchronised set of ten 35mm film strips which overlay a series of photo-electric cells, generating electrical charges to control amplitude, timbre, frequency, and duration.

“The Oramics machine is a device of great importance to the development of British electronic music,” explains Mick Grierson. “It’s a great shame that Daphne’s contribution has never been fully recognised, but now that we have the machine at the Science Museum, it’s clear for all to see that she knew exactly how music was going to be made in the future, and created the machine to do it.”

 

News, Publications, Staff profiles and activity

‘Alan Turing: His Work and Impact’ wins award for academic publishing

Prof Mark Bishop has won a top award for academic publishing for his contribution to Alan Turing: his Work and Impact, which won the R.R. Hawkins award at the 2013 Prose Awards.

Extract:
In popular culture, the great English polymath Alan Turing is perhaps best remembered for his work on the BOMBE, the giant electro-mechanical devices that were used for Ultra secret intelligence work carried out at Bletchley Park in World War II. This work would help break the German Enigma machine’s encrypted war-time signals; work so valuable it subsequently led Churchill to reflect that “it was thanks to Ultra that we won the war”.

In my area of research – Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) – Turing is better known for the seminal reflections on machine intelligence outlined in his 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence.

This paper focussed on the core philosophical question: “can a machine think?” This is a question which, in its literal form, Turing famously described as being “too meaningless to deserve discussion”.

Continue reading ‘Alan Turing: His Work and Impact’ wins award for academic publishing →

Staff profiles and activity

The computer game to solve a biological puzzle

A computer game hoping to solve one of biology’s biggest mysteries is being developed by academics at Goldsmiths, University of London and Imperial College London.

Protein docking is one of the big unsolved biological problems that DockIt, the game currently under development, will aim to solve. Central to a protein’s biological activity is that it often docks onto another protein, forming a molecular structure, but the 3D shape of this remains difficult to model.

Understanding the docking of proteins can have major benefits to science – including improved knowledge of all cellular processes, and the practical application of drug design.

Read the full article here.

 

News, Staff profiles and activity

An algorithm walks into a bar and orders a new joke: Prof Simon Colton on Radio 4

Professor Simon Colton leads the Computational Creativity Group here at Goldsmiths (based in the Department of Computing). Last week he appeared on BBC Radio 4 in comedian, Natalie Haynes’ documentary about computational creativity and humour. She writes:

Simon Colton of Goldsmiths College showed me how his algorithms search the day’s newspapers to calculate, from the headlines, whether it’s a happy day or a sad one. The programme’s mood is thus decided, and it can write something akin to poetry by picking key words from the newspaper articles themselves. Mr Colton’s computer can also turn Twitter into verse, finding short chunks of prose which fit the mood he’s chosen, then picking tweets which rhyme and scan and putting them in a meaningful order.

You can read Natalie’s full piece in The Independant here.

Women in Computing

Interview with Dr Rebecca Fiebrink

You’ve joined Goldsmiths from Princeton University. What made you decide to move here?
I came to Goldsmiths because I’m excited by the focus on high-quality interdisciplinary teaching and research that I see within the Department of Computing and around the College. I think Goldsmiths will be a fertile place to do my research, which intersects with music, computer science, machine learning, design, and human-computer interaction.

Working here, I get to be surrounded by colleagues, collaborators, and mentors who are doing high-impact research in related areas. Furthermore, I get to be a part of teaching students who come here to study things like Music Computing and Creative Computing. This is a really unique place!

If you could you sum up your research in one sentence, what would it be?
Through my research in computer science and human-computer interaction, I create technologies that enable people to express themselves more effectively and in new ways, that help them discover and exercise their creative potential, and that improve their sense of efficacy in their interactions with computers.

You’ve worked on a number 1 iTunes app (I Am T-Pain). What did you learn from this experience and do you have any tips for staff or students who are perhaps trying to work on an app?
There’s so much effort and attention that goes into making an app like this work. I think that implementing the ‘technical’ part of an app (e.g. getting the phone to play sound and tune your voice in real time, for example) can be pretty easy in comparison to getting the design right and communicating the app’s potential value to the user— not to mention getting the idea right in the first place! Of course, having a good team around you also helps. I was one small piece of a fantastic team of people at Smule, whose engineers, project managers, graphic designers, marketing people, etc. knew how to go about answering these questions (and also put in the long hours to pull it all off).

My advice for anyone wanting to build a successful is to develop their ability to think and act effectively across all of these questions: You need strong technical skills to make it all work, but you also need to start with a good idea, to develop and refine that idea over time, and to build a worthwhile experience for the user. Fortunately, in the Department of Computing, I think we’re teaching Goldsmiths students all of these skills!

It seems that you’re quite the musician (you’ve performed as the principal flutist at the Timmins Symphony Orchestra). What artist, band or performance should people look out for in 2014?
Actually, two of the concert series I’m most excited about this year are happening very close to Goldsmiths. First, Goldsmiths Computing’s Embodied Audio-Visual Interaction Group (EAVI) has an ongoing concert series at the Amersham Arms, in which EAVI faculty, students, and friends will be playing some great live electronic music. The next concert will be this Thursday, 9 January (doors open 8pm).

Second, Goldsmiths is hosting the New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) conference 30 June–3 July 2014. As part of the conference, we’ll be having a bunch of concerts and club performances of experimental, interactive, electronic music, which will be open to the public.

Beyond Goldsmiths, I’m also looking forward to going to some concerts by St Paul’s Sinfonia, a chamber orchestra based in Greenwich and Lewisham. They’ve got some terrific programming coming up, with a nice mixture of classical and contemporary repertoire.

On a personal note…

Where is your favourite place to eat in London?
I’ve eaten in so many good places so far, so this is a tough call! Maybe the London Particular?

What are your new year’s resolutions?
I’m resolving to 1) Learn more British idioms, slang, and food names so I’m not perpetually confused when people tell me things like how knackered they are after the knees-up and all they want is to eat a jacket potato and some spotted dick. 2) Spend some quality time out and about, getting to know London. 3) Learn to cook decent Indian food.
This interview with Rebecca originally appeared in Goldsmiths Staff News

 

Creativity, independence and learning by doing.