purplecat

"Bring your outdoorsy clothes we might get lucky with the weather," Matryoshka said in one of her emails before this trip.

I therefore packed my walking boots. I considered packing my walking sticks but wasn't convinced they were worth the trouble of trying to get into the carry on luggage. Once here, we consulted the weather and decided that Tuesday was the best day for a walk. Matryoshka then picked us a 13km (allegedly) walk to the next town, past a Vikinghytten where she promised there would be waffles. I murmured a bit about the lack of walking sticks but she insisted we would take the funicular railway up to the plateau and, once up there, "it's very flat". It was only later it occurred to me that, being nearly 10 years younger than I am, she might not have realised I value my sticks more on the down than on the up.

Anyway we got up onto the plateau where the walking was pleasant and easy albeit with a bit more up than Matryoshka had anticipated.



Despite the fact the sign on that cairn reads Vikinghytten, that house is not the Vikinghytten. When we got to the Vikinghytten which was actually off to the left of that cairn, it was resolutely shut and there were no waffles to be seen. Also, the toilets were locked.

However we continued onwards and upwards a bit following a nicely visible line of cairns. Then we took a turn off this path and things became a bit more complicated. It's a long time since I've been on a walk without the combination of solid GPS and an ordnance survey map. I had managed to persuade Matryoshka to load the route to Indre Arna, on her phone and we relied on this quite heavily in what followed as the path repeatedly disappeared leaving us to strike out in roughly the right direction across the bog until we picked it up again.

Then we hit the down which was both muddy and steep and variably pathless, sufficiently so that when we came out on the road and then missed the turning back onto the path we decided to stick with the road which only took us a little out of our way. Shortcuts make long delays, we reassured ourselves, and we were certainly travelling about twice as fast on the road as we had been on the path.



This is the Strava analysis of the walk showing elevation against our pace. The point where we hit the road is fairly obvious.


We ended the walk in a very empty but very clean train station with a very space age toilet but no bar. We waited 30 minutes for a train and 10 minutes later we were back in Bergen, where we went our separate ways, showered and then met up again for burgers and beer. We were both clearly a bit dehydrated when we compared notes this morning, but neither was too stiff though Matryoshka had sore ankles and I have slight numbness in one big toe.





Allegedly this was a research meeting and, to be fair, we did plan out a textbook though we got side-tracked today into writing a paper so the textbook plan hasn't even made it as far as an outline document.

Today was full of talks. The theme of the workshop is Normative Reasoning for AI, but some of the talks seemed more like logic (or theorem proving) theory talks - perhaps that is a natural consequence of mixing communities. I'm talking tomorrow morning on the UK Highway Code - I do so because the organiser suggested it, but he's now denying responsibility and says he's happy for me to talk about verifying machine ethics if I want to. This is tempting. I have a much more solid body of work on machine ethics than I do on the Highway Code. On the other hand the Highway Code talk is now written and cheese is being served in 10 minutes - so if I start writing a talk on machine ethics I will miss out on cheese. There are gaps in the schedule, so I will tell the room tomorrow morning that I could give a "lightening talk" on machine ethics if they really want one, and then the assembled worthies can decide.

This is the last travel picspam for a while I promise. I was there to deliver a lecture on Verifying Autonomous Ethical Systems to Matryoshka's Machine Ethics class.

( Pictures under the cut )

More photos of Delft

( Under the Cut )

The weekend before last, I flew out for a one day workshop on AI and Ethics as part of the American Assocation for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conference. I will probably blog about that in more detail soon, but I've suddenly ended up on the radar of Liverpool University's Corporate Communications unit (I think because of my two appearances on Radio Merseyside making soothing noises about the imminent rise of the machines) and so they want me to run something past them first for potential publicity generating reasons.

Those following along on Facebook got a front row seat of my 4am discovery (I had jet lag) that all my flights home had been cancelled since they went through New York JFK and the resulting conversion of a crisis into a minor irritation when, in an entirely unexpected fit of competence and efficiency the departmental purchasing team managed to get everything rebooked onto a wonderfully empty British Airways flight. The minor irritation was was the 8 hour wait to check-in at Austin airport and the frustration of knowing I had just purchased a special "Priority Pass" card that would have let me spend those 8 hours in a first class lounge if only I had been able to get a boarding card and get through security to reach the lounge.

( Photos of the Hotel under the cut )

The workshop was interesting, and certainly worth attending. It would probably have been more sensible to stay the whole week and go to the conference as well but I have another paper deadline looming.

A couple of weeks ago I once again enjoyed the "sensible arrangements" (seemingly limitless alcohol on an honesty system) at Schloss Dagstuhl. It occurs to me to marvel, slightly, at the way the Dagstuhl staff ruthlessly organise us. Seminar leads endlessly entreat us not to be late for lunch, supper, morning coffee or afternoon cake and there is the ritual of writing your abstract by hand into the book of abstracts.

This was a particularly successful Dagstuhl from my point of view and I came away with an invitation to give a talk, a revelation about a paper two of us were currently working on, discussions that may lead to two further papers, not to mention a list of references to check out that may be useful for my work.

The seminar itself was slightly derailed when a logician* announced that he couldn't possibly discourse sensibly on the topic without a formal definition of coordination. A working group was set up to come up with such a definition with... moderate success? Accounts suggest the working group spent a lot of time not talking to each other or, at least, all working individually on their own and then having 5 minutes intense argument at the end of the session. I rather liked one of the definitions they came up with but apparently no one else did.

There were three working groups in total but the other two quickly combined, together with some refugees from the "let's define coordination" working group. We decided to tackle the rather easier question of how you should go about engineering a solution to a coordination problem. We were aided in this by the discovery that our meeting room had an entire wall that functioned as a white board** with which we (well I, because I appropriated the whiteboard pens) had a lot of fun.

( Pictures under the Cut )

*I was tempted to write a Russian logician since most good logicians in Computer Science are Russian. However this particular logician was Bulgarian with a Ukranian surname (and a family history involving the White Army) who was about to move from Denmark to Sweden. So I'll just go with "a logician".

**This probably also counts as a sensible arrangement.

Over the summer I attended another Dagstuhl Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems.

( More under the Cut including a lot of photos of Bernkastel-Kues )

I was really just in Taiwan for the conference, arriving the evening before it started and going directly to the airport from the venue when it ended so I didn't have any time for sight-seeing. However I did take a couple of photos.

( Under the Cut )

My hotel was very western and charged accordingly. But elsewhere we were all amazed how cheap things were. In the "expensive" food court below the Taipei 101 where I had lunch every day, I could get a four course meal for the equivalent of £2.50. Similarly the bus I caught to take me to the airport (roughly a 40 minute drive along motoways) also cost £2.50. The conference banquet was a nine course meal with no rice or noodle dishes. We were told that this was because it was an expensive dinner and to have served rice or noodles would have suggested they couldn't afford to feed us properly.

Most of my other impessions are very fragmentary; glimpses of other people's lives as we were ferried to and from conference events and too brief to really draw conclusions from. Early in the morning you could see the staff in the little workshops the bus drove past, all lined up and standing to attention as their manager gave them their instructions for the day. Everywhere there was evidence of cheap labour, from the fact that all the bus seats had clean antimacassars on them which were presumably replaced and washed regularly. All the hoardings surrounding building works were decorated with hanging baskets of plants which were watered every morning. Every road crossing (at least in the posh business area where the conference was) was accompanied by a traffic policeman who would blow his whistle and direct commuters and traffic. The traffic itself, reminded me most of Italian traffic with hundreds of apparently suicidal moped riders of every kind from businessmen in suits, to teenage boys with their girlfriends riding pillion, through little old ladies going shopping. Almost ubiquitous piped Western classical music seemed to follow us wherever we went. At first I thought this was a particular obsession with Vivaldi's Four Seasons but it turned out to be a little more wide-ranging than that, but I've no idea what this signified beyond that places like westernised hotels, airports, conference centres and prestige shopping malls considered it appropriate muzak.

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