There were giants in those days

The UCNC conference series is one I try to attend most years, but I don't always make it.  I made it this year for three reasons: my team got four papers accepted, I was running the TEMC workshop at the conference, aaaaand the conference venue is a 2 hour drive from the Kennedy Space Centre.

I found some other delegates at the conference who wanted to visit (including someone who had a hire car!), so this morning four of us piled into the car, and drove down the coast.

It started with a small forest of rockets near the entrance:

I had been raving about seeing a Saturn V.  One of the group saw the rocket on its side, and asked if that was it.  No, I said, much too small! 

Gemini twins: the early capsules were so small, they needed tiny astronauts...

We had a quick look at a few exterior exhibits, but I made a beeline to the bus line for the Apollo/Saturn V centre.  We were led through some exhibits:

the Apollo landing control room

And then, finally, the reason for being here.

the Saturn V first stage rocket nozzles, each over 12ft (3.7m) in diameter

It's indoors, so it's hard to get a feel for the sheer size of this thing, 363ft (111m) long/tall.

view from the bottom

View from the top.  The very top component is the launch escape system.  The conical part at the bottom of this covers the command module, the only part of this behemoth that returns to Earth.  The command module is about the same size as one of the first stage rocket nozzles..

Apollo 14 command module

After marvelling at this monster (and probably annoying my travelling companions with my gushing about remembering the moon landing, and what at least I think are interesting facts about the rockets), and then having a not-that-inspiring lunch in the cafeteria, we returned to the rest of the exhibition near the entrance.

The other main exhibit is the Atlantis shuttle.  The entrance has the main fuel tank and SRBs on display: they look quite small after the Saturn V.

Shuttle launch tanks.

We could then get up close with Atlantis; again, it feels small.  It is good to know that we can go into space in something less huge than a Saturn V.

The closest I'll get to being a shuttle pilot.

We then had a "shuttle launch experience", cleverly done to shake us about with the illusion of increased g forces on launch.  Astronauts say this is the most realistic launch simulation they have experienced: note the use of "simulation", though.

There were many other fun exhibits and activities, plus several merchandising outlets.  I bought a plushy Apollo command module and a NASA mug.

On the way back, we completed our USA experience by stopping for dinner in a diner.

What a day!  Flying home tomorrow.

UCNC day 5

The final day of the conference.  Next year, in South Korea!

After the business meeting, where we heard exciting details of next year's venue, we had the second half of the Reaction Systems workshop.  We had four talks on systems augmented in different ways, and how they could then be applied to model particular classes of problems.

Then after lunch was the second half of the quantum computing workshop, with talks on quantum finite automata and quantum channel certification.

The conference concluded with a final session of three contributed talks, on extracting barcodes from genomes, a robot relocation algorithm, and tile self-assembly.

In the evening, a small group of us went to a restaurant I'd heard of, but never visited: the Cheesecake Factory.  As well as cheesecakes (so delicious, but spoiled for choice, so we got a different piece each, and kept rotating them around the table), there were also great savoury main courses.  Yum. I ate too much.

UCNC day 4

Today started with the second half of the TEMC (Theoretical and Experimental Material Computing) workshop that I was running.  This comprised a variety of tutorials on various aspects of Material Computing.

After coffee, Christine Heitsch gave a keynote on the use of combinatoric methods to analyse RNA secondary structures.  The aim is for the mathematical analysis to provide biological insights, and for the biological problems to be a spur for developing new mathematics.  A win-win collaboration.

After lunch was the inaugural Rozenberg award lecture.  The first winner was Jaarko Kari, and he gave us a lovely tour of his work on cellular automata in terms of multidimensional symbolic dynamics.

The final session of this penultimate day was a session of contributed presentations, covering DNA tiling, memristive neural networks, and a card-based security protocol.

UCNC day 3

Midway through the week-long UCNC conference, today we had two great talks, a group photo, and the conference outing.

First up, Mika Hirvensalo gave a (remote) presentation on "41 years of quantum computing" as an introduction to the QC workshop to come on Friday.  The "41 years" refers to Feynmann's 1982 paper of simulating quantum physics.  Of course, quantum mechanics itself is somewhat older than that, but Feynmann was arguably the first to consider it as the basis for a computational use.  Mika's talks covered a variety of historical themes: quantum computing itself, from von Neumann's (pre-Shannon) definition of quantum entropy, via Feynmann, the Deutsch and Shor algorithms, and more recent work on quantum complexity theory; some pre-history of quantum physics itself, starting with Young's two slit experiment; and practical milestones in building (small, noisy) quantum computers, from 2 bit NMR, via ion traps and photons, D-Wave's annealer, to qubit circuit machines.  A fascinating perspective.

Next up, Lila Kari gave a keynote on using mathematical analyses of DNA sequences to investigate environmental adaptations of extremophile genomes.  There was a lot of fascinating detail here about the biology of the bugs, and how to analyse them.  I really loved the use of the "chaos game" algorithm to turn a genome sequence into a 2D fractal plot, where differences and similarities are clearly apparent on visual inspection.

We moved outside into the warm Florida sunshine for a photograph. (The locals kept apologising for the bad weather: although it was sunny, it was "only" in the low 20s (Celsius), which as far as I was concerned is perfect weather!)  In olden days a conference photograph was a formal affair, all lined up with a proper photographer taking the picture.  Nowadays, loosely group everyone on a convenient staircase, snag a passer-by to be the photographer, and snap a few pictures on a smartphone.

Then off to the conference outing, to the "old" town of St. Augustine.  The campus is deserted this week, because it is spring break; St Augustine was packed, for similar reasons.  But we had a good walk round, enjoying the old town (which looked suspiciously new in places), the fort, the shore, and some key lime pie.

the old fort

panoramic view: there were fewer people here, probably because it was quite breezy and nicely cool

a view across the bay

trees in the town centre, draped in Spanish moss; beautiful

UCNC day 2

The second day of the UCNC conference started with a keynote by Yukiko Yamauchi on "Distributed computation by mobile robots".  Unfortunately she couldn't be here in person, but one thing Covid has enabled is remote presentations.  Lots of interesting ideas about what shape patterns swarms of robots can make given certain constraints.

The other keynote was by Eric Goles, on "Unconventional CA models".  These included models based on inspiration from fungi, with controllable "pores" controlling the flow of information, and models for getting consensus with local rules.

The rest of the day was taken up by a Reaction Systems workshop, and a couple of contributed papers.  I confess I missed some of this, as a colleague and I went out to put some flesh on a research proposal that we had started collaborating on over Zoom.  Covid might have enabled much more collaboration over Zoom, but nothing beats sitting down together over a piece of paper and brainstorming in person.

Off now to the conference dinner.

UCNC day 1

It's the first day of Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation 2023 conference.

It started off with a great keynote by Thomas Bäck, titled "On the automatic optimisation of problem-specific optimisation heuristics gleaned from nature".  Many population-based optimisation algorithms are essentially variations on a theme, with different parameter settings.  Rather than invent yet another variant, instead, optimise the parameter settings for your particular application.  This can lead to "weird" algorithm configurations, but better ones than we can design by hand.  Then, what to do if your cost function is too expensive to calculate for this approach? Then use a suitable cheaper proxy for the tuning, and use the tuned algorithm on the real problem.  However, standard benchmarks aren't good proxies, so use a random function generator, and choose results that are good proxies.  (And there was more good stuff too, but noting it here would make this post too long: go read his papers instead!)

Next was supposed to be the first half of the TEMC (Theoretical and Experimental Material Computing) workshop that I was running.  Unfortunately, my invited speaker was not having the same smooth travel experience from Canada that I had experienced from the UK, and wasn't going to arrive until lunchtime.  So I liaised with the conference organiser to swap some talks around.  

So instead, we had a session of conference presentations by my team, on quantum computing and reservoir computing.

After lunch, Ion Petrie delivered an invited tutorial on Reaction Systems.  I had come across these before, but it was good to have a session putting everything in one place.

Last but not least, my workshop speaker, Julien Sylvestre, gave a fascinating invited talk on unconventional robotics: using unconventional computational models in concert with unconventional hardware.

So, a great opening to the conference.  Off to the evening welcome reception at a beach-front venue.

view from a hotel window

Sunday before the conference; time to explore, and get acclimatised to the four hour time difference (it was five hours when we arrived yesterday, but luckily local daylight savings happened overnight).

First, the out of the window view:

I clearly don't have a fancy room: some of those rooms have balconies!

Then off for an explore.  Google maps suggests the route to the conference may be walkable (in time terms), but the route crosses a freeway: is it actually walkable?

Entrance to the University of North Florida

A different view near the entrance

Yes, it's walkable.  It took me about 30 minutes to get to the entrance: there was a sidewalk all the way, and pedestrian crossing lights on the bigger junctions such as the freeway sliproads.  It would have been about another 15 minutes to walk to the conference site across the campus, but as I was going straight back for lunch, rather than spending time sitting, resting, in a conference, I decided that was enough exploring for today!

view inside a hotel room

My PhD student and I have arrived safely in Jacksonville, Florida.  

We had a transit through Washington DC airport: I was slightly anxious, as we only had a 90 minute layover, yet we had to go through immigration, collect and recheck baggage, and find the new gate.  I’ve had delays with all those issues before on other trips.  However, not this time.  Immigration was super swift: there is a separate "transit" immigration (I've not encountered that before in other airports) and there were four desks open for the non US passports transiting from our flight.  Then baggage collection and rechecking was even easier.  A small conveyor belt held the luggage from our flight, which was already there as we arrived from immigration: pick up suitcase, walk through "customs" (four or five paces), drop suitcase on another conveyor belt.  And we're done.  It took longer to then walk to the new gate.  I was impressed.

We had booked a "limo" from Jacksonville airport to the hotel (that seemed sensible, because originally there were supposed to be three of us; but Covid struck down one of the team).  The driver was waiting at baggage collection (I will never get over how casual local flights are in the US), so that was reassuring.  The car was a Tesla, and the driver proudly demonstrated its self-driving capabilities.  Hmm.

Then safely at the hotel, in the middle of a big strip mall.  It's just a standard mid-range conference hotel, nothing fancy, but the rooms are huuuuge, including a decent kitchen, a small dining area, and a lounge area, in addition to the expected bed/desk/bathroom:

Kitchen area with microwave, hotplate, sink, and fridge.  Small dining table visible bottom right.

Sitting area with couch and footstool/table.  Small dining table visible bottom left.

The more traditional part of the room: desk and bed, with bathroom off to the left.

Huuuuge.  (I haven't got a top range room or anything; my student's room has the same layout.)  People live in smaller places than this!

It's dark out, so the traditional view from the window will have to wait until tomorrow.  Off for something to eat (fortunately there are tons of places to eat nearby in the mall), then to crash.

view from a hotel window

At Heathrow, ready to catch the morning flight to Jacksonville, FL (via Washington), to go to the UCNC conference.  A great view of a car park!