#pmrsymp
The symposium http://www-pmr.ch.cam.ac.uk/wiki/Main_Page was a great effort and I personally am very pleased. I believe it was a success – about 100 people came and an unknown number attended virtually (probably about 20). I’m hoping we can capture pictures, reports, etc. But here are some main points:
- Invited speakers. All excellent and fitted together well. There was NO coordination between speakers – this was deliberate – and delegates had to make their own sense.
- Media. We had all sorts. Powerpoint. Html. Local. Web-based. Recorded slides. With/out audio. Skype conference. Silent and spoken. Slides and demos.
- We had to communicate and record this
- The timescale was ultra-tight. So when we presented the results of our group we split it into 2 parts. (a) 15 mins, with 10 mini-presentations. Timed. To the second. (b) 30 mins, 7 demos, with people doing them but me speaking over them. It worked!
- John Wilbanks contributed a recorded session. Unfortunately we didn’t have a clear way of getting questions asked at the end. Sorry, John.
We had several demos; existing ones
- Crystaleye
- ChemicalTagger/OSCAR
- IsItOpenData
And those hacked over the hackfest
- Locative molecular art (David Murray-Rust). Several people were able to “see” local molecules in their phones so we are developing this and I’ll tell you more soon.
- Spoken OPSIN. We are able to speak into an Android “Caffeine”. The phone interprets the speech (send it back to Google for interpretation) then send the text to OPSIN and then send the structure back to the phone. In seconds or less. Awesome (as they now say). Sam Adams, Daniel Lowe, etc.
- Kinect molecules. Several people (DSM-R, Ben O’steen, Dan Hagon, …). You can now dance in front of a kinect and rotate a molecule or change its geometry. Fantastic.
- Ami. Showing computer vision and intelligent molecules
And then the rest
- Tom M-R painted some molecules specially for the meeting
- Brian made a huge blue obelisk
Sue and Emma put on a wonderful day and evening and looked after speakers etc.
And then Julian and Steve. They did a really marvellous job on streaming. Picked up on mobiles and PCs throughout the world. They spent 3 days preparing. Tried several approaches. Streaming is NOR trivial. For example if you have too many streams the machine may overheat (I never thought of that). How do you route a skype conversation to remote audio? How do you manage questions? Etc.
So – all in all a great occasion. Thanks to everyone
(Oh, I am not retiring)