Wednesday 31 January 2018

Month in Review: January 2018

And so the first month of 2018 draws to a close, and a busy old month it's been. But that's hardly new: every month is busy in Academia. The standout feature of this month, has of course been SUITCEYES, which is now officially live, and has been running for a month. There's been an exam to mark, an open day, a transfer viva, semester two teaching to deliver, and coursework to mark, too. Plus some time getting the Ada hand working for the Apex grant with Stuart Murray and playing around with Peltier modules and servo motors for various projects, which has been good fun.

But SUITCEYES has been the big deal. Partly because we have two postdoc roles to recruit, and a contract to sort out, and links with various partners to explore, and we're now having regular fortnightly meetings at Leeds to make sure we're all on the same page.

The main thing, though, was the kick-off meeting at our co-ordinator University: Högskolan i Borås. It was an intense three days (of solid work!) plus two days' travelling, so it took up a good piece of the month. But it was a productive time, and good to meet in person the people with whom I'd had so many Adobe connect calls.

I won't bore you with the details: suffice to say they had a cake (a cake!) to mark the start of the project, and a symposium ("From Touch to Cognition") covering various aspects of haptic communication for people with deafblindness. You can find a full report over at the SUITCEYES website.

Anyway, there was much aligning of expectations, and pronunciation (SUITCEYES is pronounced "suitcase", whereas I had been pronouncing it "suit-kize"). I'm excited to take this forward: after so much planning, it's good to be transitioning to actual work!

Oh, and I volunteered Leeds to host the second consortium meeting, in the summer. So there's that to look forward to. It's all gathering pace...

Friday 5 January 2018

2018: Year in Preview

Happy New Year! As is customary, I will start the year not with New Years Resolutions, but with a few goals that will guide me through the tear. As always, a simple bulleted list, in no particular order:

On the Blog
* At least 24 posts - the same as last year.
* At least 2 posts per month - to avoid having gluts followed by long silences.
* At least 1 non-review post per month: this is challenging, but I found that the "tick-tock" model of one monthly review and one "other" post worked out pretty well. The other posts are likely to continue being a bit random, and probably will still crop up at the end of the month when time is running out, but it at least encourages me to get my thoughts down on various topics.

Research
* Deliver the SUITCEYES and APEX projects.
* Submit at least five grant applications as either PI or Co-I: this is a bit ambitious, since I've got several live projects to deliver on this year, but it doesn't hurt to try...
* Submit at least two *more* papers to high quality journals (resubmitting the ones under review don't count).
* Get the MagONE force sensor incorporated into FATKAT.
* Get BIGKAT (the new generation of PSAT that incorporates prehensile as well as postural measures) up and running.
* Continue to develop the grip model to address feedback and corrections: This, having no direct funding attached to it, remains the poor cousin to other work 

Other
* Make some inventions: And get back into Leeds Hackspace while I'm at it. I haven't been for about eighteen months. 
* Formulate a reading list for the Engineering Imagination.
These are two that got dropped last year: let's see if I do any better this time...

This is going to be a demanding year. It certainly has the potential to be an exciting one...
Here goes!