What a week!

I had an amazing week!

On Tuesday, Jeff took me to Birmingham to meet Aaron Sloman, a famous A.I. and cognitive science researcher. He does work similar to Marvin Minsky of MIT. Aaron is notoriously busy, so I was expecting to get maybe an hour to talk with him (Jia-Yan came along as well for the morning). Much to my surprise, Aaron spent most of the day with me (and Jeff, when he was there), and I spoke with him probably for a total of about 3 hours just about his research and ideas for A.I. systems. It was such an amazing opportunity! I also got an opportunity to sit in on some lab meetings and get a tour of one of the A.I. vision lab. It was such a great day!

On Wednesday, I left work a bit early to go down to London. David (my friend from my lab at MIT who I stayed with in London) was supervised on his PhD partly by a UCL professor named Vince Walsh. David had told me what an amazing and inspirational guy Vince was, so I jumped at the chance to meet him while I was in England. David had told me that Vince was a huge classical music fan, so I asked if he might want to catch a concert. We settled on the LSO Concert on Wednesday (they were playing Beethoven Emperor Concerto and Brahms 3rd Symphony...AMAZING concert!). I will say that David did not exaggerate in his description. After accidentally heading in completely the wrong direction out of Liverpool St, I eventually made it to the Barbican, where I met Vince. We talked for about an hour and a half before the concert, and then went to a really fantastic French restaurant for a late dinner when the concert had finished. It's definitely one of the best nights I've had since I've been here! I'm quite glad it worked out.

Work has been uneventful for the last few days, but I'm super excited to be heading up to Ireland this weekend! My friend John lives in Limerick, so I'm flying into Shannon tomorrow morning and taking Monday off (flying back Monday evening). On the agenda so far is a trip to Dublin, watching a rugby match in a pub (an IRISH pub!!), and John seeing if he can't finally convince me to get Twitter (updates as they become available...I'm making him work for it!).

There will be loads of pictures up after the weekend, hopefully! Until then.