Imperial Taster Course

Yesterday I went to the Imperial Taster Course entitled “Future Computing” with Farhan (who has already written about it). It was amazing. We got there a bit late due to getting horribly lost, but only lost about 10 minutes. The introductory talk was very good; it was about real-time tracking of objects and camera position. There was vague mention of inserting virtual objects into images, but he didn’t go into much detail about that. He wasn’t very loud, and he was taking from the corner of the room and not the centre, so hearing was occasionally difficult. But good.

There was supposed to be a talk about cryptography, but it never happened. Instead we had many talks about artificial intelligence, which were quite interesting. There was software which could track faces and recognise emotions, which was incorporated into The Painting Fool which “painted” pictures based on the emotions of the person being painted. It was interesting; I know I really want to do computer science now.

We had lunch which was surprisingly good, though the pizza was cold. We then went to the computer labs and worked with Java. The stuff we had to do wasn’t very complicated, but using a new language and operating system was quite tricky. I spent a considerable amount of time trying to work out how to open the java file. Silly Linux. Actually, Linux looks really good and one day I need to stop being so lazy and actually install Ubuntu on this laptop.

Overall a very good day and I am definitely interested in doing Computer Science, and Imperial is definitely on my list. Mainly because “It is awesome.”

Afterwards I went to Melissa’s. It was good. She got really unwell towards the end :(. Had fun though :).