15 Aug 2011 - Changing places (London, UK to Cambridge, MA)

I am not with Imperial College London any more … moving ….

12 Feb 2010 - Careers Day – American School in London (ASL)

I was asked to give a talk about my work at the careers day at the American School in London. The aim of the event was to show kids that there are many different and interesting jobs out there. What made me surprised is the bunch of letters I received a few days after ! Here is an example:

03 Dec 2009 - Winning the Speak Out For Engineering competition - IMechE

Actually the competition was difficult because it is very challenging to present "a niche engineering development" to a wide audience in an interesting way, and in only 20 minutes. Also, it was extremely hard to battle in a speakers competition against native speakers, but the experience was very rewarding. :)

James Barclay, Keith Millard and Yaroslav Tenzer

An annual speakers competition entitled "Speak Out for Engineering" organized by the Institutution of Mechanical Engineering (IMechE) took place early December 2009. The event was conducted in stages over a number of days and 4 speakers were selected out of 16 for the final, which took place on the 3rd December 2009. The speakers were judged on presentation skills and on the way they conveyed scientific and engineering information to the audience. The president of IMechE, Mr. Keith Millard, attended the final evening and awarded the prizes in person.
Awards were given to the top two speakers; the second place went to James Barclay, a 2005 graduate in Mechanical Engineering and currently a Rolls-Royce employee. James was presenting results from his undergraduate project on the engineering analysis of crispy foods. The first place went to Yaroslav Tenzer, a current PhD student of Imperial College, jointly between the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Institute of Biomedical Engineering. Yaroslav’s presentation was on a novel programmable brake, which is an outcome of his PhD work, and was recently patented by Imperial Innovations, the College's technology transfer office.

Additional information can be found here : Imperial College Reporter - (page 5)

30 July 2009 - Attending a lecture by Prof. Shigeo Hirose

At the moment I am visiting Tokyo Institute of Technology, and today I attended a final lecture for the semester by the world famous robotics expert - Prof. Shiego Hirose. He is world known for snake type robots and I really enjoyed his lecture. The lecture was half in Japanese and half in English. During his last lecture he was talking inspiration and innovation rather than math, and I found it fascinating. After the lecture he took me to his lab and there I was really surprised to see the creatures which resulted from the innovative thinking.

Also, before the lecture, as I was reading about the Professor, I came across his paper entitled "A code of conduct for robots coexisting with human beings", in which he states that Asimov’s three laws are wrong and a better approach is presented. I fully agree with the proposed "moral behaviour" approach, but I do not agree with the statement that Asimov was wrong, he may as well was far ahead of the time, and probably one day the three laws would find their way into the integrated circuits … one day …