Final Thoughts (from SC)

So I thought I'd do one last SC blog, I know it's been over for a while but I haven't actually stopped travelling. I had 3 hours in my flat in London on Sunday (apparently, I thought it was still Saturday) then had to fly to Lyon that evening for ICT2008.

SC went well from my point of view, all my photos from it can be seen here. I thought I'd mention the source of my post titles as well (because I know you have all been dying to know :-)):
Movin' Right Along - Fozzie and Kermit from the soundtrack of the first Muppet Movie
Carbon Wings - Charger from their album "Confessions Of A Man (Mad enough To Live Amongst Beasts)", not for the faint hearted
Art of Balance - Shadows Fall from their "Art of Balance" album, one of the first New Wave of American Heavy Metal bands which quickly morphed into metalcore
Realist Surrealist - Johnny Truant from their full length "In The Library Of Horrific Events", a UK based band about to start their final tour, self described as "Toni & Guy"core as a jab at the new breed of fashion bands
Computer God - Black Sabbath from their 1992 album "Dehumanizer", proof that there was life after Ozzy and could be contentiously called better
Final Thoughts - Obituary from "World Demise", only Florida could produce the Death Metal sound that practically defined the genre with Obituary and Morbid Angel being prime examples.

This week I'm at ICT as mentioned and the sessions are really interesting. This morning I heard some great things about the Large Knowledge Collider (LarKC) which harnesses the power of the Grid to "remove the scalability barriers of currently existing reasoning systems for the Semantic Web" by using "massive distributed incomplete reasoning". Incomplete reasoning may sound like a poor goal but the semantic web just needs "good enough" like Google search it isn't perfect but gives you enough information to help get the knowledge you need. Also as resources (but computing and metadata) increases the results get better and better.

The last session I was in (I decided I should check my mail and do some real work) was on creative learning, with a talk from Lego (basically my childhood) and another project about learning and creativity with disadvantaged groups(of various kinds from homeless children to the adults with mobility problems). It was very interesting and the latter featured music by Kila a fantastic contemporary Irish traditional band (check them out, everyone's cup of tea unlike the artists above).

It's almost home time here so I will wrap this up, hopefully they'll let me post here in the future but I haven't received any death threats from GridTalk so far ....

Later days,
Neasan