Back from my trip

Well it's been awhile. I promised to blog from overseas, but of course I was too busy. I had a very good trip taking in two conferences, AAAI in Atlanta and ICCBR in Alessandria Italy. You can see photos from the Italian part of the trip some of which are really beautiful. We went on a conference day-trip to Stresa on one of the northern lakes and took a ferry ride to visit several islands - really lovely.

Once I returned I obviously had to clear a backlog of tasks from my desk and then yesterday my iPad arrived. They are finally on sale in NZ. Of course that wiped out any chance of working yesterday. I have to say I'm loving the iPad. More comments and thoughts on it will follow I'm sure.

Overseas for 2 weeks

I'm away to some conferences for 2 weeks but may still blog occasionally via email.

It was the most beautiful day in Auckland yesterday (photo attached).

Busy Times

Not much action on the book recently. My excuses are:

• had to mark exams and process results (for 4 courses) for the semester end
• been reviewing conference papers and 2 chapters of a new AI text book
• been reading a PhD thesis for an oral exam tomorrow, and
• finally generally clearing my desk for a 2 week trip to Atlanta and Italy

See, that doesn't sound so bad when I write it all down. The conference in Atlanta is AAAI-2010, this is the main AI conference this year. At the conference we'll learn the results of my PhD student's poker bot that is competing in the 2010 international computer poker competition. The conference in Italy is much smaller and just about case-based reasoning, my main research speciality (ICCBR 2010).
This trip I'm going to be totally reliant on my iPhone as I'm not taking a laptop. I'll have access to many of my files via Apple's MobileMe and will be able of course to get my email and follow Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook and LinkedIn all from the phone. Fortunately the conferences will have free WiFi access and hopefully my hotels will as well so I wont be needing to use any/much 3G data - the roaming charges are very expensive.
I'm planning to use Ping! to txt message with my wife and Skype to talk via WiFi.
I can also post to this blog via email and send photos from my iPhone so there will be some activity whilst I'm away.