robot age

Day 1 of the deRSE conference. A very long day with talk sessions from 10 until 6, then poster session until 8. I really enjoyed the talks I attended. The key note was excellent, Engineering Software Ergonomics by Reinhard Keil. It's strange, I've been doing this stuff for ages and never really heard about ergonomics. Things to take away were, some words describe 1000 pictures (eg vehicle) and concepts are tied to a physical space where they make sense, eg 3 apples and 4 pineapples are 7 fruit, whereas 3 units of one chemical and 4 units of another produce an explosion. At the end he mentioned ChatGPT and pointed out that language models are good for dictating text but not so good for iteratively improving a search query. Language is essentially one dimensional in time, a google search is multidimensional. Something for me to look into is the concept of architecture of perception.

I really enjoyed the session on workflows. The pyWATTS package for non-sequential machine learning pipelines looks really interesting. The other really interesting project is data version control and ZnTrack on top of it. The session on metadata was excellent as well. Great to hear about the citation file format again.

Posters were great as well. I had a lovely chat about providing RSE services. More workflows and a totally nostalgic trip down memory lane chatting about deal.II with new support for temporal discretisation and Nedelec elements. 

Also good chats about programming languages, supporting applications for long periods of time and what it is like working in a place that is still without central IT after having been hacked a little while ago. 

A thoroughly enjoyable day.

For some reason the bust reminded my of a song by Slime..