The FoD, Reanimated

We had a discussion about re-starting the festival:

• Seminars aren't discussions. Maybe it's useful to think of two types of informal presentations:

1. conventional "broadcast" mode seminars. The person in charge is the speaker, the Expert imparting their wisdom to the Gathered Audience in awe-struck attendance. Audience participation limited to polite questions at the end. Usual model: 50 mins of talk, highly prepared, fancy slides, questions at end.
2. guided discussion, lead or incited by someone who plays master of ceremonies. They don't have to be an expert to do this. It's all about the ideas, which the audience is able to bounce around as much as the speaker does. Loose model: the MC might set the stage with some prepared material, but aims to "let it go" early rather than late in the hour. Preparation time should go into the content, not slickness. FoD can support both, but that the latter is to be vigorously applauded! There are inate tendencies to revert to type 1 all the time. Said tendencies to be kept in check by group policing.

• There seems no will to bracket the subjects of "allowed" discussions. They'll all naturally have some computational element to them. Some will surely be technical AI and machine learning, others more broadly within cognitive science, or further afield into (say) evolution and complex adaptive systems.
• Venue/time: we agreed on the Cotton Annex, 11am, Thursdays fortnightly. Marcus to book it.
• Food and drink:
  • occasional beer and pizza is good.
  • big bread - we should remind Pondy.
  • bring biscuits - staff especially.
• Name: we're happy with the name.
• Web presence and mail...
  • Kourosh and Adam are going to think about this, Sergio also able to help.
  • Everyone in "AI group" should be able to add content, should be able to "control" your own talk at the very least, and be able to put links to papers etc. there beforehand. Mail out will direct people to that page...
  • automated mailing list (self quit, moderated join) would be good
  • make a forum? blog? wiki? on-site or off-site? Google groups or similar? maybe use RSS feed notifications to do mail notification of talks?
  • want a low overhead for the person who ends up moderating / organising this stuff. ANd be able to change that person around easily enough.'

Possible topics for future FoDs:

1. What's hot in GA/GP? - Tony
2. Will's neat idea for a robot - Will
3. imprecise probabilities - Sergio
4. General systems theory - Kourosh
5. Elephants don't play chess - Adam
6. Maciek
   1. The technological singularity
   2. Evolution of evolvability
7. Marcus
   1. Fight club
   2. Non-trivial sub-symbolic generative models
   3. GPO, the AI'08 remix dub
   4. Bahian Bioinformatics: what I did on my holidays
8. Something Hot - Urvesh
9. Joseph - Evolving Godzilla. (or something like that: Marcus)
10. Dirk Derom - building a neuroinformatics tool

Also there: Pondy, Mengjie.