Presenting as a Marie Curie young researcher
ESOF, the EuroScience Open Forum, came to Manchester on July 24–27, 2016, and I took part as a Marie Curie young researcher from the University of Manchester. I presented my research in the Marie Curie Alumni Association poster session, where about forty early-career researchers from across Europe and beyond condensed their work into a single message for a broad audience and answered some tough questions. My poster was called “What can machine learning and a smart carpet infer about the way you walk?”
The poster described the university’s smart carpet, a floor-sensor prototype that uses plastic optical fibers to record the spatial and temporal pattern of footsteps. I showed a spatio-temporal analysis of thirteen gait activities performed on the carpet, including tasks that placed a cognitive demand on the walker, and argued that each activity leaves a distinct pattern of frequency, amplitude, and signal type that deep neural networks can identify. The applications I pointed to ranged from security verification to the search for markers of neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease.
People and ideas across the week
Lunch with Professor Steve Furber remains one of my clearest memories. At the “Pi with the Prof” session we talked about modeling the brain and the ARM architecture, and how the systems he helped build connect to questions about neural computation. I also met Brian Cox, having prepared questions for him, and Sir Venki Ramakrishnan. What stayed with me most, though, was the passion for science among young researchers from across the event, and the range of subjects I could move between in a single week, from particle physics to models of the human brain.