Information Services Group colleagues are getting familiar with our new office at 5 Forrest Hill.
I’ve settled…back in. I’ve worked here before.
The recently-formed School of Informatics took on a youngish researcher in July 2000 to work in the computer vision group within IPAB (from whence, coincidentally, Digital Skills have recently recruited multiple training interns) under Bob Fisher. The project, if you’re interested, was about finding features in range data for improving surface fitting and triangulation prior to texture mapping, and it involved taking a portable range scanner around the Edinburgh Central Mosque. The old departmental affiliations within the new School still felt strong, and what had been the Department of Artificial Intelligence was split between Forrest Hill and 80 South Bridge, adjacent to the University buildings on Chambers Street. Forrest Hill also hosted the former Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation (see IML), with significant scope for crossover between their neural networks and our vision and robotics.
The building hasn’t changed all that much, but the decor is sooo much better now! Fresh and colourful. Well done the designers. When I arrived the vision lab was on D floor (floor numbers hadn’t been invented, we just used the letters) in a room that is now partitioned into 3.D03 and 3.D04. I lucked out with a desk that looked towards the castle, roughly where the blue comfy chair is now. My fire safety induction, given by lab colleagues, did of course involve a trip through the third floor gents and down the spiral staircase, minding the step at the bottom door. The robotics group was in D1 (3.D01), and what’s now 3.D08/3.D09 contained Forrest Hill’s half of the AI Library until it had the misfortune to be relocated to South Bridge in 2002 only to be lost in The Old Town Fire. By then, the School had moved the vision lab down to what’s now the Boardroom (1.B19), accessed in those days from the main stairwell rather than from the lift foyer as now. We put the flat bed laser range scanner in the corner behind the current door and a colleague built a Beowulf cluster in the turret cupboard that was used for applying genetic algorithms to the range data. We might have had over a whole gigabyte of memory available!
It’s still a charmingly idiosyncratic building, even those strange steps to the B floor toilet. Not sure I was ever in the drill hall itself, back in the day. One thing I am appreciating now that we’ve moved in is that any of us can use any of the rooms in any part of the building. Back then we largely stuck to our own lab, with occasional trips to Bob’s office (2.C13), and the common room (I’m trying to remember exactly where that was, perhaps 1.B09?), and I remember getting plenty of chat with the techies in the ground floor workshop where the meeting rooms now are.
Looking around the neighbourhood, I see Rudi’s is still selling sandwiches and Sandy Bell’s, Doctor’s, Cappadocia and Mum’s all survive. Tunisia’s Uncle T has been replaced by Kurdistan’s Urban Genius, there’s a Japanese place where the Italian one used to be and we have swapped Starbucks for BarBurrito.
Some personal memories of that time that have stayed with me, not all about the building of course:
~ A few weeks after starting, up in the D floor lab having to field a phonecall (remember those?) in French, which I didn’t speak, from someone senior in the European Commission. Intended, of course, for my distinguished namesake, then on leave from the University as an MEP. Call passed to second line support, in this case the Law School.
~ Reading about a team from Stanford using a range scanner on Michelangelo’s David statue and discovering that whoever had measured it decades previously had been short by a centimetre or five, meaning the accepted height in all the brochures and encyclopedias was wrong!
~ The shock at the September 2001 British Machine Vision Conference in Manchester as news came in of the planes hitting the New York towers.
~ A more local incident at a 2002 computer vision conference in Padua. With 38 degree temperatures outside and the entire city pumping the air con to the max, the electricity supply failed each day at 11am and generally wasn’t restored until well after lunchtime. Ah well, there were always posters to look at.
~ But mostly, and most importantly, memories of colleagues who worked here. Many coffees with a future entrepreneur and a future professor and their infinite ideas. Bob deciding to audio record his lectures in about 2002 so that he could stick them up on his webpage for his students to listen back to. (An excellent idea, so far ahead of its time! He did however discover that he would introduce each topic with the words, “Okay, so…” and we may perhaps have teased him that we should write some code to filter that out.) Our German PhD student and his demonstration – not at work! – of how to make Feuerzangenbowle. Our Dutch visiting student who arrived every morning whistling “Four Seasons in One Day,” frequently having experienced all four on his walk to work. The invitation to spend a weekend in Verona with our Italian visiting student (another future professor) following the Padua conference.
And not to forget the regular Forrest Hill pizza parties. Hmm, now there’s a thought…
I left Forrest Hill (and indeed research) in June 2003. IPAB also left the building shortly afterwards, sojourning via King’s Buildings to their current home in the Informatics Forum. And having moved through Teviot Place, Little France, George Square, Pollock Halls and Argyle House, each with their own pros and cons, I am entirely content to have made it back full circle.
(https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1350251 (c) Kim Traynor CC-BY-SA)
(https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1350251 (c) Kim Traynor CC-BY-SA)
