The presentation I enjoyed the most from the first papers session was the by Roger B. Dannenberg. He presented the"McBlare: A Robotic Bagpipe Player". That's right, they built a robotic bagpipe player. The resulting sound was pretty good as we could confirm at the concert that night (at least I could distinguish the sound from a human player... :))

In the afternoon, I liked the "MnM: a Max/MSP mapping toolbox", which was a set of Max objects that could learn to interpolate results given a set of inputs and corresponding outputs. It can be used for one-to-many or many-to-one mappings.

The other good presentation was the "The Metasurface: Applying Natural Neighbour Interpolation to Two-to-Many Mapping", by Ross Bencina. He implemented a tool for his AudioMulch program that would interpolate a set of parameters given a two-dimensional coordinate. I think it was one the best presentations in what concerns structure and timing.

This was also the day we put our poster up. Here's a picture of Alvaro explaining it to Ge Wang.

The Rob A friend of mine's room was robbed. He was staying at the Gage Towers, like most of us. Friday he got to his room and found out that someone had entered the room and robbed his camera and some money. How's that for Canadian hospitality?

The Hovercraft At night, after the concert we all went to the Wreck Beach for some fun (and beer). We were having fun until the cops showed up. That's right -- the cops. Apparently you can't drink alcohol in public places in Canada. They told us to leave but were not getting much success in that quest, so, minutes later, they called the cavalry, i.e., the coast guard. They arrived with a huge HOVERCRAFT to disperse the people. Unfortunately, I didn't witness this because I had left by that time, but I got the pictures from someone who did. Here are the links to some videos recorded by Laszlo Bardos (the bangarama guy): Hovercraft Video 1 || Hovercraft Video 2 || Hovercraft Video 3 || Hovercraft Video 4 Lazlo also googled around and found a foto of the "beast" in day light: Moral: If you want to see a hovercraft go to a canadian beach and drink a beer.