'It's not just about cloud computing'

MY EDUCATION WEEK:Dr Horacio González-Vélez Head of the new Cloud Competency Centre at the National College of Ireland

Monday

Today is my wife’s birthday, and my car and I need to visit the National Car Test centre. Life kicked in for real today, but I still had to get to work early for a logistics breakfast. The Cloud Competency Centre is opening at the National College of Irelnad this month, and I had to meet up with the NCI team to discuss arrangements for the launch. Wife, car, cloud computing, in that order of priority.

Jeffrey Ullman, a professor emeritus at Stanford University, is coming for the launch, so we had to contact him about practical matters. Ullman is the closest you’ll get to a rock star in computer-science circles. He’s been a professor at Stanford for 40 years, and most of us learned about computing from reading his textbooks. Getting him over here and putting this launch together have certainly been more complicated than my wedding.

The next thing I have to arrange is the Skype meeting with the new advisory board for the NCI school of computing. Chaired by Ullman, we will be chatting on the cloud with Armando Fox and Michael Franklyn from the University of California at Berkeley and John Hopcroft from Cornell University. We must have excellent reception, because, coming from Mexico, I don’t have a BBC broadcaster’s accent.

My last task of the day was to greet the new students of the HDip in web technology. It’s again a great year of this Springboard programme, and the 60-plus students all seem very motivated. That was reassuring, as many of them have been out of school for many years. I was expected at a meeting of the Cloud Arena at 6.30pm, but, with my wife’s birthday cake spoiling in the car and my 12-year-old daughter haunting me on the phone, I decided to skip it.

Tuesday

I spent this morning reviewing preparations for our master’s programme in cloud computing. We have had interest from all over the world. This year’s cohort includes students from China, India and all over Europe. It’s a big deal for them to come and study here. It’s not just about cloud computing but also about life, culture, location and diet. We work hard to support them in their transition to Irish life.

This week we will give several days to the task, including some tips on how to negotiate Irish social norms. For example, the Irish obsession with where people live – not just the county or the townland but the street, the number on the door. I now realise it’s because the Irish like to make a connection – “Oh yeah, my brother-in-law’s best friend lives two doors down from you”. However, for others it can seem like an intrusion, an attempt to establish your class status or, worse, a scheme to burgle your house.

I had a working lunch talking to European colleagues from Paraphrase, otherwise known as Parallel Patterns for Adaptive Heterogeneous Multicore Systems. It’s a €3.5 million research project that involves 10 partners across the EU. The idea is to bring developers together to seamlessly map applications to parallel systems, because, from now on, everyone is going to have parallel processing at home, on their desktop, even in their pockets.

As an example, the new iPhone 5 has a dual-core processor: for all practical purposes, each processor core acts as if it’s a separate processor, but making them work efficiently together is still complex.

From the global to the local: I left Paraphrase to head to my daughter’s school for a PTA meeting. It’s good to get an insight into the future of education in Ireland. It’s also nice to be listening instead of speaking.

Wednesday

I started my day in the Croke Park convention centre at a round-table discussion on the advantages of cloud computing for business. This was a very different focus from the blue-sky thinking of Paraphrase. These are people who need return on investment. They must prioritise payroll, deadlines, budgets and security. How does technology map on to that? I needed to talk in practical terms about the cloud, or the unicorn, as we sometimes call it. Everyone talks about it but no one has seen it.

The discussion, which formed part of the Cloud Computing Summit 2012, was a very useful exercise for me, and I had plenty to tell the dean of school at our evening meeting. We’re preparing for the next wave of technology: can’t the world just stand still?

Thursday

I started the day with a bit of reading: a novel by Carlos Fuentes. I so rarely get to read or write in Spanish any more that I have to keep my hand in or I’ll lose it. English is the language of computing.

In the morning I met with department colleagues to consider work placements for the students of the competency centre. Work placement is a core part of what we do at NCI, but we have to get the placements just right, so that they are a challenge to students and solve relevant problems for the employers. It takes time to get these partnerships just right, because students will be developing their dissertations on practical problems emanating from these placements.

I closed my working day with a meeting of all the course leaders – the painters are just out of the labs and our new MSc in cloud computing is ready to go.

Does everyone know how to turn on the computers?

Friday

My car passed the National Car Test! I am officially an Irishman. This was the last piece of the puzzle. Clutching my test cert, I made a triumphant dash for the office to prepare a new research proposal for the last call in FP7, the main EU programme for funding science and technology.

I switch so often from research to students to administration to industry to home life that I feel I function like a computer operating system: different keys are pressed and they interrupt my functioning, pulling me to a different task from the one my processor was working on.

It seems chaotic, but overall the work gets done. I don’t think I am designed to give my whole day over to any one thing.

This weekend I will probably go to the theatre with my older daughter; part of the attraction of coming to Dublin was the wealth of culture and arts here.

I must also help my younger one with his Spanish. He’s currently switching between Spanish, Czech, English and, thanks to junior infants, Irish.

If I have time I will swot up on my cultural references before I engage with our new students next week. I found a very interesting website to remind me and other lecturers of how not to alienate our students with totally outdated references, such as “airline ticket”. I mentioned Bill Clinton in a lecture last year and they looked at me blankly. I should have said Hillary Clinton’s husband.

Here are two gems I found on the Beloit Mindset List: Robert De Niro is Greg Focker’s long-suffering father-in-law, not Vito Corleone, and maintaining relations between the US and the rest of the world has always been a woman’s job in the US State Department.

I shall need to marshall my colleagues to come up with an equivalent Irish list – perhaps the notion that many Irish school-leavers probably don’t remember what it was like not to live in a recession.

This week I was....

ReadingAura by Carlos Fuentes

Listening toDavid Guetta, Bon Jovi, Verdi

WatchingLaw and Order, Flashpoint

VisitingThe Mindset List – beloit.edu/mindset/2016/