Research Visit to Brazil

I just returned from a one month post as a visiting professor at the University of São Paulo at  São Carlos, where I was working with my friend and former colleague Jo Ueyama. You can read about the work-side of our activities in Brazil here: http://www.sp-river.blogspot.com/. But it wasn't all work - I also spent a weekend on the São Sebastian beaches and went to Rio for Carnival weekend. Here are some photos:

The scenery on the drive between São Paulo and São Sebastian is spectacular, here you can see a forest waterfall in the Sierra Del Mar mountains.

Thanks to the hospitality of Jo's friends from USP, we were able to stay in a great little cottage in the forest, surrounded by forest, flowers and cool animals.

 

There was a creek behind the cottagee that you can swim in, here you see a swimmers-eye-view of Delano (our host, on the right) and Jo.

Here you can see some of the cool flora and fauna.

Compared to Rio the São Sebastian beaches were quiet and laid back, here's a shot of the beach at sunset.

In contrast, Rio was more glamerous and developed, though still very beautiful. Here is Copa Cabana beach where I stayed for the weekend.

Here is the younger, busier Ipanema Beach.

And here's a photo of me at the Ipanema Bloco parade with Alessandro, one of my hosts and other friends. What a great trip!

Visit to Shanghai and Brazil

Wow, its been a long time since I posted here. I am currently on a research visit to the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil and have been really, really busy. On the way to Brazil, I had a nice day in Shanghai, some photos of which are shown below:

Jade Buddha Temple

One of Many Impressive Statues of the Buddha

Monks Singing a Prayer

Caren Having a Beer in a Bar with Fishtank Tables

We had a great day shopping in Shanghai's art district, visiting the Jade Buddha temple and then having some drinks in this wierd bar with fish-tanks as tables.

Khalid the Droll

I've settled back in here in Suzhou, China and (so far) I am sticking to my New Year's Resolutions (see last post).

I've wanted to post this for a while - during a great trip to New York in 2006 I caught a taping of the Daily Show with Calvin Trillin, an NYC 'deadline poet'... well it turns out, Calvin correctly predicted the Christmas Day 'Underpants Bomber' three years before it happened.

After spending 20 minutes finding, capturing and uploading this, it has just occurred to me that they probably played this clip on the Daily Show again this week (I catch-up on the Daily Show over the weekend over here in China).

We have nothing to fear except Khalid the Droll's sense of humor.

Happy New Year!

This has been a good year for me. My six month visit to K.U. Leuven was very fulfiling from both a personal and a work perspective. My new job at XJTLU is working out well and China is starting to feel like home... so I guess its time for some New Year's Resolutions (in no particular order):

1. I will learn to speak Chinese.
2. I will see more of my friends and family.
3. I will balance my work and personal life better.
4. I will adopt a healthier life-style.
5. I will get a Chinese research grant.

I guess that's it! Now its blogged out, I guess I will have to keep my resolutions.

Visa Problem (!)

Well, it had to happen eventually. I was supposed to head to India to present a workshop paper on my way back to China from December 27th - 29th, but I didn't have the right visa, and so I had to reroute my flight straight to Shanghai. I have no excuse either -- I should have checked whether I needed a visa, but after trips all over Asia without needing one I guess I got lazy.

It wasn't cheap re-routing my flight and worst of all it meant that I had left England early for no good reason (my classes don't start until next week) and could have spent more time with my friends and family. Ah well, c'est la vie!

Kuala Lumpur

From December 12th to 16th I visited Kuala Lumpur for the ACM MOMM conferfence. The conference went well, and I presneted the first paper on LooCI, The Loosely-coupled Component Infrastructure, one of the main outputs of my research visit: you can check out the Sun SPOT port on Google Code. a Contiki port for more embedded WSN platforms is also coming soon.

Kuala Lumpur

I had a great time in Kuala Lumpur. Everyone was very friendly, and the resteraunts and bars were very good. It was only when I left for the airport on my last day that I realised how lush and naturally beautiful a country Malaysia is too. Unfortunately my camera malfunctioned, so I don't have any photos of my own... Next stop, the north of England.

Urbana Champaign and Chicago

Sorry its been so long since my last post. After Japan, I was super busy with teaching and writing papers, then two conferences... the first of which was MidSens in Urbana Champaign in Illinois. The workshop went very well with lots of productive discussion as well as good technical papers. It was also great to see my old colleagues and friends from Lancaster and DistriNet. There wasn't much to take photos of in Urbana, but here are a few shots from my day-trip to Chicago:

Union Station, Chicago

A Random Sky-Scraper

Looking down the 'Magnificent Mile'

Christmas Tree and Chapel on the Magnificent Mile.