iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

Tfw you forget whether you're playing Tetris or Wordle...

A wordle board that looks like I'm playing Tetris!

John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 20/12/2024

Three parking signs in close proximity in Cambridge. Pic 1: clearly non-electric vehicles are not allowed. Pic 2: clearly non-electric vehicles are allowed. Pic 3: ???

Mixed Use Parking. Electric Vehicles And Other Vehicles Allowed

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

Big thanks to Prof Danilo Mandic for an inspiring “Meet the Profs” seminar today. He explained how he has applied his expertise in signal processing to such varied domains as financial trading, heart monitoring, and sleep apnoea.

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 11/11/2024

Beautiful talk by Justin Hsu, visiting from Cornell, on how to deploy a linear type system to keep track of the rounding errors introduced by floating-point arithmetic!

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 08/11/2024

Big thank you to Eleonora Giunchiglia @e_giunchiglia for a fascinating “Meet the Profs” talk at @imperialeee about her research into compliant-by-construction ML models!

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 04/11/2024

A good day for folks who like runs of numbers!

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 30/10/2024

Delighted to have our first “Meet the Profs” seminar of the term, featuring Ayush Bhandari (@AB2World) who showed us how to extract a useful signal just from the noise of quantisation! Simultaneously mind-blowing and beautifully explained. @imperialeee

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 23/10/2024

Did I just wake up after a 400-year nap?

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 19/04/2024

Huge congrats to Yann Herklotz (@ymherklotz) for successfully defending his PhD thesis today, all about his proven-in-Coq high-level synthesis tool. And enormous thanks to George Constantinides (@gconstantinides) and Xavier Leroy for their thoughtful and thorough examining.

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 19/04/2024

Which compiler optimisation is this one again?

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 29/03/2024

“Hello, I’d like to return this bicycle please. The axles aren’t in the centre of the wheels.”

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 18/02/2024

“23-19! We have a 23-19 over here!”

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 12/02/2024

GitHub advice from my local leisure centre

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 10/02/2024

Sulphur hexafluoride is not to be smoked in this taxi.

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 30/08/2023

… I’m still getting notifications in the form of badges on the Teams app icon, which presumably indicate messages colleagues have sent me while I’m away.

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 30/08/2023

Found a mild security bug in MS Teams today: having signed out of my account several days ago (screenshot shows the sign-in screen that I’m currently presented with)…

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 01/07/2023

What’s the most interesting song that can be played in just one octave of white notes, like you get on one of these kiddie keyboards?

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 25/05/2023

If Georg Cantor made lifts…

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 23/05/2023

Delighted to welcome @irisa_lab’s Steven Derrien to @imperialcas today to tell us about how he implements speculative, dynamic loop pipelining as a source-to-source transformation in high-level synthesis.

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 23/05/2023

It was great to have Andrés Goens and Vijay Nagarajan visit from @EdinburghUni on Friday, to tell us about their fascinating #PLDI2023 work to build memory models for heterogenous systems out of the memory models of their component processors.

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 11/04/2023

@VisitPeterboro @PeterboroughCC We had a lovely time in your city yesterday but got quite confused by one of the signposts near the railway station pointing the wrong way to the cathedral. In the attached pic from Google Streetview it’s correct. Suggest you go check it.

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 24/02/2023

Where I've seen them on UK trains, the operation sequence tends to be: (1) enter the toilet, (2) press the "close" button, and then, once the door is closed, (3) press the "lock" button.

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 08/12/2022

Many thanks to @SandrineBlazy for delivering an excellent guest lecture at @imperialeee today for the Hardware and Software Verification module, all about the industrial adoption of the CompCert verified C compiler

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 29/11/2022

Congratulations to @DanIorga_TL, PhD student of @afd_icl and myself, who passed his viva this afternoon! Many thanks to Mark Batty and @gconstantinides for examining. Dan's PhD work has sought to understand the guarantees given to programmers of CPU+FPGA devices...

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 24/11/2022

The public survey from @cambridge_ip @camcitco @ConcilioComms about their redevelopment plans for the Box Cafe and the East Road garages is a masterclass in leading questions. (It rather undermines my faith in the transparency of the consultation process...)

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 01/10/2022

I think it would be quite reasonable for the government to ban the use of plastic to create multi-packs of already-packaged goods.

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 03/09/2022

How to disappoint a child on Christmas morning…

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 26/07/2022

Philippa Gardner, @AzaleaRaad, @AndreasLoow, and I are organising another "UK concurrency workshop" on 11-12 August at the @NewtonInstitute in Cambridge. All welcome; registration is free! And please email me to offer talks; schedule is not full yet....

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 22/07/2022

The paper says (on page 12):

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 29/06/2022

And Cyrus Goodarzi extended the #RISCV architecture with a new instruction for triangle rasterisation, an important procedure in computer graphics.

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 29/06/2022

Archie Crichton designed a #fuzzer for logic synthesis tools that uses a genetic algorithm to evolve the test cases.

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 29/06/2022

Maëlle Guerre presented a design that does high-frequency trading on an #FPGA at an even higher frequency thanks to the judicious use of on-chip caches.

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 22/06/2022

I am delighted to welcome @SandrineBlazy and Delphine Demange to @imperialeee this week. Here is Delphine giving us a seminar about her work to add SSA support to the CompCert verified C compiler.

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 17/06/2022

Dan Iorga (@DanIorga_TL) gave a great @pldi presentation about his work to determine the weak memory models of hybrid CPU+FPGA chips.

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 17/06/2022

Yann Herklotz (@ymherklotz) gave a great talk at @pldi just now about Vericert, his formally verified C-to-Verilog compiler built on CompCert.

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 26/05/2022

Here’s Paul Mitcheson in action at our “Meet the Profs” seminar this afternoon, sharing his research in wireless power with @imperialeee undergrads, and managing _not_ to be electrocuted during his live demo.

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 18/05/2022

And Yann Herklotz (@ymherklotz) set out some next steps for the development of Vericert, his Coq-verified HLS tool.

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 18/05/2022

Jianyi Cheng (@jianyi_cheng) explained how hardware performance can be analysed via Petri nets.

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 18/05/2022

Rachit Nigam (@notypes) described a new hardware description language — enriched with pre/postconditions about when input/output wires are used.

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 18/05/2022

Ecenur Üstün (@ecenur_ustun) discussed future directions for using equality saturation in HLS flows.

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 18/05/2022

Christian Pilato spoke about his Everest project to apply HLS in the scientific computing domain.

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 16/05/2022

Jim Dworkin from Intel is giving the #FCCM2022 keynote about FPGAs in the cloud.

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 27/04/2022

I'm looking forward to co-chairing an #FCCM2022 workshop with @lana_josipovic, all about the intersection of #formalmethods and #highlevelsynthesis. Come join us on 18 May at @cornell_tech! flashlight-workshop.github.io

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 18/03/2022

I was delighted to welcome @eckerrigan as the speaker for our inaugural “Meet The Profs” event today. Eric inspired our @imperialeee undergrads with stories about his research into model predictive control for aerospace systems.

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 06/03/2022

I spotted a book in a charity shop window and misread its title…

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 04/03/2022

Another day, another lesson in hardware design courtesy of railway station design… Cambridge station divides its staircase 50/50 between passengers going to the platform and those coming from the platform. 1/3

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John Wickerson @wicko3.bsky.social · 01/03/2022

Wow, fancy somebody with the surname “Zaichuk” being third in an alphabetical ordering of six co-authors! dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3473572

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