The Four I’s Recipe for Cooking Up Computer Graphics Exercises and Assessments

The design of meaningful student activities, such as lab exercises and assignments, is a core element of computer graphics pedagogy. Here, we briefly describe our efforts towards making the process of defining and structuring computer graphics activities more explicit. We focus on four main activity categories that are building blocks for practical course design: Independent, Iterative, Incremental and Integrative. These "Four I's" of computer graphics activity provide the fundamental ingredients for explicitly defining the design of activity-oriented computer graphics courses with the potential to deliver significant artefacts that may, for example, constitute a portfolio of work for assessment or presentation to employers. The categorisations are intended as the first steps towards more clearly structuring and communicating exercise specifications in collaborative course development settings

Probabilistic Inference for Fast Learning in Control

We provide a novel framework for very fast model-based reinforcement learning in continuous state and action spaces. The framework requires probabilistic models that explicitly characterize their levels of confidence. Within this framework, we use flexible, non-parametric models to describe the world based on previously collected experience. We demonstrate learning on the cart-pole problem in a setting where we provide very limited prior knowledge about the task. Learning progresses rapidly, and a good policy is found after only a hand-full of iterations

A new photon recoil experiment: towards a determination of the fine structure constant

We report on progress towards a measurement of the fine structure constant to an accuracy of $5\times 10^{-10}$ or better by measuring the ratio of the Planck constant to the mass of the cesium atom. Compared to similar experiments, ours is improved in three significant ways: (i) simultaneous conjugate interferometers, (ii) multi-photon Bragg diffraction between same internal states, and (iii) an about 1000 fold reduction of laser phase noise to -138 dBc/Hz. Combining that with a new method to simultaneously stabilize the phases of four frequencies, we achieve 0.2 mrad effective phase noise at the location of the atoms. In addition, we use active stabilization to suppress systematic effects due to beam misalignment.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figure