My name is Brad Johanson and I am spending the 1996-1997 academic year studying at the University of Birmingham in England. I am sponsored by District 5150, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California in the United States. My sponsoring club is Tiburon-Sunset, which is located in Tiburon, California, just north of San Francisco. My sponsor counselor from that club is David Bennett. During my year in England I am enrolled in a Masters Degree program in Advanced Computer Science. While here in Birmingham, I am being hosted by District 1060 and the Tamworth-Anker Rotary Club. My host counselor from the Tamworth-Anker club is Dr. Rao Yannamani. In this report I will give an overview of my first two months here in England. I have also been keeping a detailed journal along with photographs on the World Wide Web. This will be maintained as an ongoing status report for Rotary, my family and my friends. It can be found at http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~bej, or http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~bjohanso. The former site is in the United Kingdom and the latter in the United States.
The Masters course in Computer Science which I am attending is half-taught and half-research. Each semester we take 30 credits of courses and 30 credits of research, and then do another 60 credits of research over the summer. The research consists of two mini-projects during each semester, and then the summer is spent doing a larger project in the area of one of the mini-projects. For my first semester I have decided to take 40 credits of taught work in order to reduce the load for next semester. I am taking one required course on research skills, a course on Human Computer Interaction, one on Artificial Intelligence and a last on Biological and Computational Architectures. The last two courses are assessed solely on a final examination, while the first two have projects and reports. The Human Computer Interaction course has been especially interesting since it involves three projects done in groups of about six. It has been a good opportunity for me to improve my skills at working in a team.
My Mini-Project research for this semester is in Computer Vision. Specifically, I am looking at ways to allow a computer to identify cells in pictures of microscope slides. The problem with a lot of biological research is the need to laboriously count cells in order to determine what sort of activity is taking place. It would be nice to automate this on a computer, but the task has proved a difficult one, since extracting the boundaries of cells is not well suited to traditional methods of image processing. One of the doctoral students here at the University is researching human vision with the goal of making a computer "see" the cell images in the same way as humans, who have little trouble identifying cell borders even when a complete periphery is not visible. In my project I am learning about this research and will write some programs to test how well various approaches work. It has been very interesting work, and is very applicable to the real world field of biological research.
During this year I am living in Oakley Court, a University flat complex. Oakley Court is part of the Pritchatts Park International Post-Graduate residential complex located about 10 minutes walk from central campus (although, weather permitting, I usually RollerBlade in, which takes about 5 minutes). Oakley Court consists of four blocks surrounding a grassy central area. The flat that I am in has 10 students in it, and is divided into two wings, each with its own bathroom and toilet room. One kitchen and living room is shared by all of us, but the kitchen has two sinks, stoves, freezers etc. Each of our rooms has a refrigerator in it for us to store our perishable foods.
When I first arrived I was given the choice of which flat to live in, so I chose one of the few with British students, given the point of the scholarship being to get to know people from the United Kingdom. There are eight British, one Greek, and myself in the flat. I have gotten to know most of the people in the flat and they are decent, if a little boisterous. Nobody can complain that we are an anti-social flat, and we have gotten our share of noise complaints. A tradition among many of the members of our flat is to drink a lot of beer, sing along to MTV and eat Balti curries late at night. It has been a lot of fun, although it can be tough on those occasions when you need to get up for a class in the morning.
In addition to my standard classes and relations with my roommates I have taken up some extra-curricular activities as well. For exercise and sport I have joined the Orienteering Club. Orienteering is essentially a foot race through the countryside with a catch, you have to find a series of way-points as you go and punch a card at each one. I had done some orienteering as a Scout, but never competitively before now. I joined since I thought it would be fun to do something new, and also because I have recently had surgery on my shoulder and I wanted to join an activity that did not require rigorous use of my arms. So far I have gone to two Orienteering events, one local and one national. Both were a lot of fun, and the national one gave me a chance to go down to New Forest in the south of England. During that event we got to see the New Forest ponies and also a wild pig and her piglets.
I have also joined the Anglican Society on campus. They are a fun group of people, and in addition to church services we go on excursions from time to time. I have been on two, one to the Walsall Illuminations, which was a night event with illuminated sculptures, and a second which was a weekend retreat to Southam. I especially enjoyed the second since it game me a chance to pause and catch my breath after the busy first weeks in England.
Finally, I am taking an extra-curricular German class which meets once a week. I thought it would be nice to study a language since the University here has a good language department. Rather than strengthening my Spanish, which I already speak well enough to get by in Spanish speaking countries, I decided to try something new. German seemed like a good choice since I will be able to speak it if I travel to Europe during the coming year.
Besides the trips I have made with the clubs I am in, I have also gone on two Rotary related trips. The first was Link Weekend in Bristol. Link Weekend is an opportunity for all of the Ambassadorial Scholars in the British Isles to come together for fellowship and an introduction to Britain. I stayed with Rotarian Steve Perry and his family for the weekend, and had a chance to see some Bristol landmarks including St. Mary Redcliffe Parish Church, called the fairest in Britain by Queen Elizabeth I. The weekend was enjoyable, and I also made many good contacts with other scholars. The second trip was a weekend in Brighton at the District 1060 conference. There were two balls during the evenings, one with a Carnival theme, and the other with a Regency theme. The Regency theme was chosen since Brighton is the location of the Royal Pavilion, built by Prince-Regent, and later King, George IV. On the Saturday afternoon all of the Scholars and Youth Exchange students in the District had a chance to tour the Pavilion, courtesy of the Brighton Rotary Club. The weekend was great fun, especially the dancing in the evenings at the balls.
So far I have made two speeches to local Rotary Clubs, and also attended a number of events in conjunction with my host club, Tamworth-Anker. Throughout all of this my host counselor, Dr. Rao Yannamani has been a big help organizing rides and making sure that I am invited to things. All of the Rotary Clubs I have visited have also been very supportive, and I am very grateful that they have made me feel so welcome.
Overall, my stay so far has been great. My only complaint is that it has been quite hectic juggling all the administrative details, keeping up with Rotary events and staying involved with my various activities. I suspect now that I am settled in and have gotten my bearings things should run more smoothly.
Finally, let me encourage you to look at my web-site which has much more detail than I could fit into this short report. It also has many photographs, which frequently tell the story better than words can. As I mentioned earlier, the web-site is located at http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~bej and also at http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~bjohanso.