A delegation from HAPiWEC attended the Oceans conference in Limerick. There in person to present their paper ‘Paper title’ were Drs Campos, Price and Mortazavizadeh, while their co-author Dr. Yazdanpanah provided HA-in-the-loop support back in Glasgow.
We hired a stand in the exhibition to demonstrate the remote lab aspect of HAPiWEC. The demo was a game of remote roulette: participants could interact with the motor in Glasgow via a Zoom call and GUI on a laptop at our stand. As these had different time delays, stopping the motor in the winning sector was a pretty random process. Nevertheless, partipants enjoyed having a shot at winning one of the FloWave-branded rubber duckies.
In the Zoom call, the camera focussed on the motor. Dr. Yazdanpanah only appeared in the call when the motor needed a nudge to start at a low speed, and in these cases, it was only his arm that featured. This led to the discovery of a previously unacknowledged step in the X-in-the-Loop workflow: HairyArm-in-the-Loop.
The exhibition was housed in two large marquees, which had been designed for solar gains that would be welcome in typical Irish weather. Consequently there were sauna levels of heat in the marquees and we were grateful that our stand was close to a number of ice-chilled fans. Drs Campos and Mortazavizadeh did the bulk of the shifts at the stand and are to be commended on their dedication to a dress-code that was incompatible with the temperature. This heroic adherence to the dress code prompted an interesting dialogue: the international conference experience is not universal. In both Mexico and Iran there is a preference for journal publications, while conferences are national events with a highly formalised format and dress-code. This insight is relevant to HAPiWEC because part of the project remit is to widen participation, particularly to countries that do not have the resources that we take for granted in Scotland.
