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Desert Island Hard Disks: Mark Plumbley

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Desert Island Hard Disks: Mark Plumbley

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Mark Plumbley

Posted on 18 January 2017

Estimated read time: 3 min
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Desert Island Hard Disks: Mark Plumbley

Posted by s.hettrick on 18 January 2017 - 9:34am

DIHDYou find yourself stranded on a beautiful desert island. Fortunately, the island is equipped with the basics needed to sustain life: food, water, solar power, a computer and a network connection. Consummate professional that you are, you have brought the three software packages you need to continue your life and research. What software would you choose and - go on - what luxury item would you take to make life easier?

Today we hear from Mark Plumbley, Professor of Signal Processing at the University of Surrey, and Chair of the Institute's advisory board.

What software do I need if I'm stuck on a Desert Island? Let's see...

Out-of-office with chatbot (based on deep learning, of course). I don't want to be concerned that people will notice I'm away. So instead of an out of office responder that simply replies "I'm away and I will delete your message on my return", my out-of-office-bot would reply in the style that the recurrent neural network had learned from my other messages. Nobody will notice the difference, so I can relax properly knowing that nobody will send out a search party.

Evernote, customized for my GTD/TSW variant. Indispensable. I would finally have time for all those Next Actions accumulated in 5-SomedayMaybe. With the necessary saved searches and shortcuts set up to keep me organised, I'll never be stuck knowing what to do next. Hmm, it seems that most of the Next Actions don't have the context @DesertIsland - I guess they may just have to wait for a while. OK, so let's create "Relax [Repeat]", tag with context "@Beach" and time tag ":8h", and file in 1-Now. All set for a maximally productive day!

Python, with an unending supply of packages. On a Desert Island I would have time to actually do some programming, so I could build all those algorithms that I never quite got round to before. And then refactor the others that I really meant to before, but the conference deadline had passed and I had another one to write instead. And then build a new framework so I can refactor them again. And then resurrect the numpy matrix class by using composition instead of inheritance from array to make the world a better place.

My one luxury: A fully-working copy of the British Library, including the sound archive, so I can do a bit of reading and listening to music in my spare time.

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