Pierre A. I. Wijkman

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News

Here are the latest changes on this site:

• 2011-01-24: A new system for distance courses ready

Teaching

Summary of:

• Internetprogrammering – Stationära enheter
• Internetprogrammering – Mobila enheter
• Webbutveckling - Klientsidan
• Webbutveckling - Serversidan

The courses above are visited by many students each year! Wow! :-)

Closed IP1-4

Closed Applications for Internet

Research

I support the Open Source Initative (OSI) and Free Software.

From phone

Message: Hi!

Presentation

I am a Ph.D in computer science and work as an assistant professor at The Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden. Here I teach, do research and some other fun things.

Why do I work at a university when I could make much more money in the industry? For me, it is because (1) it is a place for free open creative thinking, similar in spirit to open source coding, (2) there is time (and space) for self learning, and, (3) you meet many intelligent and creative students. I strongly recommend it!

By the way, the photo is from 1994 when I won the IBM Leonardo Da Vinci Prize in a nation wide competition with over 3 000 competitors. And yes, the "A" and the "I" in my name does not stand for "artificial intelligence" but for "Arne" and "Ingvar" who is my father and grandfather.

Interest

My focus is on learning/adaptivity and various sorts of technical matters dealing with computers. My interest for computers and learning/adaptivity started early in my life. I began programming computers at the age of 14 and I read "Computers and the Human Mind: An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" by Fink at the same time. When I read about Samuels self-learning checker playing program there was no way out :-). I have since then tried to understand real learning/adaptivity and ... I still do :-). In the beginning I was mainly interested in artificial systems and I made a large number of programs simulating various processes from nature. Since 1996 (when I began teaching) my focus has included also natural systems such as humans :-). I have tried to summarise everything in my hopfully evolving CV.

Can we fully understand learning/adaptivity? If we describe or formalise learning/adaptivity we are limiting the phenomena to a more specific function but is not learning/adaptivity the very process that gets out of every such restriction? Are we defining learning/adaptivity now? :-) Can anyone define the concept of concept?

Other areas of interest are consciousness, Maxwell's demon, non-linear systems, metaphysics, theories of everything and the future of computing. I do not like determinism and dualism :-).

Hobbies

My favourite hobby is to activate my body. I have exercised since the age of 5 and I mostly bodybuild, run, swim and bicycle. I love exercising!

I read a lot of books and science magazines, especially in complexity, physics, biology and computer science. My favorite books are:

• "At Home in The Universe" by Kauffman (Viking)
• "How Nature Works" by Bak (Springer-Verlag)
• "Gödel Escher Bach" by Hofstadter (Basic Books)
• "The Computational Beaty of Nature" by Flake (A Bradford Book)

I will make a complete list later :-).

I also love to go to the theme park riding roller coaster, free fall and everything else that wakes you up. Wow!

Fun stuff

Here are some demos that I made recently:

• Tellus is a screensaver that shows a rotating live earth. Yes, it is a live picture from space, the program connects via a number of computers to a number of satellites and gets a live composite image. Download and be amazed!
• Robot chat lets you talk to my robot sister Amy who knows me reasonably well, sometimes too well.
• Talking chat is a program that generates speech from text. The voice is not always appropriate. If you start with "java -jar Client.jar" you can talk with anyone. If you start with "java -jar Client.jar atlas.dsv.su.se 4456" you can talk with my sister Amy.
• IP-telephone is a program that enables telephony over Internet. Be sure to have a microphone and a speaker. Start the program on one computer with "java -jar Phone.jar" and on another with "java -jar Phone.jar x" where x is the IP-number of the first computer. Hello!
• Whiteboard is a program demonstrating a distributed painting. It is not very impressive.
• Chat on mobile is a chat client for mobile phones with Java support. Surf with your mobile phone to the link above and it will install directly to your phone.
• The Mandelbrot set is amazing! I wrote my first Mandelbrot set program in 1985 on my old friend Vic 20 that had an enormous 4 KByte of internal memory. One image took several days to render but is was a great experience I will never forget! You can zoom in the image by making a rectangle with the mouse.
• Some demos of progressive downloaded media with Flash and MPEG-4: TV/DVD resolution, HD resolution, and, Full HD resolution.
• Some demos of realtime streaming media with MPEG-4.
• A family morph made with Morpheus by placing a number of correlated points on two images. This is a good start if you want to build a similar program yourself.
• A demo of a Flash-based online lecture with synchronized OH-images taken from a PowerPoint-presentation with Stefan Möller.
• A demo of a SMIL-based online lecture with synchronized OH-images taken from a PowerPoint-presentation with Stefan Möller (requires RealPlayer).

There is a lot more but you have to log in to the courses above to check it out.

Current activities

Currently I am playing with:

• A paper about sexual reproduction and complexity.
• A paper describing a new model of adaptivity (this will need some more work though). I have been working on this since 1996. I will not publish this paper.

Future plans

I want to do more research into consciousness, free will and other philosophical stuff. Right now I am playing around too much with a lot of computer tech, something that I love to do, but I need to get serious sometimes :-). So, I will begin to write a paper about free will and the foundations of quantum mechanics anytime soon now ... hmm.

Search

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Contact

The best way to contact me is by e-mail:

pierre@dsv.su.se

Please, do not use my FC-address.

Here you can send a SMS to my mobile phone:

If you want to send something by snail-mail the postal address is:

• Pierre A. I. Wijkman
• Department of Computer and Systems Sciences
• Stockholm University / Royal Institute of Technology
• Forum 100
• 164 40 Kista
• Sweden

If you have some urgent snail-mail contact me by e-mail first.

This page

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By the way, DI is a great site with tons of great music!