Through the Interface

After an incredible week at TechX in Seattle, I headed back to Europe, but not yet homewards. I changed planes in Frankfurt on my way to Alicante for a friend's 60th birthday.

I hadn't slept at all on my flight from Seattle to Frankfurt as - despite having a seat with decent legroom - I had someone next to me who was clearly severely alcoholic (trust me, I'm not one to judge) and was literally sweating alcohol. There was no way I could sleep with the smell of his sweat next to me.

By the time I arrived in Frankfurt I was exhausted. I had quite a bit of time between flights, but thankfully Frankfurt is a Lufthansa hub: I have lounge access with Swiss and so could hang out in the business lounge between flights.

I was just about to nod off in the lounge, but then realised they had showers available, which proved to be a complete lifesaver. I felt sooo much better after a shower. I slept 2 hours on the onwards flight to Alicante, and then met up with some friends of friends who were coming to the same party and happened to be renting a car. We travelled together to Altea.

Altea is up in the hills above Benidorm and is somewhat cooler. It was raining when I arrived, but the weather was clear but chilly by the time we went out for tapas in the church square.

Francesco, who's birthday we were celebrating, worked for many years at Autodesk and also coolOrange, a partner of ours, so many of the people who came had some kind of Autodesk affiliation. Many others were friends of his from Italy.

After some light food we headed back to the car.

For Friday night the main entertainment was heading into Benidorm. If you mention Benidorm to anyone who has been there - or grown up in the UK - you usually get a very strange reaction. Especially if you mention a birthday party.

It's a bizarre place. Full mainly of young (and not so young) Brits who are there for beer and excitement of various sorts.

Benidorm has several high-rise accommodation blocks, some of which you can see in the below photo.

We only stayed for one beer. I don't expect to ever go back there, although the breakfasts do look tempting.

I went to bed at nearly 3am, having only slept 2 hours in the preceding day and a half. But I slept well, and woke up in time to head to Altea's waterfront with several former Autodesk colleagues.

The day was mostly about relaxing and catching up with old friends. A great way to spend a Saturday.

This was by no means the full complement of ex-Autodeskers who came in, but it was a solid start.

I see Oscar regularly in Switzerland, but it's always fun to hang out.

I see Emanuela less often - she's based in the Midlands (of the UK) - so this was a rare treat.

We went to the least touristy of the beachfront restaurants, El Chiringuito.

As most of us were due back at the same restaurant on Sunday for a paella, we went for the fideuà. It's like paella but is supposedly made with angel hair pasta. This one looked like it was made with tinned spaghetti but nonetheless tasted very good.

By the time lunch was finished we headed up to Francesco's place. It's up in the hills, surrounded by commercial loquat (also known as Japanese medlar) orchards. A lovely fruit but very sensitive to wind, etc., so they're gradually being swapped out for avocado plantations, apparently.

Francesco was very happy to receive a walking stick from someone for his birthday. He doesn't need it, but proceeded to hobble around with it for much of the evening.

People were already arriving for the evening's celebrations. While the sun was shining it was reasonably warm.

As the sun went down it got distinctly chilly, but the band - and the dancing - kept people warm.

In the morning some old friends stopped by before heading northwards. Xavier is Spanish but has lived in Switzerland for many years.

He recently bought a thermal imaging camera extension for his phone, which is really neat. He gets even more excited about cool tech than I do.

We tried it on various objects. You can see residual heat left on tiles when you walk barefoot, for instance, and looking at cooling coffee is wild. I need one.

For lunch we headed back to Altea. My flight was at 6pm, which meant I had to head to the airport at around 3pm. Lunch was at 1:30pm, and it was a really busy Sunday, but I still managed to eat a few plates of paella before rushing off.

My flight to Berlin wasn't direct: I had to transfer in Frankfurt. I only had 1h15 to change planes, which would normally have been plenty, but we ended up landing 50 minutes late. I was really lucky: the departure gate of the Berlin flight was A56 but the original arrival from Alicante was meant to be at A34. Because of the delay we came in to A62 which was just a few minutes run away. I got to the gate just as the boarding started.

I arrived in Berlin Brandenburg airport at roughly the same time as Dagmara and Allin, so we shared a taxi into town. Allin, Tomas and I shared an Airbnb a 20-minute walk from the conference venue. It was very nice, I have to say.

The walk in the morning was delightful. We went along cobbled streets and through a park.

The park still had blooming tulips!

The Machine+Behavior was held at Harnack House, part of the Max Planck campus.

Here's a quote from Max Planck - can we please call it a maxim? (badum-tish) - that translates to "to apply something you must first understand it." I have adapted my own version (a keanim?) that says "to apply something, someone in your team must first understand it." 🙂

The Machine+Behavior conference is all about the impact of generative AI on humanity. Here's the description from their website:

As Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) rapidly reshapes our world, and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) becomes a real possibility, we are faced with many pressing questions, such as:

• How will AI impact human communication, friendship, education, ethics, cooperation, and conflict?
• How do we ensure AI safety when human behavior and cognitive limitations form an attack vector?
• What is the impact of AI on human innovation and culture?
• Are there lessons from biology or political science to inform how humans can control a more powerful intelligence?

We believe answering these, and many related, questions requires deep collaboration between AI scientists and behavioral scientists from across disciplines. We aim to collaboratively chart research priorities, foster community ties, and catalyze interdisciplinary efforts to study machine behavior and human-machine behavioral dynamics across scales and over various time horizons. Only by better measuring and understanding machine behavior can we ultimately control it.

As the conference was relatively inexpensive and local, we could have a good group from our team attend. Everyone found it to be very worthwhile.

Many of the speakers discussed their experiences using AI as a proxy to study and explore human behaviour. There were many valuable insights shared.

The weather was really nice throughout, so breaks and meals were often spent on in the garden.

Each day had a poster session, as you might expect.

In the evening of the first day there was even a dinner event.

Harnack House is a very nice conference venue, I have to say.

One of the many keynotes I appreciated was from Eric Schulz, who leads the Human-Centered AI lab at Helmholtz Munich.

The catering at this conference was really first-class. During one break we were even given Berliners, appropriately enough.

There was a huge amount of information presented over the course of the two days. Many insights were shared and connections made. Thank you to all the organisers for putting together such a fantastic program!

In the evening our team went across to Ingenieurbüro Kraft, where we had a tour of their facility and a discussion about their various water treatment projects around the world.

Herr Kraft (I call him Harald) is an old friend of the family who used to visit us regularly in the East of England on this way north on motorcycle tours of Scotland.

It had been several years since I last had the chance to talk with Harald in person, so I was very happy he was free to join us for dinner.

Once the main conference was finished, on the Wednesday we met at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development for the Behavioral Clones workshop.

The institute is in a very old part of Berlin. On this side street there are three kinds of cobblestones.

The workshop was about using AI models to simulate human behaviour: something that's at the core of what my team is researching.

The two main organisers were Dirk and Levin, who are both researchers at Max Planck.

A project that has inspired our team in the last year or so is Centaur, which fine-tunes an LLM (llama) with data from psychology experiments. It was great to hear from Marcel Binz, the lead researcher on that project.

Christoph Hölscher and Leonel Aguilar Melgar from the Future Cities Laboratory at ETH Zurich are longstanding acquaintances (Leo came to the Encoding Experience event in London, for instance). Leo is also an old friend of Jaime Rosales, so this photo is for you, Jaime!

My big plan was to head to a party at the NEST building in Dübendorf when I got to Zurich: there was an opening event being held there for ETH Zurich's Future of Construction Symposium. It was only happening from 7-10pm, and as my flight was delayed I only arrived in at 9pm, so I decided to skip it. It was a shame, but then I was also very tired after the last 10 days on the road.

I had a great time in Seattle, Spain and Berlin. It was a really valuable trip, and I greatly appreciated meeting so many interesting people. It will be good to be home for a few weeks, though.