Computer Supported Collaborative Work in Design

The real (official) reason that I am in Chile is to present a paper at the CSCWD international conference. So I did. I reported on our work in building a framework to integrate together a variety of robot controllers and sensors, in order to research on programming and controlling groups of robots. What we reported this time is just some mundane foundation work. We are still working on the more challenging problems, and hopefully, will have something more exciting to talk about in the future.

Now this is interesting. This little animal is called piure in Spanish - a kind of sea squirt, I was told. It is a bit like a bright red oyster. Bite into a cooked one, and the texture even resembles an oyster. But the taste is something else: a mixture of metal and gasoline! I made myself eat several of them to memorize the taste; but my brain keeps trying to block it off. I am not sure I can recall it now. It is truly something else.

The lady at the small restaurant outside the market in Valparaiso (where we injested the piure) didn’t speak any English. But we still managed to order two great sea food dishes essentially by pointing and gesturing. Everybody there was warm and friendly. The couple at the next table even taught us how to add lemon juice and salt to the beer to spice it up. And it was good.

Time and again Chileans at the subway, on the street, in restaurants, ..., volunteered to help us. We like you Chileans.