NANDA Workshop 2023

This is a trip report from the NANDA workshop in London.

Took CX100 to Hong Kong and didn’t get to my hotel until close to midnight HK time (which was 2am Sydney time). However, they must have filled the hotel because I was upgraded to a suite.

The following day the first stop was the table tennis shop for new rubber. Apparently it should be changed every year. It was more than 10 years since I changed mine and I was told off by the cranky uncle there because the rubber had perished and the glue stuck to the blade. He told me I needed a new blade (and it should be a Butterfly blade, not a Stiga). He got more agitated when I asked what was the difference between the cheap and expensive one (he said there was no difference). I very much miss HK, overseas most shop owners don’t verbally abuse their customers. He wasn’t happy when I asked for orange balls (they stopped using them a few years ago).

It was a pretty impressive shop. A Japanese customer came in and I helped translate. After that the owner was all smiles.

Photos of lots of champions including Soo Wai-yam, Ma Lin and Tomokazu Harimoto.

After a few meetings at CUHK, went to play with the table tennis team. I hadn’t seen Mr Ho (in blue) for more than 10 years and he reminded us that we had won the HK University competition many years ago.

When I got back to my hotel, there was already a red rainstorm warning in effect. This soon became a black rainstorm warning which shut the city down and I had to cancel my visit to HKU. According to Reuters, it was the heaviest rainfall on record, HK receiving 20cm in a few hours. This guy was cleaning the drain.

Fortunately, there were still a few restaurants open in Tsim Sha Tsui.

Later that evening, when the warning signal was removed, I went for roast goose here. The owner still remembers me.

Then had a pleasant evening listing to jazz at Ned Kelly’s Last Stand.

The following day, flew to London and met up with some Sydney Uni people, Adeline, Prof Ben Eggleton and Harj at Sky Garden.

The main event was the NANDA Workshop, hosted by Prof Wayne Luk. It was great to catch up with some old friends including Ruby Lee from Princeton. The workshop was truly excellent with papers on computer architecture, design automation and reconfigurable computing.

Profs Wayne Luk (Imperial), Ruby Lee (Princeton), Kunle Oyekunle (Stanford), Subhasish Mitra (Stanford) and Matthew Leung (Huawei).

Prof Steve Furber (Manchester University), principal designer of the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor.

We inspected some old cars restored by Imperial College students.

Dinner at Hux Brasserie.

Clockwise, myself, Profs Wayne Luk (Imperial), Ruby Lee (Princeton), Howard Lee, Paul Kelly (Imperial), Mary Sheeram (Chalmers) and Miriam Leeser (Northeastern).

The next day I did a viva examination for Prof Christos-Savvas Bouganis at Imperial College (congratulations to Dr Diederik Vink). Our exam only went for about 3 hours (they have been known to take the whole day) so we had time for lunch at the Imperial staff restaurant. Here I am with Christos and Prof Peter Cheung.