A while ago a group of people in the Ph.D. lab bought a coffee
machine. In order to overcome some poxy university health and safety
regulation forbiding hot liquids in the workplace (which we assert
exists only to support the somewhat overpriced and mediocre coffee
outlets on campus), and in honour of perhaps the most famous, if not
the first web
cam we chose to redesignate the machine as an experimental
platform for computer vision and artificial intelligence (where
coffee would become an unfortunate, but neccessary by-product).
I attached a
cheap digital camera to the adjacent wall and we set up an old PC as
the coffee server and my colleague Dr. John
Collomosse developed some image processing software using matlab
to determine various properties of the image (such as how much coffee
is probably in the machine). It should be noted that while the
experiment is still ongoing (and will continue to be, until the
machine blows up, or we run out of coffee), early results of our
experimental program indicate that general productivity in the lab is
inversely proportional to the volume of coffee remaining in the jug.