Rush hour, Princes Street, Edinburgh

Normally at 08:00 on a weekday, Princes Street would be crammed with buses, trams, taxis, cycles and pedestrians. This was not the case today for a city in lockdown.

My walking route this morning was up to Princes Street, down to Dean village, and along the Water of Leith to the art gallery. The way back included climbing up a rough path that I've never noticed before not far from the weir beneath the art gallery. This comes out at Wester Coates, close to my Auntie Anne's old house. The route home again was along the (very quiet) main road past Haymarket Station, then I cut back to base through the New Town.

I spent most of the afternoon marketing a fully-funded PhD studentship on natural language interfaces. If you know any Computer Science or Software Engineering Bachelors or Masters graduates (or soon-to-be graduates), who have some experience of studying Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, or Machine Learning (e.g. as part of a module, or in a project), and have achieved (or are on target for) a 1st class or 2.1 degree, please send them my way! Fuller details of the studentship are posted on my blog, and the SGSSS web site. I also shovelled email, and checked some revisions to a journal article.

I must say that I am already feeling the benefits of outside exercise and daylight.

Exercise today: walking (16,502 steps).