Rob: Ok. Currently I'm in Edinburgh, which I've lived in for almost ten years, ten years now. Come up came up here to do my PhD and stayed on and done a sort of a variety of jobs, not necessarily in Edinburgh, but there's a small but significant electronics industry in Scotland, mostly based around Edinburgh, so I've worked for a number of companies around here. Sabine: And where are you from originally? Rob: I'm originally from Kent, which is the sort of the South East of England. From a place called Ashford, which is a very noteworthy, but it's now one of the stops on the Eurostar train between sort of London and France. And, yea, has an international railway station, which is quite amazing for this quite small town in sort of Kent. You know, there's a it's half an hour to France and fifty minutes to London now, you know, it's closer to France, you know. At some time, you know, they've actually started putting up signs in French going from the railway station, you know. So it's quite strange for sort of the UK, where we consider ourselves a bit of an island, to have this sort of fifty, your know, thirty minute connection and you are in Lille, in France, you know. Sabine: But when you where there it wasn't like that? Rob: No, when I was there as a kid, they'd been planning the channel tunnel for quite a long time, but they needed somewhere to put this railway station. So, first thing they did was knock down the cinema, which was the only thing to do in Ashford, because it happened to be next to the railway station, so they could build a bigger railway station. So the net effect of that when I was a kid was that we lost the cinema. But yea so it opened up after I went to university. But it was quite when my parents did live there, it was quite useful, because you, you know, I could go and see my parents and then sort of jump across to the continent and see France, Germany, Europe. Sabine: Ok. Rob: Yea. Sabine: What made you come to Edinburgh then? Rob: Nice city actually. Yea, I'd done my undergraduate degree in Manchester, which is a great place to be a student, because there's, you know, there's about four universities, all in just south of the city centre. So as a student it's great, you know. They basically several suburbs of the city are just given over to students, really. So, it's a great place to be a student. But Edinburgh there is a good department of computer science here, it was doing something I was interested in for a PhD and, yea, Edinburgh is just a really excellent city, you know. It's small and compact, but it's got all of the things that a capital city has in terms of art galleries, culture, the festival, so. Yea, you know, it's a fantastic place to be. Sabine: Ok. Can you tell me a little bit about your PhD actually, what it is about and ? Rob: Right, yes, I did my PhD in the department of Computer Science, but very much it was concerned with something that would naturally fall within electronics as well. It was concerning a particular type of silicon chip called a Field-Programmable Gate Array. And it was looking at making these devices asynchronous, i.e. not having clocks. And most devices in the world, in terms well, most silicon chips currently have a central clock which coordinates how they operate. And I was looking at applying some novel ideas, which were to sort of remove this global clock from this particular type of chip, and make them run asynchronously. The idea is that you could get nice properties like using less power, that the systems will be more modular because you don't have to distribute this clock over the whole system. And, I mean, if you look at sort of modern personal computers, the clocks are running at amazing speed, you know, sort of several gigahertz. And actually it's not you know, you've got one clock going in, but it's not synchronised over the whole chip, you know, because it takes there's different distances it has to travel, and they become really significant when you're going at those sort of frequencies. In a nutshell that was what I was doing for my PhD. Sabine: And did that take you straight on to the work you are doing now, or what are you doing? Rob: It got me, I mean, you know a lot of practical skills in terms of chip in terms of, sort of chip design and what you need to do to sort of make electronics and . Sabine: So, what are doing now actually, what's your job? Rob: Right, I am currently working as an electronic engineer effectively. So I my official title is Systems Integration Engineer. So I'm putting together a lot of different parts of the system to make an overall system. So that includes a lot of software as well as the electronics, i.e. the silicon chips. So, for example, I might assist to help out in the design of a of part of the chip. I would specify what the chip does in many of its key aspects, and also get involved in the firmware which goes on the chip to make it do something useful. So, to give you a practical example, my current project is working on a chip which generates music for mobile telephones, for example, MP3s and also these ring tones which kind of make a plague everyone lives now when the mobile telephone starts to ring. So, I mean, obviously there is massive number of people who sort of are involved in doing that, and I have one work at one kind of particular level where, you know, there's a whole working for sort of Epson, which is a sort of Japanese company that actually own fabrication plants or fabs, as we like to call them. And you know, these fabs the end the game in the end is to keep these fabs full of chips and make money through selling them. And so there's this whole army of people in Japan who are actually making the chips. And we're looking at the designs and trying to specify the products and then you know, we have sales and marketing division in Germany who are trying to sell the product as well. So, there's a, you know I'm a small cog in a very big machine as it were. Sabine: As it were, yea. That's a good description. Sabine: What's the aspect you like most about your work? Is there anything? Rob: I quite, you know, I quite like this sort of there's quite a lot creative design to being an engineer, I think. So, that's quite interesting. I quite like building things and actively, so. I think that's quite often people who stay as engineers quite often, especially in sort of computer science, electronics, it's that what really drives them in some ways it's they're quite they just like building and playing with electronics, and you know, I had a computer when I was very young, and you know, that's probably why I am doing this job now. But also, you know, it's quite interesting, the technology is moving on at such a rapid pace, you know, you can do kind of remarkable things that ten of fifteen years ago were almost impossible, are now, sort of every day . Sabine: Does it involve travelling, your work? Rob: It involves some travelling, seeing customers. In the current job I've been over to Japan once, and in previous jobs I had to go to sort of Taiwan. But sometimes fairly mundane places where . A lot of electronics companies in the UK are actually in the sort of South East, so I've been a lot of the trips are down there. Sabine: Is that something you enjoy or is it a stressful thing? I mean, how do you feel about having to travel at short notice maybe in some cases? Rob: Well, I like it in small doses, and as long as it's not a really pressing, you know, pressing reason to travel, you know. Sometimes, you know, some of the trips I had make to Taiwan, it was fairly much 'you are getting on this flight tomorrow, and you know, you are going to be there till this problem is solved, and the you're going to come back', you know. You don't actually get much of a chance to see the place or see the culture. But sometimes if you get a chance to sort of grab a weekend here or sort of extend the trip, like I did when I went to Japan, it's, you know, it's great. The company is allowing you to sort of see the world. But sometimes they don't, sometimes they just pull you straight back, so, yes. Sabine: Yea, it's interesting, everyone thinks travelling is just fun, but . Sabine: What do you think is different? I mean, earlier on you talked about you are from England originally and you have lived in Scotland for a long time. Is there anything that you miss that you know from England, or is there anything that you like particularly about Scotland in comparison to England, or is that too general in a sense? Rob: I mean I think the reasons I quite like Scotland is it's a little bit less built up than especially the South East of England, you know. You always feel the traffic is a little bit suffocating and so forth in the South East. There's a bit more space in Scotland, and also it's . Yea, the I mean I actually quite like the fact that, you know, Scotland has its own government, so is a little bit independent, you know. It does things a little bit differently from England. I quite like that. Sabine: Have you travelled around Scotland, or is your time too limited to do that? Rob: I've seen most, you know . Quite often sort of rented cottages up north in the Highlands and sort of did a bit of walking. Sabine: So, what would you recommend, which place would you recommend? Rob: I quite like Applecross, which is this sort of little village where you have to cross a high mountain fairly high mountain range to get to. It's all single track roads, and it looks out over the Isle of Skye, and that's quite, you know, that's quite an atmospheric place, I would say, but I mean all around the Highlands really it's very beautiful. % % Acknowledgements, availability and copyright % -------------------------------------------- % Acknowledgements: The project has been supported by the University of % Tuebingen. The video interviews have been carried out and recorded by % Sabine Braun, Stefanie Hahn, Petra Hoffstaedter and Kurt Kohn. The % speakers have agreed to the use of the materials for non-commercial % research and education purposes. % % Availability of the ELISA corpus: The ELISA corpus is made available by the % Department of Applied English Linguistics at the University of Tuebingen. % It is freely available at this website for study, teaching and research % purposes, and copies of the transcripts may be distributed, as long as this % statement of availability appears in the text. However, if any portion of % this material is to be used in educational presentations and publications, % permission must be obtained in advance. Commercial use of any form is % excluded. For further information about permissions, please contact Dr. % Sabine Braun at s.braun(at)surrey.ac.uk. % % Copyright of the ELISA corpus: Department of Applied English Linguistics, % University of Tuebingen. %