Visiting India for the Cardiff Agents Conference
2026-04-24
I am writing this on my way back home after spending a wonderful 3 days at the Cardiff University Agent Conference. The purpose of this conference is to build relationships with the various councillors that help Indian students apply to University.
I was asked to attend and show the newest masters programme we are offering at the School of Mathematics: Artificial Intelligence and Statistical Analytics (MSc). This was a great opportunity to speak and engage with the 70 councillors
This was my first trip to India so I was delighted by the opportunity.
Upon arrival I made sure to keep my bribentives safe for the session I was running the next day.
Our international office team had planned a great programme. On the first day we had a number of team building exercises which were a bunch of fun and a nice way to get to know each other. Here is a photo of the team I was in:
Here are a couple of the examples of the team building exercises:
Thanos ran a great session showcasing some of the teaching being done at the Business School: this involved a judging of AI prompts.
It is always somewhat amusing, how far we have to go from Cardiff to find out what great work our colleagues do. Or even to meet them! In one particular case to meet them again, I was sat on the judging panel with Eleri: we had met about 15 years ago doing our Postgraduate Teaching Certificate and not seen each other since. It was a real pleasure to hang out again.
In the evening we had a beach party.
On the second day I ran my game theory workshop where I walk students through a replication of Axelrod's tournament to understand how game theory can be used to model emergence of cooperation through direct reciprocity. This lead to me talking about our new MSc. The councillors were fantastic sports and made the session fun:
The full set of results is here, this was a particularly uncooperative environment which is actually all part of the fun:
In the afternoon Reece ran an absolutely brilliant session where he asked students to argue a legal case. He was the judge and here is my genuine reaction the first time he spoke quite sternly (in judge mode) to one of the "barristers".
It was brilliant and incredibly thought provoking too (the case he had them argue is apparently a classic one that set a precedent of necessity not being a defence against murder.).
This was a brilliant event and a privilege to be a part of. Meeting all the councillors and learning from them as to what we can do better for Indian students was my highlight. I feel like I also made a lot of friends.
