We had a very distinguished visitor at our office yesterday! Prof. Bill Fitzgerald, who heads the Signal Processing Lab at the University of Cambridge, dropped by. For me, that’s one of the nicest things about working for Mendeley – we get to meet brilliant people who do research on the most fascinating of topics.

Bill, for instance, applies his data modelling expertise to a wide range of fields, from audio processing (e.g. automatically transcribing a piece of music to musical notation) to medical imaging and the diagnosis of schizophrenia. Later, during our lunch at Sapori (an Italian restaurant around the corner), he briefly spoke about his PhD research on the statistical properties of quantum mechanics. This prompted Mike to tell a Heisenberg joke I didn’t know yet: Heisenberg is speeding down the highway. A traffic cop pulls him over and asks: “Dr. Heisenberg, do you know how fast you were going?”. Heisenberg: “No, but I know exactly where I am!”

Yet, since Bill has been one of our earliest beta testers, we mainly spoke about his and our ideas on how to improve Mendeley and in which direction to take it. Such discussions are extremely valuable to us, so if you have any suggestions, requests, or ideas, please always feel free to contact us!