Misc – Harun Šiljak

Lit projects

Cooperation, fiction and estranged science are the three driving forces defining projects I am leading outside of the strict research boundaries. The two current projects emerged from the academic circle: my Marie Curie fellowship, and my Complex Systems Summer School experience at the Santa Fe Institute.

Stranger Fictions is a forum for creative exploration through conversation and writing on themes and topics of concern to researchers engaged with interdisciplinary fields of Information and Communications Technology research. I host it with Dr Jessica Foley, and we had a series of very successful workshops, documented on our website.

Sci-Fi ABM-thology is an interdisciplinary group of researchers and educators from around the globe. Through this open-source and fully-volunteer-based project, we are exploring our favorite science fiction stories with new mediums and hope to bring them to the new audience. Jeongki Lim, Andrew Gillreath-Brown and myself are always looking for collaborators–bring us your favourite sci-fi worlds! Our website contains information on models developed so far and ideas for future work.

Computer Games

My name appears somewhere in Football Manager 2007 credits since I was a researcher for the game’s player database.

A game I made in 2011/2012 as a part of a graduate software design course was based on Landau’s license plate game (I wrote about it in math.e (in Croatian) and Mathematical Intelligencer (in English)). The game, originally written for Linux (Ubuntu) and recompiled as a demo for Windows, has several difficulty levels and a multiplayer mode. I am not developing it anymore, and it would be great if someone wanted to continue with it: maybe turning it into a phone app?

The game’s name is Dau (its old website is still available on web archive) and the source code, ‘deb file and some of the windows version files are available here. Be warned, it’s a mess. The game’s manual is also available.

Games, Sports, Hobbies

I play board games and chess variants: shogi is by far my favourite (My love for chess, shogi and go is a few orders of magnitude greater than my playing skill, though). I would also like to have a go at designing a board game or a card game.

I’m an amateur radio operator as well, E73HS and a member of ETF Sarajevo Radio Club. I am not very active at the moment, but that should change in due time.

And yeah, I solve maths problems as a hobby. I was Bosnia and Herzegovina IMO (International Mathematical Olympiad) team member in 2006 and 2007, and I still enjoy solving and creating Olympiad problems and teaching students (B&H and Ireland olympiad contestants) a thing or two about combinatorics and/or number theory.

Videos: talks, stand-up

When fake news were a relatively fresh term, I focused my TEDx talk on the idea of fighting fake news with scientific method. It was worth a shot.

TedXIBU, Sarajevo, Mar 24, 2017

Sharing the passion about reversible computation seemed like a simple, easy, and funny thing in my head, but I’m unsure if you share the sentiment–reversible computation was the topic of my stand up routine for Bright Club, science comedy night at Dublin’s cult venue, Whelan’s.

Bright Club Dublin, Apr 10, 2019.

At the Worldcon 77 in Dublin, I participated in three panel discussions: one on non-TV Doctor Who, one on non-English TV science fiction & fantasy, and one on Muslim science fiction and fantasy. The last one was recorded, so you can see how it all looked like (with all the “back home in Bosnia” references).