H.A.L.E is an event that will carry LEGO Mindstorms-based payloads into the Earth’s stratosphere. At that altitude H.A.L.E. will be above 99.9% of the atmosphere. They payloads will be exposed to extreme the cold and radiation of near space. The sky looks black and the curvature of the Earth is evident. Individuals and teams from all around the world are busy designing and building payloads for this historic event.

High Altitude LEGO Extravaganza

Tags: robotics, space

Official Google Blog: Our Googley advice to students: Major in learning

It’s easy to educate for the routine, and hard to educate for the novel. Keep in mind that many required skills will change: developers today code in something called Python, but when I was in school C was all the rage. The need for reasoning, though, remains constant, so we believe in taking the most challenging courses in core disciplines: math, sciences, humanities.

And then keep on challenging yourself, because learning doesn’t end with graduation. In fact, in the real world, while the answers to the odd-numbered problems are not in the back of the textbook, the tests are all open book, and your success is inexorably determined by the lessons you glean from the free market. Learning, it turns out, is a lifelong major.

a short video summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. Created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University.

A Vision of Students Today

In addition to that, a UC Berkeley Professor Harold Rheingold made a video of a professor’s viewpoint of a class full of students on laptops. This is part of his work exploring attention in the classroom and elsewhere. One of my favorite quotes was when he worked with a student that said, “There is a marketplace for [the student’s] attention, and if the professor couldn’t compete, that was the professor’s problem.”

Attention in the Classroom

Technorati Tags: education, attention,

Let me know if you want to see the pretty graphs that Google generates on our behalf.

City of Iowa City - Volunteer Log of Hours Worked

Tags: flood2008, iowa city, iowa, volunteer

They’re using the same entry/descent/landing system as the Mars Surveyer that failed spectacularly in 2001 (stupid metric system), as well as parts from the Mars Polar Lander.
Minor correction:  Mars Polar Lander was in failed in Dec 1999 and it probably failed  due early to  engine shutdown in the  last little bit of landing.  Mars Climate Orbiter has the honor of the unit conversion  issues.  Thanks Kurt Schwehr, from Tucson Science Operations Center.

Like the Phoenix bird of ancient mythology, the Phoenix Mars Mission is reborn out of fire; this new mission was created from the embers of previous Mars endeavors. Phoenix will use many components of two unsuccessful Mars missions, MPL and MSP ‘01. Using lessons learned and an extensive testing program, scientists and engineers are confident that Phoenix will rise from the ashes revealing clues in the martian arctic soils about the history of water and potential for biology.

 I thought it was interesting that the project site mentions a number of times that Lockheed Martin is responsible for the spacecraft engineering.

Anyway…have a look.

Phoenix Mars Mission - Home

Tags: mars, space, robots, robitics, science

(more…)

The redesigned the layout of the MIE pages to fit with the College of Engineering’s design, but they didn’t change much of the content.  Why am I still on the front page of IE?  Get some new pictures!

The National Acadamy of Engineering put together a committee to decide on some engineering Grand Challenges. 

So…get to ‘em, everyone! =)

Using the infrared camera in the Wii remote and a head mounted sensor bar (two IR LEDs), you can accurately track the location of your head and render view dependent images on the screen. This effectively transforms your display into a portal to a virtual environment. The display properly reacts to head and body movement as if it were a real window creating a realistic illusion of depth and space.

YouTube video link

He’s made the software available on his Wii projects site.

Wii gotta get one of these!

10:00
Broke into discussion groups.  Discussed how SN tools support and
enhance teaching. and what can UI do to use SN tools.   Many of the
groups identified the need for some type of decision support system for
faculty to help them decide which tool could be used to address
different types of learning objectives. 

12ish: Lunch.  Very
yummy.  I spent much of it talking with a professor from the Spanish
Dept, who had questions about types of technology she could use NOW.

1ish:
Broke into separate sessions that went into more depth on specific
technologies - wikis, Second Life, podcasting.  Ok, I went back to my
lab for this part of the day.

2:30: Overview of Personal Response Systems, or “Clickers,” which are used to get real-time responses from lecture students.

I
was struck by the range of perception of and experience with different
social network technologies.  Some people had never heard of some of
the tools, some had heard of them but never seen them, some had seen
them and were not clear why they would use them in class, and some
(few) had used them in class and research.  It was good for me because
it challenged many of the assumptions and ideas that I have come to
take for granted in my social network research.

Access to the technical skills and resources to build and use social network sites was an issue for some departments.

We raised some of the obvious issues of privacy, data mining, and UI
social network policies.  One professor, for example, recently started
a Facebook profile.  She only allows her students to see a limited
portion of her profile, and asks her students to limit her access to
their profile.  She wants to keep a teacher-student relationship, and
doesn’t want to see their party pictures.  Another person suggested
that it may be proper not to Facebook-friend people while you are
teaching class, but you can be friends after.  It will be interesting
to see how institutional policies evolve in this area.

Because
of the range of experiences, I think they could have done a better job
at introducing and organizing the social networking arena to the many
newbies in the group.  The first speaker did a great job of showing
some of the social network sites like Facebook, myspace, youtube, etc,
and even showed some examples of how they are being used in education. 
But I think this group needed to take a step back from specific tools. 
For example, I think social network technologies are good at 1)
locating and connecting people with similar interests, 2) enabling
asyncronous communcation and collaboration, 3) enabling reuse/mashups
of existing content and 4) aggregating many opinions or viewpoints
about a particular resource.  It may have been helpful to introduce
social networking by saying, “here are 4 uses for social networking
technologies, and here are particular examples of these uses.”  This
would have helped people to separate concepts about social networking
in general from the specific implementations you see in Facebook,
Second Life, etc.  Second, introducing social networking concepts
instead of specific tools may have helped people identify how these
tools could be used in their work and teaching.

STSC CrossTalk - Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow? - Jan 2008

It is our view that Computer Science (CS) education is neglecting basic skills, in particular in the areas of programming and formal methods. We consider that the general adoption of Java as a first programming language is in part responsible for this decline. We examine briefly the set of programming skills that should be part of every software professional’s repertoire.

The main argument here is that students are becoming programming plumbers - basically able to follow set patterns or string together libraries, but lack knowledge in fundamental computing areas to enable them to solve complex or large scale computing problems efficiently.  The article also describes some computer engineering skills/knowledge that programmers should have.

In the Iowa College of Engineering, first year students have a programming course in which they learn C.  However, the course skips pointers, references, and memory management in order to simplify the course and retain more students.  I’m not sure when, if ever, pointers and memory management are re-introduced into the engineering curriculum.  Perhaps somewhere in the EE track.  As a programmer, I hated having to deal with memory management and pointers, and I have been extremely happy to move from strongly typed compiled languages like C, C++, Java into scripting languages like Python and Ruby. But I think that a fundamental knowledge of memory management becomes like a common abstraction between languges that lets you learn new languages and techniques more efficiently.

Also, I think you should have to get a license to use the rm -rf * command (recursively remove everything, forcibly without confirmation) in unix.

(more…)

“Twenty-seven percent of respondents reported that social media is a core element of their communications strategy. Only 3 percent stated that social media have little or no value to their communications initiatives. Respondents believe that social media is most effective for the following sectors: arts, entertainment and recreation; communications; computer hardware; and education.”

“Now we want to accelerate the development of robots that make a contribution to society, drawing on our knowledge and innovation in the field of automobiles.”

Honda is also interested in partnering with Universities to continue to improve robotics.

I’m not good at literary criticism, but I think it is safe to say that the book deals with the limitations of pursuing scientific thought and scientific questions for their own sake, and that real wisdom is more likely to come from a more humanitarian view of the world. Basically, the book wonders what the point of scientific truth is, if it doesn’t really improve the human condition. A damn good question.
It also has a few witty things to say about human nature. Here’s a few more snippets that caught my fancy this time:
(more…)

“All of the true things that I’m about to tell you are shameless lies.”

and

“‘Dr. Breed keeps telling me the main thing with Dr. Hoenikker was truth.’

‘You don’t seem to agree.’

‘I don’t know whether I agree or not.   I just have trouble understanding how truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person.’”

and

“Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”

and

“There was a sign hung around my dead cat’s neck.   It said, ‘meow.’ …. Somebody or something did not wish me to be a nihilist.   It was Krebb’s mission, whether he knew it or not, to disenchant me with that philosophy.   Well, done, Mr. Krebbs, welll done.”

Good stuff, even if it is a bunch of shameless lies.

I can’t wait to get started!

Also, installed a CAPTCHA service to hopefully reduce the amount of spam.

I’m turning off comments on new posts.   This setting can be overwritten on individual posts. We’ve only had 1 ‘real’ comment on this blog (thanks Will), so it doesn’t appear that anyone will miss this functionality.

In this competition, teams will be required to demonstrate a robot
that has the ability to:

1. Autonomously connect to the Internet and build an object
   classification database sufficient to identify a number of objects
   found on a textual list.
2. Use this classification database to autonomously search an indoor
   environment for the objects in its list.

Integrating a mobile robot with the vision research adds another
interesting layer of complexity that would not ordinarily be available
in a purely computer vision competition. Semantic understanding of
the objects could also be expanded to scene understanding as well.
Thus, scene context can be used to guide the search for objects in
areas which make the most sense for them to be found (e.g. a stapler
is usually found on a desk rather than on the floor or on a wall).

The Semantic Robotic Vision Challenge

Technorati Tags: robotics, computer vision, artificial intelligence

• I was really struck by the diverse interests of the conference patrons. I think this diversity reflects the wide range of disciplines that makes up human-robotic interface research. There were people with psychology and social psychology backgrounds, people with music backgrounds, and of course computer science and engineering. I enjoyed the diversity because it challenged me to think of robotics and the impact of robotics on society much more broadly than I had. In our research we had focused on scientific robots, particularly mobile robots used to explore Mars. This conference brought to my attention many more kinds of robots: robots to assist the elderly and blind, robotic shopping carts, robots that interact with children and give guided tours of museums, that play drums interactively with other drummers, robots that act as proxies for individuals physically located elsewhere.
• Much of robotics research is taking place in Japan, and there were a lot of Japanese attendees. Some of their presentations blew me away. Japan seems to be making a national investment in using robotics to change society, both as an assistive technology for the disabled and elderly. One of the keynote speakers from Japan, Hiroshi Ishiguro, had a really interesting perspective on robotics. He believes that the study of robotics is the search for deeper understanding of human behavior. His goal is to understand how humans behave and interact with each other to such a detailed level that he can create robots that behave like humans, and allow humans to interact naturally with the robots he creates.
• One of the recurring conversations at the conference was trying to understand exactly what is Human-Robot Interaction as a scientific discipline? Certainly we draw from engineering, computer science and computer vision. As we seek to make interactions between robots and humans more natural, we draw from more social sciences like psychology, social psychology, even neurobiology. But it appears that HRI has yet to really crystalize or formalize as a discipline in and of itself, in that there are no central theories or agreed upon principles that we all agree upon. It may be difficult to come to that kind of consensus, since right now we build robots with particular traits to solve particular problems…its hard to generalize techniques for a Mars robot to techniques for a robotic shopping cart. At any rate, it is kind of exciting to be working in such a young field. Lots of opportunity, even if there is some risk that in 5 or 10 years it may not exist.
• I thought it was even more fun to ask the question, “What exactly is a robot?” One definition is that a robot is a collection of automation that senses the environment and can take action on behalf of the operator. So is the automatic flushing toilet a robotic toilet? I think if you asked 50 roboticists, you’d get 50 different answers.
• Central issues in HRI: People tend to anthropromorphize (treat as though it were human, with human intelligence and motivations) robots. This is a problem because we don’t yet have the artificial intelligence to make the robot behave completely natural, so people get confused. So a lot of the papers were sort of demos of making robots interact with people in different ways and different situations, and seeing how they react. One paper made people play with a little robot, then asked them to kill it by smashing it with a hammer. People said things like, “poor little guy, ” or “that’s so inhumane.”

One thing that you have to consider as a budding academic is which societies and associations you want to align yourself with — whose papers will you read and who do you want to read your papers. I think I will continue to be involved with the HRI crowd because I feel its diversity is a strength. Robotics can take you into so many fields like space exploration, medicine, and in the home. That gives you a lot of opportunity to collaborate with different people in different fields, and extend your own research in lots of different ways.

Technorati Tags: robots, robotics, human robot interaction, user interface, research, conference

Minor correction:  Mars Polar Lander was in failed in Dec 1999 and it probably failed  due early to  engine shutdown in the  last little bit of landing.  Mars Climate Orbiter has the honor of the unit conversion  issues.  Thanks Kurt Schwehr, from Tucson Science Operations Center.

Like the Phoenix bird of ancient mythology, the Phoenix Mars Mission is reborn out of fire; this new mission was created from the embers of previous Mars endeavors. Phoenix will use many components of two unsuccessful Mars missions, MPL and MSP ‘01. Using lessons learned and an extensive testing program, scientists and engineers are confident that Phoenix will rise from the ashes revealing clues in the martian arctic soils about the history of water and potential for biology.

 I thought it was interesting that the project site mentions a number of times that Lockheed Martin is responsible for the spacecraft engineering.

Anyway…have a look.

Phoenix Mars Mission - Home

Tags: mars, space, robots, robitics, science

They’re using the same entry/descent/landing system as the Mars Surveyer that failed spectacularly in 2001 (stupid metric system), as well as parts from the Mars Polar Lander.

Like the Phoenix bird of ancient mythology, the Phoenix Mars Mission is reborn out of fire; this new mission was created from the embers of previous Mars endeavors. Phoenix will use many components of two unsuccessful Mars missions, MPL and MSP ‘01. Using lessons learned and an extensive testing program, scientists and engineers are confident that Phoenix will rise from the ashes revealing
clues in the martian arctic soils about the history of water and potential for biology.

 I thought it was interesting that the project site mentions a number of times that Lockheed Martin is responsible for the spacecraft engineering.

Anyway…have a look.

Phoenix Mars Mission - Home

Tags: mars, space, robots, robitics, science

Tags: web2.0, social networking, blogs, wiki, education