One of the main things that makes me love the iPhone is the combination of a good solid web browser with the phone functions. I once had a Treo and there is no comparison at all. Sometimes people complain about the browsing speed, so it was interesting to see the side-by-side comparison below between the Apple iPhone and the RIM Blackberry Bold.
The video makes and interesting and compelling demonstration, but the upshot is that the iPhone is a lot faster. I wonder if this is partly because the iPhone is based on a robust UNIX-like kernel which is the backbone of the internet, as well as because the Safari-based browser has been the subject of development for the huge Mac community for many years. (Claims regarding the speed of Safari version 3 in comparison to other browsers have been around for some time.)
2008
2008
Today was my second day in my new role of Director of the McGill School of Computer Science (roughly equivalent to "Chairman of the Department"). The school is part of the Faculty of Science, but it has many links to Engineering as well. I also have some plans to increase the visibility of robotics at McGill, and this platform should help.
2008
On November 14th, 2008, Michael Geist will give two talks in Montreal. One will be at the Computer Science colloquium at the Cchool of Computer Science of McGill Univeristy, and the abstract is below. The other talk will be at the Trudeau Foundation. The McGill talk is open to the public; I don't know much about the other talk.
Why Copyright? The Fight for Canada's Digital Future"
Abstract:
In June 2008, the Canadian government introduced Bill C-61, new
copyright legislation that closely followed the U.S. Digital
Millennium Copyright Act. The public response to the bill was both
immediate and angry - tens of thousands of Canadians wrote to the
Minister and their local Members of Parliament, leading to town hall
meetings, negative press coverage, and the growing realization that
copyright was fast becoming a mainstream political and policy issue.
The "Canadian copy-fight", which includes many new advocacy groups and
the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group that has over 90,000
members, has attracted considerable attention from the mainstream
media, with many wondering how copyright had emerged as a contentious
policy issue. This talk will assess both the legislative proposals and
the Canadian copyfight experience in an effort to answer the oft-asked
question – "why copyright?".
2008
In the new International Edition of Hasbro's game Monopoly (known as "Monopoly Here and Now: World Edition"), the Atlantic City street names that defined the game have been replaced by the names of major international cities. Of course, in classic Monopoly the square named Boardwalk was the most expensive, important and glamorous on the board and the ownership of Boardwalk often determined the outcome of the game.
In Monopoly Here and Now, the square that was Boardwalk will be called Montreal! The game will also have revised events with an international theme replacing the traditional "Community Chest" and "Chance" cards. The city that occupies the lowest-priced square is the Polish city of Gdynia, an industrial port town of about a quarter-million people. ''
One of our friends, incidentally, works for Hasbro and got to play the role of the iconic Mr. Monopoly (formerly known as Rich Uncle Pennybags) at the product announcement yesterday.
To fool with the consistency of placement of Montreal, I tried comparing hotel prices for Montreal and Gdynia. On the travel web site that I use (tripadvisor.com), Montreal has 85 hotels listed and reviewed, with nightly prices from $592 to $39 (median price 315). (The $39 price is in student residence at McGill University, available only while students are away in the summer.) In contrast, the 17 hotels listed for Gdynia vary in price from $190 to $24 with a median price or $107. Likewise, using Expedia.com, the median prices for Montreal and Gdynia are $340 and $131 respectively. (The cheapest hotel shown in Gdynia is the Kropeczka Hotel which is 17 Euros and actually looks pretty nice.)
For Paris, France, however, I get a median single-night hotel price of $678 due to an very expensive outlier hotel, so I guess the median hotel price wasn't the basis for Montreal's placement in the top spot. In must have been the quality of the robotics labs!
The full list
... ...
There's more. Read the whole story on "Montreal is Boardwalk in the new Monopoly"
2008
This Summer I attended the International Symposium on Experimental Robotics. This meeting takes place every second year and tends to be located in diverse locations. This year it was in Athens, Greece and Natasha came along to check it out and do some sightseeing.
As the name implies, the conference features papers that have an experimental component. The selection on topics was very diverse ranging from medical robotics and (endoscopy -- cameras on a flexible stick) to search and rescue. There were a couple of papers on very different kinds dealing with autonomous or semi-autonomous flying helicopters. A student from Andrew Ng's lab discussed their ongoing work on the control of helicopters, and the amazing dynamics they can manage. Somebody from Nick Roy's lab presented the vision-based helicopter system they have developed that recently won a search-and-rescue contest (as noted previously in this blog in entry 112).
My own presentation dealt with the Aqua underwater vehicle and I talked about some new ways we are doing visual servo control to interact with human divers. In particular, I talked about some early results on using machine learning to assist the construction of servo controllers for real-time tracking underwater where color is an important cue.
As usual, the conference presented a great opportunity to meet people from the community and talk about research. Unlike larger meetings, the group is fairly focussed and you end up spending plenty of time with the same (very interesting) group. For example, I got to speak at length with a couple of interesting younger researchers such as Katie Byl and Jonathan Clark, and may end up with a new research sub-project as a result. Of course, it was also great to meet many old friends and colleagues, not the least of whom was the eminent Oussama Khatib who is the lead organizer of the meeting. Natasha got to briefly monopolize the dance floor with Oussama at the end-of-conference dinner; he also turns out to be a great dancer.
A highlight of the trip, aside from the talks, was a concert one evening. This was a performance by the Bolshoi Orchestra that was help in the Acropolis . They performed “Alexander Nevsky", a cantata for mezzo-soprano chorus and orchestra, opus 78 (1939) Sergei Prokofiev and Vladimir Lugovskoy. It also included Violin Concert No. 2, with Simos Papanas (of Thessaloniki) as the soloist and was conducted by the chief conductor of the Bolshoi: Alexander Vedernikov. This was the best possible venue to a concert and made the trip truly memorable.
2008
Today I visited Wolfram Burgard's lab in Freiburg Germany. There are numerous interesting projects going on there, including work on range estimation from video and range data, and modeling of robot kinematics using Gaussian processes (the latter was the subject of a recent paper at RSS). They also have several interesting implementation projects running, including an automated blimp, and automated helicopter, and several types of vehicles.
I also gave a talk there whose primary focus was our own underwater and amphibious robotics work at McGill. Unfortunately, the display system would not recognize my older Powerbook, and as a result the 1-hour talk started a half -hour late. This was a new experience for me. This got me totally stressed out and led to a very uncomfortable talk for me. That said, the visit was very pleasant, interesting and enriching.
2008
I am going to the Robotics Science and Systems Conference and want to load my Garmin GPS with a map of Europe. The open source gpsbabel program seems suitable, but the macports install (port install gpsbabel) fails with an error as follows:
configure.in:39: error: AC_SUBST: `' is not a valid shell variable name
The solution for me was to visit the source directory on my machine:
cd /opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_release_ports_textproc_gpsbabel/work/gpsbabel-1.3.5
and edit the file config.in
to delete the lines mentioning the (obsolete) AC_EXEEXT. Then it installed fine.
Once a suitable map has been created, the Garmin 60CSX, like other Garmin USB devices, can be directly mounted on the desktop as a mass storage device. This requires you to go into the System setup menu, in the interface section, and click on "Mass Storage Device".
It's also possible to export a set of points of interest from Google Earth as a .kml file, and then use gpsbabel to convert this to a .gpx file (which can presumably be uploaded directly using gpsbabel).
2008
We applied for and received funding from Microsoft to develop tools and infrastructure to use Microsoft Robotics Studio (MSRS) with our underwater and walking robot systems. Our work has involved the control of our robot both underwater and on land using visual markers, especially because any other type of communication underwater is so difficult. This funding is part of Microsoft's Human Robot Interaction Awards and was awarded to Ioannis Rekleitis and myself.
To quote our own project information, there are many challenges to be faced here due to the fact that our Aqua vehicle moves in a variety of terrains and is capable of providing very limited sensory feedback in the form of video footage and the state of an inertial measurement unit (IMU). We want to use one video and IMU feedback for control.
Current operations with the robot require a skilled operator who is capable of guiding the robot either in walking or in swimming mode. In our project we proposed to implement a user interface utilizing the strengths of the Microsoft Robotics Studio (MSRS) to provide an interface for controlling the robot as well as a visualization tool for interpreting the visual feedback. This work would also extend a new method for communicating with AQUA when a direct link to a controlling console is not available; this method called RoboChat is based on cue cards that are presented in AQUA’s vision sensor, instructing the vehicle to perform high level actions. While on land operations communication between an operator and a vehicle is easy to implement in a variety of methods, e.g. wireless/wired links; underwater communications are a lot more restrictive in terms of cost, bulk, energy, and bandwidth.
Some of our work with RobotChat was recently presented at the 2008 International Conference on Robotics and Automation. The Microsoft announcement is here
2008
I attended the Apple World-Wide Developer's Conference last week (in additional to visiting people at Stanford, Google and PARC). Most of the actual content that was presented at the conference is covered by non-disclosure agreements, but a few generic observations can be made.
iPhone development is going to be huge. A diverse range of topics was covered, and the iPhone development sessions, in particular, were jam-packed and in several cases mandated the use of overflow rooms (and the main rooms were already very large).
West, and they were pretty full
WWDC was very large and was very well executed and professional. I have been attending various professional conferences for 20 years, and this was probably the most impressive I have seen in terms of organization, preparation and logistics. Of course, the fact that it was held in San Francisco didn't hurt either!
Since the iPhone development environment is very similar to the one for regular OS X, one can expect a lot of crossover from developers who originally have plans for only one of the two platforms. The UIKit for the iPhone isn't quite the same as the OS X environment, but additional the development effort required to port an iPhone application to the Mac might be a small as a day or two. This is also an important benefit for Apple.
rehearsed, albeit occasionally a bit dry
2008
I was at the AI/GI/CRV/IS set of conferences last week and took part in a panel discussion on the future of artificial intelligence, along with Jonathan Schaeffer and Kate Larson, and moderated by Kevin Leyton-Brown. We had been charged by Kevin to try and be a bit controversial, and managed get a bit of debate going, especially between Jonathan and myself, although I think we really pretty much agree deep down on the big issues.
One on my more provocative comments was that both the research areas of artificial intelligence and computer vision could be regarded as branches of robotics. This was not meant to be a comment on the relative importance or the areas, but to unify them under a common umbrella. It also does not imply that all AI must deal with embodiment, just as all AI need not deal with cognition. In terms of positioning thee areas within computer science though, I think this is a needed (and correct) grouping consistent with their historical relationship and genesis.
