NYTimes: I.B.M.’s Supercomputer Challenges ‘Jeopardy!’ Champions – NYTimes.com
IBM is building a massive question answering A.I., named “Watson”, that is going to play on Jeopardy in the fall.
Movie of a load-bearing dog-like robot that can’t be kicked over, that can walk in the woods up a hill, sometimes recover from slipping on ice, walk over a pile of concrete blocks, and run.
http://www.bostondynamics.com/dist/BigDog.wmv
In addition to an index of over 200 open source machine learning software projects, the “about” section notes that there is an open source tools track of the journal JMLR, and that there are MLOSS workshops sometimes at NIPS and ICML.
Festo A.G. bionic learning network 2009 video:
You’ve got to see this to believe it…!
A great essay by Gerald Sussman, “Robust Systems”. In the first half or so (my favorite part) he describes architectural principals of biological systems that contribute to robustness. In the second half, he gives proposals for making computers more robust.
The journal, Frontiers in Neuroscience, edited by Idan Segev, has made it Volume 3, issue 1. Launching last year at the Society for Neuroscience conference, its probably the newest Neuroscience-related journal.
I’m a fan of it because it is an open-access journal featuring a “tiered system” and more. From their website:
The Frontiers Journal Series is not just another journal. It is a new approach to scientific publishing. As service to scientists, it is driven by researchers for researchers but it also serves the interests of the general public. Frontiers disseminates research in a tiered system that begins with original articles submitted to Specialty Journals. It evaluates research truly democratically and objectively based on the reading activity of the scientific communities and the public. And it drives the most outstanding and relevant research up to the next tier journals, the Field Journals.
iRobot looking robots talking to you, for real? Worth watching the video to see the exciting things coming out of the Personal Robotics Group recently.
From the page:
We are developing a team of 4 small mobile humanoid robots that possess a novel combination of mobility, moderate dexterity, and human-centric communication and interaction abilities. [...] The purpose of this platform is to support research and education goals in human-robot interaction, teaming, and social learning. In particular, the small footprint of the robot (roughly the size of a 3 year old child) allows multiple robots to operate safely within a typical laboratory floor space.
Neat stuff!
