The slate of invited keynote speakers for RSS 2008 (Robotics Science and Systems) is starting to get populated. One of the speakers will be Kevin O'Regan. He does very influential work on human perception, specifically including visual attention, color perception, and change blindness. Change blindness deals with our use of attention and the fact that if our attention is misdirected in the right way we can fail to observe truly significant changes in the visual world.
There are a slew of other very exciting and diverse speakers also planned for RSS. One of the strategies for RSS keynote speakers is to invite well-established figures who are "tangential" to the conventional robotics community, and who can introduce new ideas, issues and research.
2007
2007
A while ago I made some comments on the impending stronger copyright laws facing Canada. I think the proposed legislation remains inappropriate and unbalanced. Michael Geist is a regular commentator on this issue and has produced a nice movie/slide show on one aspect of the issue.
2007
The iPhone has a note-taking application, but at present the notes do not seem to get synchronized with the host computer. I wrote a program that allows you to sync and save the notes database from the iPhone and/or restore it at a later date. It also produces an ASCII text file (notes.ascii) that has the content of the notes so that they can be accessed off the phone.
The program is python code and requires a python interpreter. This is found by default on Mac OS X, but I am not sure about it's status on Windows.
On a Mac, running it would involve opening a terminal window and typing:
python getNotesaver.py
The program can use the USB connection to communicate with the iPhone (in which case iTunes needs NOT to be running and the open source iphuc program must be installed). It can also communicate with the phone using scp, assuming you have "jailbroken" the phone and installed this tool. If you use scp, then the phone needs to be on your network and you should know it's IP address.
TO USE THIS, YOU EITHER NEED TO HAVE ALREADY INSTALLED iphuc ON YOUR COMPUTER OR ELSE INSTALLED scp ON THE PHONE ITSELF, FOR EXAMPLE USING iNdependence.
Of course this program comes with no assurance of utility or anything else. I do not warrant it in any way against any consequence, direct or indirect. I believe it works well, but by using this you disclaim all recourse for whatever it does, even if it erases your database, your phone or your bank account.
The program is here. The latest version is version 1.2.0. This page entry is updated as new releases appear. (it was originally released as version 1.0 and there were several other versions).
It now includes the ability to patch the display of the cell-phone carrier name to allow the name to fit in the allocated space, for those not using AT&T. (Yes, it's sort of an odd feature for this tool.)
Feeback is welcome, especially from Windows users who should feel free to provide patches.
Updated Nov 26, 2008 to version 1.3.2 (Not all updates are noted in this way.)
2007
This news will be all over the place soon, but I was surprised it has not been widely publicized yet. The software-onlysolution for unlocking the iPhone to allow it to work with and GSM cell phone company was released for free yesterday.
[ Followup 9/20: the software-only fix described below works well sometimes, often it is quite tricky, and occasionally (rarely?) it leads to complete disaster. ]
A solution that required a hardware fix, including opening the very-hard-to-open case has been around for some time. A software-only solution was announced weeks ago, but was widely considered to be false or premature. There ewre numerous announcements that failer to materialize. About 2 days ago a commercial vendor started selling a software-only solution which was widely believed to be derived from the intensive efforts of a public reverse-engineering group. Finally, yesterday, a free solution was released and it is being widely distributed on the internet. It seems to be compatible with Rogers in Canada as well as Fido, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Telstra, SingTel, ORANGE, PCCW Mobile, Telenor and other GSM providers.
So far, the solution still requires you to find various critical files on obscure web sites, but simpler and simpler ready-to-click packages are being produced by programmers. I have not tried any of these, but they are being very widely reported to work well for most people. A few caveats remain, such as that the solution will not work for SIM cards that have a PIN lock on them, or that a few people report rendering their iPhone inoperable (but who knows this small minority actually did, as some of the tools have the potential to be used incorrectly).
It remains possible that a subsequent release of iTunes from Apple with be incompatible with this or other unlocking solutions, but that is impossible to predict with certainty. It seems certain that Apple will be under pressure from AT&T, due to their contractual obligations, to try and stop this unlocking. They almost certainly cannot to anything to interfere with people using the current version of iTunes though, and they can't force people to update, so the risk is probably quite low.
2007
We submitted a paper on automatically extracting interesting pictures from robot navigation video to the Robotics and Automation (ICRA) conference. Normally I don't blog about real work, or write about unpublished results, but this time the conditions are right. This work is part of John-Paul Lobos' thesis research and it extends the thing dubbed the "Vacation Snapshop Problem" in the work by Eric Bourque and me a few years ago (pdf paper). The idea of the Vacation Snapshop Problem is to select a few descriptive "Vacation Snapshots" from the potentially large set of pictures you (or a robot) might take while navigating along a route (i.e. a video that is a so-called navigation record). In this work we looked that what defines the most appropriate "interesting" photographs that summarize what a robot saw.
An aspect of the approach involves building clusters of images that are depict about the same content as one another (even though the pixel-to-pixel content of these images may vary quite a bit). The figure here illustrates the kind of results we get fully automatically, but there are a lot of details that determine what kind of pictures are selected.
2007
Code was added here to allow postings to be rated by visitors. This is AJAX based, so rating an item does not cause a page reload unless it's clicked before the page has finished loaded (in which case the required javascript may not have been launched).
It can be obtained here as an XML file for Zope. WARNING: THE VERSION HERE WILL NOT WORK IF YOUR ZOPE IS BEHIND AN APACHE SERVER ON A DIFFERENT MACHINE. I fixed the software to handle this case, but have not prepared a xml archive yet. [ Nov. 2007]
