International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER) 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.

  

Montreal is Boardwalk in the new Monopoly

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

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Michael Geist to speak at McGill School of Computer Science, in Montreal

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?".