My Weblog
This is a place for me to post interesting snippets or complete random things about life, my research, AI, robotics and everything else. Have fun and leave a comment!
Proposal, Proposal, Proposal
January 25, 2013
Recently we have been quite busy with writing, proof-reading and submitting various proposals. The IDSIA Robotics Lab is involved in some new interesting projects, one in the FP7-SPACE-2013 call. The GMV lead project aims to look at autonomous operations of a Mars rover with a focus on biological evidence/fact finding. In the meantime I was also writing an SNF Doc.Mobility proposal and started to look into writing my PhD proposal (2nd year review). *pfff*
Apart from that we are also involved in FP7-ICT (robotics) calls for machine
Video Statistics
December 17, 2012
Our IM-CleVeR video “Toward Intelligent Humanoids” reached almost 9000 views, 900 likes on Facebook, 30+ tweets and a lot of interest. Thank You again! The video was watched in nearly every country of the world (120+ so far) from Albania to Zimbabwe, with the most plays coming from the US, Switzerland and the UK (interestingly enough the most loads came from Portugal!).
Here's a list of links and articles about the video:
EU Robotics Week
November 26, 2012
Also this year the European Robotics Coordination Office is organising a European Robotics Week. The idea is to "show the general public what robotics is all about and what important role robots play in Europe!". The IDSIA Robotics Lab is again taking part. This year we:
- launched our new webpage,
- rleased a IM-CLeVeR outreach video just recently and
- have a lab door/open house in our lab this Wednesday.
“Toward Intelligent Humanoids”
October 23, 2012
We, the robotics group at IDSIA, are proud to announce the release of our new video Toward Intelligent Humanoids (aka The Story of Several Nerds and Their Adorable Baby Robot), which we invite you to view at our new IDSIA Robotics website: http://robotics.idsia.ch/im-clever/ (embed after the jump)
iCub_SIM on Mountain Lion
August 21, 2012
After upgrading to the latest Mac OS X, named Mountain Lion, here is how to get the iCub simulator running on a fresh install.
IROS 2012 Acceptance
July 3, 2012
The IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, or IROS as it is commonly known, acceptence emails have been sent. From their email the number of submission was 1801("the second highest in the history of IROS and a record for a robotics conference in Europe") with 812 of those being accepted (i.e. 45%).
Compare this to IROS 2011 where acceptance was 32%. (790 papers have been accepted out of 2459 submitted). After googling this, I found more rates:
2010: 58.2%
2009: 54.5%
2008: 48.7% (661/1358)
2007: 52.4%
oh and my my paper did get accepted :) more about that later...
Apply and Participate in the iCub Summer School
April 25, 2012
IIT has recently released their Call for Participation for this year's (already the seventh!) summer school focused on developing software for the iCub humanoid robot. It will be a great 10 days, at an awesome location, with a very cool robot and enough time to get your hands dirty. If everything goes right IDSIAni will be there too to show what we are working on here ...
Prospecting a Prospectus
March 20, 2012
Today it is exactly 13 months since I enrolled as a PhD student here in Lugano, at the Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI). It's time to write my research prospectus, or at least try to find out what that is *uhm*
Although I am working for over a year here at IDSIA I have not yet a clear idea what I will do, but I heard that is normal in graduate school. So finally I set down and wrote up some ideas of what I want/can do in the next years to get my doctorate.
Vision-eering
February 19, 2012
Recently I have been working a lot on trying to make the iCub see things. A fully integrated computer vision or robotic vision system is a quite tricky mathematical and engineering problem. Here at IDSIA we were trying to develop an easy to use system that would allow to rapid prototyping (offline) vision modules for the iCub, mainly to detect and localise objects the robot is in later stages supposed to manipulate and interact with.
Finally a new Laptop Bag
January 11, 2012
On a different note I finally got a new laptop bag :)
After 5 years with my old bag, I decided to cover my new MacBookPro with a new bag as well. My old one I got in 2007 just after moving to Lisbon to work at IST. It was less then 20 euro at the local FNAC at that time and it survived until now (though with some scraps :).