Couple of Paper Acceptances while I was Away

It is our pleasure to inform you that your abstract entitled "Agent
Control of Cooperating Satellites" submitted to the AI in Space:
Intelligence beyond planet earth, has been accepted for an oral
presentation.

The exciting thing about this paper is that we only had to submit an abstract, but are now required to produce a full paper by the 1st July - I forsee much frantic scribbling in the next month or so. The paper describes the current case study we are working on which is the exploration of asteroid clusters using multiple satellites.

Thank you very much for submitting a paper to CLIMA XII. We are delighted to let
you know that your paper is accepted for presentation and inclusion in the
Springer LNAI Proceedings.

This paper is "A Formal Semantics for Brahms" and is really the baby of my PhD Student (using the phrase "my PhD Student" here to refer to someone for whom I'm tenuously 3rd supervisor in a vague "the university admin can't cope with RA's supervising PhD students" kind of way). I did do a little polishing on the paper so I'm not too embarrased by the author credit. Brahms is an agent programming language used by NASA to model human-robot interaction. We want to do some model checking (verification) of these models but that means we needed a semantics for the language first which said PhD student had been diligently working on for about a year now.

Couple of Paper Acceptances while I was Away

It is our pleasure to inform you that your abstract entitled "Agent
Control of Cooperating Satellites" submitted to the AI in Space:
Intelligence beyond planet earth, has been accepted for an oral
presentation.

The exciting thing about this paper is that we only had to submit an abstract, but are now required to produce a full paper by the 1st July - I forsee much frantic scribbling in the next month or so. The paper describes the current case study we are working on which is the exploration of asteroid clusters using multiple satellites.

Thank you very much for submitting a paper to CLIMA XII. We are delighted to let
you know that your paper is accepted for presentation and inclusion in the
Springer LNAI Proceedings.

This paper is "A Formal Semantics for Brahms" and is really the baby of my PhD Student (using the phrase "my PhD Student" here to refer to someone for whom I'm tenuously 3rd supervisor in a vague "the university admin can't cope with RA's supervising PhD students" kind of way). I did do a little polishing on the paper so I'm not too embarrased by the author credit. Brahms is an agent programming language used by NASA to model human-robot interaction. We want to do some model checking (verification) of these models but that means we needed a semantics for the language first which said PhD student had been diligently working on for about a year now.

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/41470.html.

Microsoft have bought Skype

According to the BBC anyway.

I'm not sure what to make of this news. Skype is quite clunky in several ways and it would be nice to see it improved with the potential investment of Microsoft's resources behind it. Unfortunately the terms "not clunky" and "Microsoft" don't automatically link up in my mind. There's also a concern that the Skype implementations for Linux and MacOs may become poor cousins (though part of the value of Skype must be its ubiquity) and that the charging model may become less generous.

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/41480.html.

Acroban Humanoid Robot

Pierr-Yves Oudeyer gave another plenary talk on how you control/direct curiosity driven learning in Robotic systems. The talk was, I think, a little be stolen by the acroban robot. Broadly speaking Oudeyer observed that many existing robot platforms for AI experimentation are optimised for things like ease-of-changing batteries and are, in fact, quite difficult to program because their locomotor abilities are very rigid and inflexible. The Acroban robot is engineered to be a lot more "human-like" in it's mechanics, essentially with a lot of the intelligence in the mechanics itself, rather than in the software.


Cute video follows:

Acroban Humanoid Robot

Pierr-Yves Oudeyer gave another plenary talk on how you control/direct curiosity driven learning in Robotic systems. The talk was, I think, a little be stolen by the acroban robot. Broadly speaking Oudeyer observed that many existing robot platforms for AI experimentation are optimised for things like ease-of-changing batteries and are, in fact, quite difficult to program because their locomotor abilities are very rigid and inflexible. The Acroban robot is engineered to be a lot more "human-like" in it's mechanics, essentially with a lot of the intelligence in the mechanics itself, rather than in the software.


Cute video follows:

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/42142.html.