http://www.educatingsilicon.com Listening for the pitter-patter of tiny metal feet. Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:13:36 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Well well. Hot on the heals of kooaba, competitor SnapTell just released an iPhone client for their visual search engine. The index apparently contains most books, DVDs, CDs and game covers - over one million indexed items. If the recognition rate is as high as it should be, that's a ... http://www.educatingsilicon.com/2008/10/06/snaptell-explorer-mobile-visual-search-heats-up/ I'm still rather excited about yesterday's kooaba launch. I've been thinking about how long this technology will take to break into the mainstream, and it strikes me that getting people to adopt it is going to take some work. When people first started using the internet, the idea of search engines ... http://www.educatingsilicon.com/2008/09/10/but-im-not-lost-adoption-challenges-for-visual-search/ Today kooaba released their iPhone client. It's a visual search engine - you take a picture of something, and get search results. The YouTube clip below shows it in action.  Since this is the kind of thing I work on all day long, I've got a strong professional interest. Haven't ... http://www.educatingsilicon.com/2008/09/10/a-visual-search-engine-for-iphone/ GetRobo has an interesting interview with Brian Gerkey of Willow Garage. Willow Garage are a strange outfit - a not-for-profit company developing open source robotic hardware and software, closely linked to Stanford. They're funded privately by a dot com millionaire. They started with several projects including autonomous cars and autonomous ... http://www.educatingsilicon.com/2008/09/07/mobile-manipulation-made-easy/ Peter Norvig of Google likes to say that for machine learning, you should "worry about the data before you worry about the algorithm". Rather than argue about whether this algorithm is better than that algorithm, all you have to do is get ten times more training data. And now all of ... http://www.educatingsilicon.com/2008/09/03/big-data-to-the-rescue/ For the next week I'll be at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Pasadena. For Monday and Tuesday I'm going to the Future of Visual Navigation workshop. For the main conference I'll be presenting my paper "Accelerated Appearance-Only SLAM", with some new ideas for very fast inference ... http://www.educatingsilicon.com/2008/05/17/off-to-icra/ Some Google Street View cars were spotted in Italy this morning. Anyone who works in robotics will immediately notice the SICK laser scanners. It looks like we can expect 3D city data from Google sometime soon. Very interesting! More pictures of the car here, here and here. The cars have two ... http://www.educatingsilicon.com/2008/04/18/google-street-view-soon-in-3d/ Check out this great TED talk by UC Berkeley biologist Robert Full. His subject is feet - or rather, all the clever ways animals have evolved to turn leg power into forward motion. It's a short, fun talk, and rather nicely makes the point that the secret to success for many ... http://www.educatingsilicon.com/2008/04/14/clever-feet/ Augmented reality systems are beginning to look pretty good these days. The videos below show some recent results from an ISMAR paper by Georg Klein. The graphics shown are inserted directly into the live video stream, so that you can play with them as you wave the camera around. To ... http://www.educatingsilicon.com/2008/03/19/opengl-invades-the-real-world/ Boston Dynamics just released a new video of Big Dog, their very impressive walking robot. This time it tackles snow, ice and jumping, as well as its old party trick of recovering after being kicked. Apparently it can carry 150 Kg too. This is an extremely impressive demo - it ... http://www.educatingsilicon.com/2008/03/18/big-dog-on-ice/