Today’s edition of the New Scientist news feed includes an article about my PhD research. How nice! They called the article ‘Chaos filter stops robots getting lost’. This is kind of a bizarre title – ‘chaos filter’ seems to be a term of their own invention :). Still, they mostly got things mostly right. I guess that’s journalism!
Whatever about the strange terminology, it’s great to see the research getting out there. It’s also nice to see the feedback from Robert Sim, who made a rather impressive vision-only robotic system with full autonomy a few years ago, still quite a rare accomplishment.
For anyone interested in the details of the system, have a look at my publications page. New Scientist’s description more or less resembles how our system works, but many of the specifics are a little wide of the mark. In particular, we’re not doing hierarchical clustering of visual words as the article describes – instead we learn a Bayesian network that captures the visual word co-occurrence statistics. This achieves a similar effect in that we implicitly learn about objects in the world, but with none of the hard decisions and awkward parameter tuning involved in clustering.
That’s awes, congratulations!
Nicely done. I noticed the headline in one of my science feeds, but didn’t realize it was about you.
I think this is you again:
Mapping robots equipped with visual vocab filters for more accurate mapping
Bruce Schneier has a post that may interest you: History and Ethics of Military Robots
Autonomous vehicle contest winner:
DIY Drone with GPS and digital compass navigation
Does free really mean free???I recently found this free online auction site AuctionNitro.com. There are ABSOLUTEY 100% no fees to
list items, sell items or buy items! You can even feature, bold etc., at no cost as well and there is no
“gotcha” fine print. However, I found myself sending several emails asking over and over “it is all free?
What’s the catch?”FREE MEANS WHAT IT SAYS – FREE!!!It seems that the word free today carries so little real substance that it has to always have a catch to it.
-Does Free mean almost free?
-Does Free mean only if you subscribe and pay later?
-Does Free mean just for some people?When a product and/or service is advertising free, in my old fashioned mentality, it always means free!
Try it, Use it, Love it or leave it but don’t abuse it! Today it seems that talk has become so cheap that
what our country once stood for “Free” is now just a passing phrase for marketers.