HINA, one of the cutest robots to have ever been created is shown in the carefully edited video below making a cup of coffee for her owner, or better yet, her friend. Although the robot does do all the work as shown, it definitely did not do any of it under its own will or on a single try. Just think of the video like a well choreographed kung-fu fight in a movie. Enjoy!
In the span of 3 years, some 40,000 teams from around the world took up Netflix's challenge of improving movie recommendations by 10% over the company's Cinematch engine. And just a day ago, one of these teams has claimed the top prize and the $1,000,000 that go with it. This team consists of the 2007 and 2008 progress prize winning team BellKor from the USA, Austria's Big Chaos team, and Canada's Pragmatic Theory team. Until recently, the teams were competing against each other unable to reach the 10% improvement threshold but they put an end to the competition when they joined forces.
Other teams now have 30 days to submit their solutions and outdo the top team for a chance to claim the top prize for themselves; keep an eye on the official leaderboard here. Can others do it? Well, you never know so it will be an interesting 30 days.
I have to admit that a couple of years ago I really didn't think that this day would come. I was certain that the 10% improvement had been selected by Netflix to prevent people from ever claiming the million dollar prize. I guess, I was wrong after all.
That said, I am currently reading Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams' best seller Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything and I think the Netflix competition would make for a great story for this book. It is yet another example of how computers and the Internet allow thousands of people across the globe to collaborate effectively and efficiently to solve problems at a fraction of the cost of a single corporation doing the work in house. I don't know how much money in Research and Development Netflix will save from this competition but I suspect they stand to make a lot of money from the 10% improvement in recommendation accuracy. They will certainly make back the prize money in no time (if they haven't already considering that improvements over 7% have been achieved by many teams over the course of the last 2 years.)
Kudos to the teams for their achievement and kudos to Netflix for taking a chance most corporations would never dare take.
The iPhone app store may be home for some 50,000 applications but few are actually worth the download, free of charge or not. One of these few applications that are a must have for every iPhone owner is AutoStitch by Cloudburst Research Inc.
This nifty application can create panoramic or wide-angle images from any arrangement of photos and minimal user guidance. The latter two features are what makes AutoStitch such a great application. Any arrangement of photos means that you don't have to take your photos in sequence for the stitching to work; the application can figure out the overlap between images on its own by the use of state-of-the-art feature-based image matching techniques. And minimal user guidance means that you only have to point the application to the directory where all your photos are stored and it will gladly stitch together all those photos that belong to the same scene. The photo at the top of this post is an example panorama created using this application (the image is copyright Cloudburst Research Inc.)
If you recall, I wrote in the past about image stitching software including the high resolution Gigapan system, the desktop version of AutoStitch, and the open source autopano-sift. Microsoft's Photosynth maybe the one related application that is best known to you. Similar software is available today in several commercial image processing software packages. Interestingly, the founders of Cloudburst are also the first to publish the method that makes Autostitch and all these other panorama creation software work so well.
Learn more about the iPhone Autostich application at the company's website here or you can buy the application from the App Store for $1.99 here.
There is a new computer vision book in the works but a well know researcher Richard Szeliski of Microsoft Research. If you don't spend much time reading conference proceedings and journal articles you may not have heard of the author before. However, you know him indirectly from some of his work that Microsoft has started publicizing in the last few years. Richard Szeliski is one of the main people behind Photosynth, the software that allows users to create stunning panoramic images from collections of digital photos without much hassle.
The new book is based on the lectures of a computer vision course that Szeliski has taught with some of his colleagues at the University of Washington. The book starts with a description of some basic concepts on image formation and processing. It then continues to cover a large number of advanced topics in feature detection and matching, segmentation, calibration, structure from motion, image stitching, computational photography, stereo, recognition, and image-based rendering. The book presents recently published work by a variety of computer vision researchers from across the globe so many of the chapters describe state-of-the-art methods.
That said, Szelinksi's new book is not finished yet so don't rush to the bookstore to buy it. While still working on the project, the author makes the most current draft available online for anyone to download and read. He seeks the community's feedback in making this a book worth having. I have read parts of it and it looks like it is going to be a great book when finished. You can download the latest draft here.
Earlier this month, Willow Garage's Personal Robot 2 (PR2) robot successfully passed the second project milestone navigating an office environment, opening doors, and plugging in the electrical supply to recharge its batteries. The first milestone the robot successfully passed last December (if my memory serves me well) was about navigating around an office environment but without the requirement of opening doors.
According to the company, the robot navigated autonomously for nearly one hour passing through half open doors and locating power sockets while realizing a locked door was not passable and moving on to another one. Apparently, the robot's batteries allow it 3 to 6 hours of autonomous operation. PR2 has two compliant arms with 7 DOF each.
Willow Garage was founded only in 2006 and the robot they have constructed so far has some very impressive capabilities. Sure, it is no ASIMO but the team has much less money to work with that the Honda team. Let us also not forget that the same group is developing an open source operating system for robotics, support the open source player/stage robot control architecture, and continues to update the open source computer vision library OpenCV.
The video below shows PR2 navigating the Willow Garage offices and doing its thing.
The market of affordable robots for hobbyists has definitely flourished in the last few years as electronics components and open source software have made such creations possible. Robe:Do Robotics is a small mom and pop operation out of Colorado that builds and sells a small range of such small and affordable robots that look like a lot of fun.
The company is owned by William and Esmaa Self who hand build every robot they ship to customers. For now, they sell 3 robots called the Coppa, Silvio and Three. The first two have 4 wheels and are designed for carrying large payloads while the last one which is also their latest offering is designed more for speed than heavy lifting. Three can carry a laptop up to 6 pounds heavy. Robe:Do suggests that the $439 robot be paired with an equally cheap netbook computer for many days of fun activities. The company provides high-level libraries for controlling the robots making it easy to get one running around avoiding obstacles with just a few lines of code.
In case you are wondering what can one really do with robots of such modest specifications, take a look at the below video of a Coppa robot receiving a command from an iPod Touch and then preparing and carrying popcorn just in time for the movie.
News the last couple of days are that the Hong Kong based Jetta Company Limited has acquired the Pleo IP from Ugobe and they have promised to start manufacturing the robot toy once again in the near future. The company's press release was not any more specific about exactly how and when Pleo will be brought back to life.
Back in April when Ugobe filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, I mentioned a number of reasons as to why Pleo failed in the market. In summary, the product was overpriced and overhyped; the cost of 350$ was too much for a luxury toy during an major economic downturn. Ugobe's IP was expected to sell for a good amount of money and so it is no surprise that a large and successful company such as Jetta eventually purchased it. I guess I should mention that Jetta was the original manufacturer of Pleo working under contract with Ugobe during the dinosaur's brief existence on Earth.
I am curious to see what Jetta will do with Pleo. Are they going to manufacture and sell Pleo exactly as it was last or are they actually going to upgrade it in some ways? Is Caleb Chung going to be involved in future development? This latter point may be important for the continued survival of this robotic toy. At the end of the day, I believe that much of the media coverage and the hype surrounding Pleo had lots to do with the fact that it was the brainchild of Caleb famous for being the creator of the Furby toy. Without him and without any major improvements of the current product, will anyone care for Pleo?
We will know in a few months what Jetta has in store for Pleo. In the meantime, owners of Pleo can feel relieved that there is a good chance new parts such as batteries will continue to be available and their expensive toy will not end up becoming nothing more than a Jurassic paper weight.
