Wednesday, April 11, 2007

ICRA 1

It is immediately apparent that I know absolutely nothing about robotics.

The idea of me attending this conference is that I will give my presentation at the workshop on Saturday, but also that I will try to pick up on interesting software/development/programming/design type of issues that designers have when they are developing their robots.

One thing I have picked up on immediately, though, is that this is definitely a conference for robotic scientists rather than robotic engineers; not to say that no one here has built robots, that is not true, but the types of issues that interest them are not related to building the robots themselves but with the robots' mental models of computation, planning, locomotion, grasping, etc. I didn't expect to go to a conference and pick up on exactly what everyone was talking about, but I do feel a bit out of the loop.

Yesterday there was some site-seeing and some very-tiredness. Today, the first day of the conference, I am trying to attend as many potentially interesting talks as I can.

PS: A330s rule. Ours had those little TVs in each seat, but apparently now (in the two years since I have traveled across the Atlantic) you can now start your movies whenever you want as well as pause them as they run. This is in contrast to the last personal TVs I used where you could only switch channels, but had to watch whatever movie was on at whatever point in the plot it was at.

I saw Stranger Than Fiction, as well as School for Scoundrels. Not half bad.

2 comments:

  1. Damn the Italians for stealing you! Flux is this weekend, as well as some slammin' (yeah, I just said slammin') house party on Stanton Ave (which I know nothing about except that a friend said it would probably be awesome)...and I have no one to go with. All my normal people are out of town, but you're the farthest away, so I'm the most cross with you.

    (p.s. hope you're having fun... crabbies say "yo, daddy-o!"

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  2. Tell my children I love them.
    Yeah I keep hearing about FLUX; apparently this is the first time that it has happened in several years. Man my timing is poor!

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