eyewriter.org open source initiative.

The EyeWriter project is an ongoing collaborative research effort to empower people who are suffering from ALS with creative technologies.

http://www.eyewriter.org/

Absolutely stunning

Algae take over beaches in northern France

I wonder if any company will be doing a partnership with the French government to use the algae as fuel. My understanding is that one can press algae and produce oil pretty much the way olive oil is produced. I can picture an old water powered mill pressing algae instead of grinding wheat and producing algae oil and fertilizer. Ahh, i guess it might not be as easy as one may think.

Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion

Guys, this is huge.

Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion

Somewhere else, I’ve also read the US Navy approved $10B research spending for next 5 years on this project (don’t ask me why exactly US Navy)

I want to bring back to our attention (after more than 20 years!) Carl Sagan and his TV Series Cosmos, which has inspired tons of discussions and brainstorming between me and Yonel back then. The great news is that all 13 episodes are available on Hulu and I don’t know about you, but I’m gonna watch them again!

This is something different from the current hot trend here (Robotics), but here is a link to the Blue Brain Project – an exiting attempt to model and simulate human brain.

They have created a virtual pack of neurons that acts just like the real thing, and hope to get an e-brain up and running.

All hope is not lost. Genes don’t really code the body like blueprints do for a building, mapping out every single detail; instead, they give a more general instruction and hit the “repeat” button a few million times (e.g. when they give fractal instructions). This means that amid the great complexity of the whole brain, there are structural units that repeat themselves. One such structure is called a neocortical column (NCC): a group of about 10,000 neurons in the cerebral cortex that are organized in a relatively consistent way across the mammalian brain. Millions of these columns compose the whole of the brain.

Check out this video that flies you through their virtual brain:

Flying through the column

and here is project home page

http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/

The Blue Brain runs on IBM’s Blue Gene/L (btw: there is one is Sofia since last year, but currently I have no idea how I can get hands on it, and actually not sure what to do with it) supercomputer, one of the top five supercomputers on the planet.

Swarm Robotics

Here is an article plus a lot of videos about Swarm Robotics

About robots and what other people are doing

I have list of websites about robots and robotics that are very interesting. I did this research some years ago when I had more free time to surf the net, but I will probably get back to the subject of robots and robotics soon.

I am personally most interested in micro-robots which are considered those that are in size less that 1 cubic inch. The Ants from MIT (http://groups.csail.mit.edu/lbr/ants/) is very good example.

The Swiss EPFL institute had done great deal of research and work in that area. Not all the pages are currently active, but they have archives of most of their projects. Here are some links:

• http://diwww.epfl.ch/lami/ – The LAMI (Microprocessor Systems Lab) – the founder is now running this business: http://www.didel.com/.
• http://asl.epfl.ch/epfl/ – ASL/LSA Autonomous Systems Lab.

Here: http://nanolab.me.cmu.edu/projects/waterrunner/ – a project from Carnegie Mellon University – Water Runner Robot.

Of course Linux has its share in the business too: http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Open-source-robotic-simulation-packages/ – “Open source robot simulation software simplifies the creation of physical …”. IBM are in the business too – http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-robotools/.

For  “iFanatics” there is that silly walking  iPhone robot (http://robots.net/article/2670.html) create by Japanese eningeer Kazu Terasaki.

If you want to start practice here you can find some gear:

• http://www.acroname.com/
• http://www.robot-electronics.co.uk/
• http://www.active-robots.com/
• http://www.allelectronics.com/
• http://www.newmicros.com/

… and some tutorials:

• http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/step/index.html

Other links that you may fond interesting:

• http://robots.net/
• http://www.solarbotics.com/

Open source robot simulation software simplifies the creation of physical Linux-based robots, according to an overview article at IBM’s DeveloperWorks site. Simulators such as ODE, Simbad, TeamBots, KControl, Gazebo, and Carmen can help test ideas before putting them into hardware, writes author M.

OpenCourseWare free high quality lectures !

I’ve been watching Stanford University lectures about robotics on Boxee for a while now.  You can also download full lectures as podcasts for iTunes. Here is also a way to search the  OpenCourseWare base http://ocwfinder.com/. Please let me know if you find some interesting lectures !