Dance of the ERPlephants

Posted on January 19, 2013 by Leona

Behold: the beleagured ERPlephant, caught in a perpetual struggle to keep its gnarly data models away from it’s human interactors’ field of awareness (and mostly failing, until humans get round to platform-ifying ERP and letting bizfolk just download ERP apps from ERP stores).

In the meantime, an ERP system has its work cut out. It has to secure funds for each undertaking, draw up calendars and divide days into portions in which work is carried out and others in which it is not, rank workers, rate and skill them, fully employ them or part-hire or contract them, know how much they’re paid and how often, know how much to sell their time for, assign them to things, retire or fire them… Continue reading →

Robot tentacle learns to reach: “goal babbling”

Posted on May 27, 2012 by Leona

I guess these are the kinds of problems baby octopii need to deal with… only, erm… eightfold.

You can read the paper here and learn all about “joint spaces” or, you can just watch (stay with the vid – it may seem dry but it’s cool to see how the learning unfolds) – all courtesy of botjunkie’s new automaton spot at the IEEE… which I encourage you to peruse for even more bot fun.

Learning to reach with Festo's Bionic Handling Assistant

google’s project glass

Posted on April 5, 2012 by Leona

Well the comments thread was fun.
And to the “this should be contacts… why would everyone start wearing glasses again?!” detractors: some of us are still squeamish about messing with our eyeballs, thank you very much. And anyway, glasses have become fashion accessories of a sort.

But I concur, with those who have said it, that this sure as hell can’t be voice-activated. It’s annoying enough listening to people shout into their handsets in public. And what if someone else in the vicinity was also shouting commands at their glasses? And they were standing very near to you (e.g. in a packed elevator or subway car)? Eggzackly. So if nothing else google, start tracking eyeball movements the way most sci-fi writers have plainly and painstakingly laid out in the blueprint for the future. Also, you might want to officially roll out those driverless cars, because those are going to have to co-evolve with this tech, for blindingly (haha!!) obvious reasons.

Project Glass: One day…

PETMAN: Terminator’s great great grandaddy

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Leona

So botjunkie have been subsumed by the IEEE and I didn’t know! Shame on me for not visiting them more often. But seriously… do you not quake in your boots when you behold this (even just a little bit?!!):

PETMAN

Don’t forget to check out their new automaton blog here: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics

A different approach to the robotic grip problem

Posted on November 4, 2010 by Leona

I saw this vid on botjunkie, a site that I (and you) really should visit a lot more often. Have a looksee (you need to watch till the very end):

Presenting the Universal Jamming Gripper

We of bounded rationality

Posted on December 22, 2009 by Leona

I came across a fascinating article at the Communications of the ACM site about negotiation agents. Continue reading →

Complex accounting is routing strategy. It's here to stay.

Posted on December 18, 2009 by Leona

multinet [updated : 2009-12-19]

The only thing that’s interesting about the copenhagen climate summit is the strategies that nations employ to wriggle out of real and tangible cuts in emissions.

The interconnectedness of environmental and other systems on our planet has made us turn, naturally, to network theory for gaining useful insights. This is becoming more so with regard to how we manage the environment.

The first weapon drawn from the network theory arsenal is almost always economic theory… which – I feel – is just a narrower, more specialised type of network theory. Economics seems to be a set of stripped down routing games that focus on monetarily-quantifiable payoffs.

Continue reading →

Festival of the Gynnies

Posted on December 5, 2009 by Leona

gynoid-done-right I was doing some research on bots (specifically androids/gynoids) to help get me back into this short story I was writing. I love anything to do with bots, even if I have problems with some of the actual, real-life ones we’ve built so far (yeah i know – sorry, Fritz Lang’s golden gal and Terminator’s borged-ed up Summer Glau – at left – sadly are not the subject of this post)…

[updated 2009-12-06] : more cool bot links and vids, restructured.

Continue reading →

Not so fast, little internet…

Posted on October 22, 2009 by Leona

netlinks Imagine that the ever-densifying network of devices that we know and love as the internet becomes sentient. Ish. Or aware or whatever:

Dangling upside down via an umbilicus to its humbler origins, and having its ass spanked by Lady The Phenomenon of Emergence herself, will the quasi-conscious intelligence that gulps down it’s first breath be a babbling baby spurting meaningingless, screeching white noise, or will it be a grown thing, whose first words will be more like ‘I am Zod. All must bow before me!!” ? Continue reading →