Visual object tracking with a $300 drone

Haskins may be good at tracking eyes, but we're following balls (green ones, to be precise). Dramatic reduction in the cost of drone aircraft and digital video cameras, combined with the availability of powerful software platforms like OpenCV (the same technology that won the DARPA Grand Challenge race in 2005), are making this kind of research available to anyone with a few hundred dollars, a decent laptop, and the ability to program in a general-purpose language like Python.

Errol Morris: Borges, Kripke, Kuhn, ...

Wittgenstein whacks you with a poker, but Kuhn throws an ashtray.

Meanwhile Error Morris just keeps kicking ass.

Batter up!

Tobii eye tracker laptop prototype

Salon Science features an article called "New tracking technology knows when, where your eyes look" by Peter Svensson of the Associated Press that describes a laptop prototype by Tobii Technology Inc. Tobii eyetrackers are commonly used in academic research in areas such as psychology, vision, and marketing. For example, at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut, eyetracking is a frequently used methodology in cognitive science research related to reading, attention, and perception. The laptop prototype uses a combination of cameras and infrared light sources to help track gaze and determine where you are looking on the screen.

RoboEarth: A World Wide Web for Robots

Markus Waibel describes a European project called RoboEarth. This story appeared in IEEE Spectrum on Feb. 25, 2011. The RoboEarth website describes the project as "... a giant network and database repository where robots can share information and learn from each other about their behavior and their environment." The project is part of the Cognitive Systems and Robotics Initiative from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme. Waibel indicates that the project is "... building an Internet for robots: a worldwide, open-source platform that allows any robot with a network connection to generate, share, and reuse data" He continues, "... my colleagues and I believe that if robots are to move out of the factories and work alongside humans, they will need to systematically share data and build on each other's experience."

Extreme Audiophiles Take Microphones to Next Level

The anechoic chamber at the Josephson Engineering facility in Santa Cruz, California, is featured in a Feb. 8, 2011 article by Matthew Schechmeister in WIRED Raw File. If you are in the New Haven, Connecticut area, and want to see an anechoic chamber in person, make arrangements to visit Haskins Laboratories and perhaps they will be able to show you their facility. Thanks and a hat tip to RSC for drawing our attention to this story. (Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com)

New Tools and Methods for Very-Large-Scale Phonetics Research

The University of Pennsylvania is hosting a workshop (Jan. 28-31, 2011) on new tools and methods for Very-Large-Scale phonetics research, as part of a newly awarded NSF grant. According to their website, "The themes of the workshop include: integration of speech technology in phonetics studies (including 
software to facilitate teaching and research); variation and invariance in large speech corpora; and revisiting classic phonetic and phonological problems from the perspective of corpus phonetics. A tutorial on forced alignment and the Penn Phonetics Lab Forced Aligner will also be provided prior to the workshop. Selected papers from the workshop will be published in a special issue of The Journal of Experimental Linguistics." Participants include IS regulars Elliot Saltzman, Mark Tiede and Louis Goldstein.

The Pirahã Controversy, three years later

In two earlier meetings, we read material on the controversy surrounding the Pirahã language, which Dan Everett claimed had no recursion -- thereby undermining a key claim made in a(n in)famous article by Chomsky, Hauser, and Fitch.

Now (well, last summer actually) Hauser has been found guilty and put on leave by Harvard for scientific misconduct (though as usual in today's corporate-coverup university culture, nothing is really clear about the status of his case), and Everett has moved from being the Chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Illinois state to being the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bentley University, just a few miles from our beloved Brandeis.

It makes me wonder what all the fuss was about.