Cloud-Robots and ROS

A video at Google I/O 2011 introducing ROS and cloud robotis, new web services for building smart robots

MyRobots provides a store for robots-related applications.

Mozilla reveals its mobile OS boot2gecko

Mozilla fondation revealed its mobile operating system Boot2Gecko at the annual event MWC in Barcelone. The project is open for community contribution.

Boot2Gecko or B2G is based on web standards to be compatible with a wide range of devices from multiple construtors.This OS is supposed to run over web browser !!
A dedicated marketplace (Mozilla Market place) is also about been revealed for developpers to publish their apps. None know when this OS will be available for public.
Go to B2G project github an strat hacking it.

UK Researchers Plan Mobile Real-Time Sign Language Translation App

A team of British researchers is attempting to create a tool that translates a set of standard signs into readable text, in real time. It’s called the Portable Sign language Translator, and it should be out next year.

The signer would gesture as normal towards a camera on a phone or PC, and it would instantly translate based on a database of signs. Right now they are planning to support British Sign Language, but the system is perfectly capable of handling ASL, Makaton, and international languages and alphabets.

It is possible, however, that the static set of known symbols may still be limiting to signers, so the app will also allow the user to create their own signs for more complicated or personal objects.

The obvious application is for day-to-day communication between someone who cannot speak and someone who cannot understand sign language. But a visual, gestural language could be useful in other situations as well, and not just to people with disabilities. Multimodal communication is becoming the standard for interacting with our technology, and while heretofore we have communicated largely with inorganic tools, so to speak, such as the mouse and keyboard. Directly interacting with a machine that understands our voice, gestures, and position is going to produce extremely rich interaction methods in the future.

In the mean time, the app is being developed by Technabling, a company spun off from the University of Aberdeen. They plan to release it as a product next year, though there is no word of platforms or price. It is being funded by the UK’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Small Business Research Initiative.


Source TechCrunch

Cloud-based Machine learning

The ability to analyze information and use the results to make more informed decisions is something that interests a lot of people. Developers, publishers, and small to large business owners all collect an overwhelming amount of data pertaining to the work that they do. Employing a staff of analysts to sift through the onslaught of what can sometimes seem to be useless information is obviously one way to solve this problem, ‘Machine Learning’ is another.
BigML is providing developers a cloud platform for uploading data and having convinient way to process it with the help of RESTful API. Their pricing model is SaaS-based, which means users will have to pay only when they are analysing their data.

Google has already a similar service Google Prediction API that offers developper ability to build robust applications just like Amazon's product recommandation.

Textifter is another cloud-based service that allows you to analyze text to extract knowledge.

Source BigML API Profile

Training robots to understand humans

Can robots become able to understand humans? Well IBM's Watson supercomputer had already beat all humans in Jeopardy !
If Watson was deployed in the cloud, the it will make it possible for robots like NAO to understand human language.

Some scientists involved with a new study from the Georgia Institute of Technology are predicting that every home will have a NAO-like robot by the end of the next 10 years — and they went to work finding out how to get those robots to learn from humans’ commands.

Today, knowledge of robot programming is typically held only by computer science and robotics experts. Non-programmers aren’t usually very good at teaching a robot because robots “learn” in ways different than humans do. But soon, everyone will need to know how to talk to robots, because it looks like they’re going to be as common as a household coffeemaker.

To help robot builders learn to make robots more responsive to human teaching methods, researchers at Georgia Tech studied the types of questions usually asked by humans. They documented the kinds of questions people asked into three categories — label, demonstration and feature.


Georgia Tech offered an example of each: Label query — “Can I pour salt like this?” Demonstration query — “Can you show me how to pour salt from here?” Feature query — “Can I pour salt from any height?”

The scientists found a majority of people ask feature queries or questions directly related to the task. The researchers believe their work will advance the field of robotics by giving scientists guidance for future robot programming.

“These findings are important because they help give us the ability to teach robots the kinds of questions that humans would ask,” said lead author Maya Cakmak, Ph.D. student in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing. “This in turn will help manufacturers produce the kinds of robots that are most likely to integrate quickly into a household or other environment and better serve the needs we’ll have for them.”

How do think robots will be useful at home? may be for watchint over kids?
Leave a comment and tell us what do you think below.

Java.Net.UnknownHostException On Android

Possible solutions to the error:

     java.net.UnknownHostException: myapp.co.uk  at java.net.InetAddress.lookupHostByName(InetAddress.java:513)

when trying to access a website on Android.

They run from most to least likely, start at the top and work your way down:

1. Check that you have set in your AndroidManifest.xml file (on the same level as application tag) 
   
   

   1	<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET" />

   
   
2. If you are behind a proxy you may need to do the following:
   

   1	System.setProperty("http.proxyHost", "proxy.potatos.com");

   2	System.setProperty("http.proxyPort", "5050");

3. If you are using an emulator try deleting and recreating the virtual device.
4. If you are on a real device try switching the wifi on and then off again
5. If it is something which happens once when an emulator or device boots but is ok later you could try ‘warming up’ the dns by running code such as the following before your own web request :
   

   1

   try {

   2	InetAddress address = InetAddress.getByName(Url);

   3	} catch (UnknownHostException e) {

   4	e.printStackTrace();

   5

   }

6. Try rebooting your development machine – I’ve heard of this working