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Finally, vindication.. and it couldn't have come sooner. Lately the nightmares have been more frequent and vivid. No one believed my account of that late night of coding in 2003, the Night at the Media Lab (sound thunder and creepy music) when all the robots and props came to life running amok at the MIT lab. It started a normal evening, the building emptied of faculty and graduate students at sundown leaving a handful of us undergraduates slaving away coding in C. All sense of normalcy began to fade when I heard strange sounds coming from the Personal Robotics Group space. I tip-toed towards Professor Breazeal's lab, avoiding any illumination from the 21" LCD monitors that were too busy churning out simulation data to notice the disturbance. I finally found an observation post by the drinking fountain. I lay there hidden, my senses highly attuned and my blood awash with adrenaline. I spotted them.. there they were, the Tangible Bits Group's PlayPals rewiring Leonardo's artificial brain! Poor Leornado - brainwashed, he unknowingly used the OLPC to edit Wikipedia and planted evidence falsely blaming the CIA for the heinous crime. The horrors..

This video is proof.. proof that that night was real.

PBS recently aired on it's brilliant NOVA ScienceNOW program a profile of MIT Professor Cynthia Breazeal. Professor Brezeal founded the Personal Robots Group (formerly called the Robotic Life Group) and is well known for creating emotive and expressive robots for interaction with humans. One of her most famous creations is Kismet. Other pretty awesome creations include Leonardo (pictured above alongside Stan Winston and Prof. Breazeal) and RoCo. See the NOVA ScienceNOW profile video on PBS' website here

Here's a video of the MIT Urban Challenge car in action!

DARPA are continuing their site visits to narrow down the contestants for the much anticipated Urban Challenge. Last week, they visited MIT. Ford, which formed a research alliance with MIT, provided the team with a brand spankin' new Land Rover LR3 to play with. The team's got some heavyweight research support, drawing together the expertise of MIT and Olin College faculty, students and Draper Labs.

For people speculating how our beloved world will eventually come to an end: robots killing their inferior human creators and genetically-modified super-intelligent-mutants wiping us all out are two popular hypotheses among others (big asteroid hitting earth)! So when the term “bio-hybrid” came to birth, I am sure the cyborg connotation touched some nerves.

As far as I know, the term bio-hybrid came out of MIT. It is used to refer to robotic limbs hybridized with our human nerve system. By combining tissue engineering, neurotechnology, material science, surgery, and robotics, a new generation of artificial prosthetics were developed to allow control of metals and plastics by brain signals. The earliest reference I found on the Internet is when the Department of Veterans Affairs issued a $7.2 million grant to MIT and Brown University in 2004. Less than 3 years later, some remarkable bio-hybrid prototypes really emerged. ... continued

Imagine a smart Roomba that only cleans the carpet when little Sam spills cornflakes onto it, or a kitchen robot that cooks a steak perfectly to your liking, or an autonomous car that can adapt to different road conditions. Each of these robots will need to have a vision system that can identify surface textures and colors. Well such a vision system is a step closer to reality thanks to researchers at the NTT Communication Science Labs and MIT's Brain and Cognitive Sciences Labs. The researchers found that there is a correlation between human perception of glossiness and statistical properties of the image that can be easily computed. Well, if you are now officially lost, don't worry: I have two entertaining links here and here of some entertaining illusions created by one of the researchers, Professor Adelson. For the rest of you, you can read more on the work published in the prestigious Nature here.

No, it's not an oxymoron. The MIT school calendar consists not only of the usual Fall and Spring semesters but an optional mini-semester lasting the month of January called the IAP (IAP). During this time, students have the option of hibernating through the cooold New England winter or trying out hundreds of fun classes/activities like building loudspeakers, dark chocolate tasting, belly-dancing and glass-blowing. Robot competitions such as MasLab and 6.270 also feature in January. This past IAP, another robot-building offering was the Roboone Workshop where students had the opportunity to tinker with a KHR 2HV!

Well, this will sure take interacting with your computer to a whole new level. Cynthia Brezeal, head of the MIT Media Lab's Robotic Life group and creator of Kismet, has been working on an expressive interactive robotic computer aptly named RoCo. RoCo is able to move its head (the monitor) in a rather animated fashion, in response to social cues from the user. For example, if the user slouches on his/her chair, RoCo responds by shaking it's head in utter disapproval, just like my mom. This video shows RoCo in action. It's quite entertaining to watch.. yess, we at waziwazi do have a life!