This week we had our second Thinking Systems retreat at O’Reilly’s Rainforest Retreat. Was a great few days in mother nature with some spectacular views. I used the Autostitch software to create a nice huge panorama – click on the image to open up a full size one, and then make sure to hover your mouse over the new image until you get the option to click on it again to enlarge it.

O'Reilleys Panorama

ABC's Catalyst Science Program

Catalyst Team

My work as part of the Thinking Systems project is going to be on ABC’s Catalyst television program. Session times are:

• 8 pm Thursday 19th February on ABC 1
• 1:30 pm Tuesday 24th February on ABC 1
• 5:30 pm Friday 20th February on ABC 2

A link to a the video and transcript is available here.

Here is a video on YouTube of our suburb mapping stuff, with some introduction and brief explanation of how it all works. Click the link to open the YouTube video.

RatSLAM

New Scientist

The New Scientist article can be found here.

Paper accepted to the journal IEEE Transactions on Robotics for publication in October 2008. The paper will form part of a special issue on Visual SLAM and presents work showing that it is possible to map an entire city suburb using just a low quality web camera mounted on the back of a car. This work follows on from preliminary work in this conference paper.

You can see a photo of the experimental setup just below 🙂

Car Sensor Platform

Finally got around to putting up some photos from my overseas trip, the gallery is below:

Norway and Portugal 2008

Just spent a lovely week at a conference just outside of Melbourne at Mt Eliza.

Some visual neurogenesis:

Neurogenesis snapshot

Animated neurogenesis

Just found out the RatSLAM system has been referenced (albeit briefly) in a patent by Gerald M. Edelman, the 1972 Nobel Prize Winner in Physiology / Medicine! Here is the paragraph:

While hippocampus models also have been instantiated on mobile robots, many of these also make assumptions, such as the “a priori” information driving the response of hippocampal “place” cells or of a map that is input to the hippocampus. A few robotics models, which do include a neural simulation controlling the mobile robot in a navigation task, learn the mappings and hippocampal responses by autonomous exploration. One such model was very loosely tied to neurobiology and used learning algorithms similar to what is known as back propagation for learning. This developed a Simultaneous Localization and Mapping algorithm inspired by the rodent hippocampus, called RatSLAM, which is a hybrid between Artificial Intelligence SLAM systems and attractor dynamics thought to be represented in the hippocampus to create map-like representations of the environment.

Gerald Edelman