Mr. Future

Stanford University has launched a series of 10 free, online computer science and electrical engineering courses. These include topics in Artificial Intelligence and “Introduction to Robotics“, taught by distinguished robotics professor Oussama Khatib.

Editor of MIT Press’ The Robotics Review, President of the International Foundation of Robotics Research, Dr. Khatib’s recent research been focused on “human centered / human friendly robotics,” haptic interactions (including “lazy” robotic movement studies).

Each course comprises downloadable video lectures, handouts, assignments, exams, and transcripts. A complete online course catalog is available here.

And just to see what you’d be getting into, here’s the first video lecture from “Introduction to Robotics”

Link (via Device Guru)

The Engineer reports on a project at Plymouth University that combines computer vision / object recognition, and A.I. learning with human-robotic interaction.

The work at Plymouth is an effort to apply human learning processes to robotic systems, teaching the robot word meanings and object recognition as if it were a small child.

“There will be speakers, a microphone and two cameras in the robot’s head, which [researcher] Belpaeme said will be able to pick out humans in a room, make eye contact, track human gaze and interpret pointing gestures and correlate them with what is being pointed at.

‘We are going to make the robot look cute and we are going to try to trick people into teaching the robot things just as they would a small child.’”

Link (via Ralph. Thanks Ralph!)