Who’s Who: Jeff Hawkins 2010.12.20
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Jeff Hawkins sits in front of a copy of his book, On Intelligence
One of the biggest innovators in artificial intelligence today is Jeff Hawkins. Inventor of the Palm Pilot and the Treo Smartphone, Jeff Hawkins decided to turn away from consumer electronics and turn his attention toward solving the problem of advancing machine learning. Hawkins founded a research company called Numenta in 2004 and published a book, “On Intelligence”, that same year. The book makes the case for studying neurobiology to build a model for intelligent systems. His Hierarchical Temporal Model (HTM) algorithm has the potential to revolutionize the computer and robotics industries. (more…)
Who’s Who: Rodney Brooks 2008.09.28
Posted by fjackal in Who's Who: Roboticists.Tags: heartland robotics, iRobot, rodney brooks
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Rodney Brooks is credited as being a major contributor and proponent of the Subsumption architecture that deals with the way in which robots handle tasks. Essentially, the architecture builds “layers” of small, simple tasks to perform autonomous behavior. This has allowed robotics to achieve fast speeds in performing tasks, but has been criticized for its lack of accuracy. Much of his research in robotics has been at MIT, where he has worked since the 1980′s. Recently, Rodney Brooks made headlines in the robotics industry by leaving iRobot, one of the world’s largest robotics corporations, as Chief Technical Officer to start his own venture dubbed Heartland Robotics. He is one of the most prominent roboticists around, and it will be interesting to see just what sort of projects and creations will be coming out of this newfound company.
Who’s Who: Takeo Kanade 2008.07.31
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Takeo Kanade is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. His official title is the Director of Quality of Life Technology Engineering and he has been an integral part of the campus since 1980. His greatest accomplishments are in the area of computer vision and IU (Image Understanding).
According to Kanade in his CMU profile at http://www.ri.cmu.edu/people/kanade_takeo.html , the most successful examples of IU involve the Factorization Method and the Multi-Baseline Stereo Method. Using Factorization, a 3D model of a scene or object is created by simply recording a scene through video. The Multi-Baseline Stereo method, on the other hand, uses multiple camera angles to produce a dense depth map of a natural scene. This works like a 3D camera. (more…)
Who’s Who: Ernst Dickmanns 2008.07.30
Posted by fjackal in Who's Who: Roboticists.Tags: automated driving, driverless car, ernst, roboticist, robotics
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A pioneer of the automatic, driverless car…Ernst Dickmanns has made surprising advancements in this technology well before it is been widely applied. Apparently, his experimentation with driverless cars dates back to the 80′s, and he achieved a 95% autonomously driven vehicle by 1995! This is remarkably impressive, considering his vehicle primarily navigated using black-and-white onboard cameras. (more…)
