Oh my god, I know System 370 assembler.
As an update to my earlier post, David Cohen, LA Lisper, let me know that slashdot posted about Evolution's partnership with Wowwee.
The thread is terrible, except for a followup from the original poster, a Caltech grad student with an interest in computer vision, in which he gives a nice short description of the actual technology that WowWee will be using.
The first bit of technology Evolution Robotics will probably be contributing is their ViPR [evolution.com] (Visual Pattern Recognition) tech, which allows for real-time recognition of objects in the environment. It's really quite impressive to see it in action -- it can learn how an object looks using just a single training example, has a high recognition rate, is resilient to occlusion/rotation/scale, and can operate at 15fps on an ordinary computer. It works by efficiently extracting a few hundred SIFT [wikipedia.org] (scale-invariant feature transform) features from an image, and then learns what affine arrangement of them indicate an object. A downloadable demo is available on the ViPR page.
(Apparently the slashdot editors cut all that interesting stuff from the original submission because it didn't have anything to do with beer. Way to stay interesting, guys.)
Posted by jjwiseman at April 05, 2006 10:22 AMThat S/370 might be a '158' -- I last saw one about a million years ago. Those disk drives in the background are 3330s, each of which holds one of the disk packs the young lady has brought to the console. A single pack held, get this, 100 megabytes of data, and the transfer rate was something more than 800 KBPS.
Posted by: David Andrews on April 5, 2006 07:17 PMI still don't know which, if not both, of the robot companies I'm invested in and when, if ever, this will pay off my credit card debts. But I do I said over and over and over while employeed at ER: "we need to get our tech into cheap toys to make volume sales".
But then again, I was just a shitty release manager.
Posted by: sowhendoIgetrich? on April 20, 2006 02:48 PM