Author: AMH

Being interested in, and recently done a fair bit of reading about, human subjects research, this article from a couple of months ago about using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for running human subjects experiments caught my eye. It’s a pretty neat idea for pulling in volunteers from a variety of demographics, with some obvious concerns – are people who they say they are, and how much effort will they put into the experiment being the major obvious ones. The article gives some nice specific suggestions for avoiding biases, cheaters, testing the correctness of your study, and addressing other issues. If done … Continue reading Let Turk research for you

I’ve noticed that whenever I teach a subject, the news appears to be disproportionately full of stories about that topic (and yes, I do understand that is not the case…). These are some of my favorites I have found recently: I linked to the BigDog project several months ago – Boston Dynamics has outdone themselves, pushing their sophisticated walking abilities into a bipedal robot, Petman. The video on this is amazing! [via many places, including C.] On the opposite end of the spectrum, iRobot has developed a “morphing blob” robot based on a structure of inflatable air pockets. [via many … Continue reading Best Bots

This is a robotics application I’ve never run into before, but it is actually being used in the Netherlands: a gas pumping robot. The video shown makes it look like it works pretty well too, and while it seems slow the article says it speeds things up enough to actually increase their number of sales per pump. I do wonder how much of that is the fact that, to use the pump, you preregister with your credit card number and preferred type of gas (so that you don’t interact with the robot at all, you just pull up and sit … Continue reading Does not yet wash the bugs off my windows

The news from earlier in the week that Google is committing to providing users easy and free ways to move their data in and out of Google products addresses one of the concerns I have had about cloud computing. I understand the appeal in terms of expense, and I have had good experiences when I have used Google Docs for collaboration. But often the content being created is stuff that I may want around many years in the future, or also available off-line on a flash drive (we can pretend the entire world is networked, but in just the past … Continue reading Data Liberation

We’ve been talking about various types of scheduling problems in my AI class, so this local article about computer modeling used to schedule sports games caught my eye. It is an interesting constraint problem – not just the number of games, mix of who plays who, and frequency of games, but particular rules based on amount of time needed to set aside for travel and other issues of fairness. It is particularly worthwhile to think about the advantages this system offers when changes occur that make a planned upon schedule no longer acceptable. Often, the human response to that is … Continue reading A “fair” schedule lets me sleep in until at least 7