Blog

Georg C. F. Greve, President, Free Software Foundation Europe A long presentation that covers the basics of free (as in freedom) software, touches Open Source Software, and moves on to show that proprietary software is a danger to society, because code (software) forms the basic structure of an (internet based) society. By using proprietary software (and out of the same reasoing) Digital Restriction Management (DRM), the users put themselves UNDER the control of software or media monopolies. ...

Gabriel J. Gomez, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, University of Zurich Talks about the work on designing a robotic hand that mimic the human hand. Exploring the concepts of grasping. Very high degree of freedom. Pressure sensors. Different movies of the hand opening, closing, grasping things (spheres, cylinders). The hand is controlled by a neural network, fed by the the sensors (pressure and bending sensors) and the output is fed to the actuators that control the hand. This leads to the hand trying to “explore” objects when holding them. ...

Fuminori Yamasaki, CEO iXs Research Corporation Shows a small ECO Robot KHR-1, that is sold for $1'000. He shows that it can walk, stand on it’s arms, somersault and make a cartwheel. It is used for example for battle competitions between humanoid robots. There are 100 competitors that match their robots every 6 months, so they have to make new robots every 6 months. The hardware has become very good, but nobody knows about a purpose or usage yet (unlike the car, which has a purpose and high infrastructure needs (roads, gas stations) ...

Walter Hehl, IBM Research Center Ruschlikon Gives a broad overview on the progression of computer processing power and storage and how this influences “pervasive” computing. Interesting points: “What was once private is now public”, “what was once hard to copy, is now trivial to duplicate” and “what was once easily forgotten, is now stored forever.” (Ron Rivest) IBM sees the nexus of “intelligence” in a household in the various incarnations of PlayStations, X-Boxes. Supposedly they started 5-6 years ago to design the (cell)processors that power or will power these devices. ...

Things to do at a conference: There shall be drinks and food. Preferably free. Preferably drinkable (coffee in the shape of dark water is not enough - especially if it costs CHF 1.50). I don’t mind paying for a beer or something solid to eat. But water/coffee/fruits have to be available. There shall be Wireless LAN and electricity. Collaboration at a conference is not possible without. (it seems though, that there should be wireless access - it’s just not working) ...

Das “Big Brother” Panel Die Debattierenden waren wirklich nett zueinander, sagten nicht viel neues und sind meiner Meinung nach am Thema vorbeigeschrammt. Neben dem Datensammeln im Namen der nationalen Sicherheit, das a) zur Sicherheit notig ist (Peter Regli) aber b) nicht transparent ist und deshalb gefahrlich (Matthias Leisi), dem Hacken von Krankheitsgeschichten durch WLAN lauschen vor dem Krankenhaus (Dominik Flammer). Wirklich gefahrlich scheint mir etwas ganz anderes zu sein: Das Datensammeln in grossem Stil wird durch die Firmen betrieben. Sony hat mit dem CD Debakel vorgemacht, was passieren kann, wenn Firmen um des Profit willens zu unlauteren Methoden greifen. Google ist zwar “not evil”, aber wie lange noch? Die Datensammlung, die Überwachung von uns wird freiwillig geschehen. Der Staat mit seinen Überwachungsanforderungen wird eine geringe Rolle spielen als die Firmen, die den glasernen Konsumenten mochten. ...