New and Emerging Technologies in Assistive Robotics Slides

Assistive robotics from Wolfgang Heller

Baxter

Originality

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”
--Herman Melville

Integrity

“Truth at last cannot be hidden. Dissimulation is of no avail. Dissimulation is to no purpose before so great a judge. Falsehood puts on a mask. Nothing is hidden under the sun.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

“Stars hide your fires; let not light see my black and deep desires: The eyes wink at the hand; yet let that be which the eye fears, when it is done, to see” ― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

ubuntu 12.04 lts - No video mode activated

After 5 hours of debugging, I finally was able to work around the issue.
In /etc/default/grub
Commented out:
GRUB_DEFAULT
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET
GRUB_TIMEOUT
Changed
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nomodeset"
Get rid of the reference to "splash" because that is what is crashing.
Ref 1
Ref 2
Ref 3
Ref 4
Ref 5
I also did the following:
cd /usr/share/grub/
sudo cp *.pf2 /boot/grub
Finally I could boot but the mouse pointer was MIA.
Did this to get it back:
sudo modprobe -r psmouse
sudo modprobe psmouse proto=imps




NOW I CAN FINALLY CATCH UP ON MY WORK!

References for graphs in R

This link provides pretty simple examples but useful. Adding error bars is not completely straightforward, this link gives a good explanation.

Data Fusion

My poster on data fusion.

How to write a good research paper and give a good research talk

Good reference for research paper and presentation advice.

Interesting Blog for Graduate Students

I found a few posts that were useful here.

IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing 2013

The IEEE ICSC.

NLP Resources

I am spending time this semester learning NLP since my work overlaps with NLP. I found a free ebook for learning NLP in Python. Another link for this book is here.
At the UMBC NLP course web site there are also slides available.
In particular, I have been working with OpenNLP which so far has been very useful. However, I am at the point of doing in-doc coref and having a lot of problems. There is not really any documentation on the in-doc coref api calls but I did find someone who dug into the code a bit and found a way to do it. However, so far, when executing my implementation, it runs forever. I hope to have an update soon.

Never Ending Learning (NELL)

Attended a very interesting talk related to Nell. The work is from Carnegie Mellon. If you are interested in machine learning, particularly how to perform learning over time, you may find this work of interest.

UMBC ebiquity group

Our group is performing interesting research by blending semantic computing with security, mobile devices, medical informatics and big data problems. Some of this research overlaps quite a bit with natural language processing. Read our publications to see the latest research coming from our lab.

Powerpoint Alternatives

I have been looking for an alternative to powerpoint that works reasonably well. So far OpenOffice and LibreOffice are not sufficient, especially when working on a team of Windows users. The following article provides a good list. I don't have a suggestion yet but would love to hear what others are using....

MASC 2013 Call For Papers Still Open

The 2013 Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning is still open.