Interesting Stuff

For those of you who are interested, the results from the robotic part of AAAI are at this site. Ironically, it looks like there will be more work packed into these final 2 weeks than in the rest of the summer – we have to build a website (mostly completed), write 2 papers (we’re about a quarter done with the first one), make a new poster, and if there’s any time left over, do the rest of MCC and the visual odometry stuff. We’ll see about that. In the meantime, Ben and I have completely different writing styles, and it’s getting even more trying to work together. However, by the time that Ben, Mac, and I can finally agree on anything, it’s absolutely gorgeous (this is kind of how we wrote code, too, except that I gave in to Ben more often than I should have, which resulted in the bugs that we had to fix at the conference).

Oh! One more awesome thing that happened at the conference – on Wednesday, we gave a 10-minute presentation on our robot and how everything worked. That went really well. Two hours later, Paul Rybski (who was in charge of the robotics exhibition and works with Manuela Veloso on Aibo soccer) gave a talk about the Aibos in his lab. He mentioned that they were using a particle filter to localize themselves, and then said that he’d explain how particle filters worked, but the Harvey Mudd team had already done that. It was awesome!

Other than that, things are starting to return to normal, which is both boring and nice. Strangely enough, though, there seems to be very little in the news these days. I hope you’ve all heard that Carl Rove is purportedly the leak that revealed former CIA agent Valerie Plame’s name to the press (though there is some talk that there was a second leak from one of Dick Cheney’s aid). When he was elected president, Bush vowed to fire any member of his staff who leaked secret information. However, he has recently rephrased his stance to say that he will only fire anyone committed of such a leak. Ordinarily this is fine, but it is nearly impossible to actually commit someone for this offence. You have to prove Rove knew that Plame was a CIA agent, that this information was classified, that the CIA wanted this information to be secret, that he was telling this information to someone without the required clearence, and finally that Rove was doing all of this on purpose. Consequently, Bush has revised his position to be idealistic but not practical, simply to help his loyal servants (which would be permissible if Rove hadn’t committed a crime). Well, we’ll see what happens.