RoboSub 2011

Robosub (http://www.auvsifoundation.org/foundation/competitions/robosub/) is a competition involving Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV). The challenge is to overcome the obstacles and perform the tasks without human interventions.
The winners are:

1st Place: ETS Team SONIA (awarded $7,000)
2nd Place : Cornell University (awarded $4000)
3rd Place: University of Florida (awarded $3,000)
4th Place : Reykjavik University (awarded $2,000)
5th Place: University of Maryland (awarded $500)
6th Place: University of Rhode Island (awarded $500)
7th Place: United States Naval Academy
8th Place: North Carolina State University

Mayor's Cup for Community Outreach: Carl Hayden High School (awarded $1,000)
Second Chance Award: University of Central Florida (awarded $1,000)
Outstanding Technical Mentorship: University of Maryland ($500)
Hardware is Hard Award: Utah State University (awarded $500)
Innovation on a Budget Award: Mesa College (awarded $500)
Best Paper Award: Kyushu University (awarded $500)

http://www.auvsi.org/news/#RoboSub2011
The video:



The team describes the challenges and the experience during the competition:
http://sonia.etsmtl.ca/en/news/final-day-we-finished-in-1st-place

 A great collection of their papers etc:
http://www.auvsifoundation.org/foundation/competitions/journalpaperarchives/2011robosubjournalpapers/

Attending MaxEnt 2011 in Waterloo, Canada

I am attending MaxEnt 2011 in Waterloo Canada.

Travelling to Waterloo was slightly involved because of the few reasons. The first one was the visa issues. At least, I am thankful that it arrived a week before my departure. Few of my friends could not make it due to the delays. Another one was that the airfare to the nearby airport was  very very expensive.  So, I travelled via Toronto (about an hour drive).
However, the best part of the airport was that the the wifi was free. So, I quickly joined the network and started calling people while waiting for my shuttle to arrive.

Here, in MaxEnt 2011, I will be presenting my work on collaborative experimental design by two intelligent agents.  The abstract of the talk can be found here ...(PDF!)

The work is the result of the overall successful (past) developments (by the Giants) of the Bayesian method of inference, experimental design techniques and the order-theoretic approach to questions. 

We view the intelligent agents as the question asking machines and we want them to be able to design experiments in an automated fashion to achieve the given goal.  Here we illustrate how the joint entropy turns out to be the useful quantity when we want the intelligent agents to efficiently learn together.

The details are in paper, which will be put in arxiv soon.

On the side notes:

Google detected right away that I "moved" to canada. So they wanted to offer Google.ca

yahoo music does not seem to work!

Pandora does not work.

Interesting!