Minnesota West Guitar Hero Robot

Article From Machine vision and image processing

Banner Engineering Corp. partnered with a Minnesota West Community and Technical College engineering student and robotics instructor to develop a robot designed to play the Guitar Hero video game—responding to each note as it appears onscreen. Pete Nikrin, who graduated from Minnesota West in 2008 and now works as a manufacturing engineer at Meier Tool & Engineering, designed the robot to compete with a friend that Nikrin had introduced to the game and, after playing for two weeks, had surpassed Nikrin in his ability. Bill Manor, robotics instructor at Minnesota West, suggested Nikrin incorporate a PresencePLUS P4 OMNI vision sensor with a right-angle lens from Banner Engineering. Manor had such a vision system in his possession, as Minnesota West had purchased it at a discount through Banner as a start-up education kit. To develop his Guitar Hero robot, Nikrin used a mannequin—complete with Minnesota West sweatshirt, hat and painted fingernails—and installed the camera lens as the robot's left eye, which would be positioned toward the TV or computer screen. The robot, named Roxanne, identified the notes to be played by using an Edge vision tool, which detects, counts and locates the transition between bright and dark pixels in an image area. For more information, go to: http://www.bannerengineering.com/en-US/ayrok.

Hot Topics in Molecular Imaging

TOPIM stands for 'hot TOPics in molecular IMaging'. The format is a medium scale one-week workshop organized by the European Society for Molecular Imaging (ESMI) and the European Network of Excellence DiMI. TOPIM is an annual event, aiming at covering a different red-hot aspect of research in Molecular Imaging every year.

Imaging Systems Biology

Date: February 7-12, 2010

Place: 10052 Bardonecchia (TO)

            Piemont
            Italy

Scientific Committee:

• Silvio Aime, Italy
• John Clark, UK
• Andreas H. Jacobs, Germany
• Clemens W.G.M. Lowik, The Netherlands
• Vasilis Ntziachristos, Germany
• Bertrand Tavitian, France

Topics:

• cell cycle
• differentiation and de-differentiation
• growth of multicellular systems including angiogenesis
• cell migration and homing
• intracellular and membrane trafficking
• cell-cell communication
• pathogen-host interaction
• endocrinology (insulin)

Presentations:

Presentations will be held during the morning (8:30-12:00) and the early evening (16:30-20:00) such that there is room to continue scientific discussions in between or to enjoy the snow

http://www.dimi.eu/index.php?id=2032

2nd Workshop on Cognitive Information Processing (CIP2010)

Following the success of the first edition of the workshop on Cognitive Information Processing, we are pleased to announce the second one in this series. This workshop aims at bringing together researchers from the machine learning, pattern recognition, statistical signal processing, communications and radar communities in an effort to promote and encourage cross-fertilization of ideas and tools.

CIP2010 will take place on June 14-16, 2010, in Italy, in the island of Elba, at the Grand Hotel Elba International (http://www.elbainternational.it), which dominates the beautiful Bay of Naregno.

CIP2010 is sponsored by the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP), and the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), and it has the technical co-sponsorship of the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society (AESS) and the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS)

The workshop will feature six keynote addresses and technical presentations, oral (invited) and poster (invited & regular), all of which will be included in the workshop proceedings.

Prospective authors are invited to submit full length (six pages) papers via the conference website for presentation in any of the areas listed below. All submitted papers will be subjected to a blind peer-review process.

Theory:

• Learning theory and modeling;

• Bayesian learning and models;

• Information theoretic learning;

• Graphical and kernel methods;

• Adaptive learning algorithms;

• Ensembles: committees, mixtures, boosting, etc.;

• Data representation and analysis;

• Collaborative sensing techniques;

• Other topics for cognitive information processing.

Applications:

• Cognitive radio networks;

• Cognitive radio modulation techniques;

• Dynamic spectrum management;

• Opportunistic resource allocation;

• Cognitive radar and sonar;

• Knowledge based target detection, estimation, tracking and identification;

• Waveform agility design;

• Blind source separation;

• Cognitive dynamic systems;

• Distributed, cooperative, and adaptive processing;

• Remote sensing;

• Other application areas.

Accepted papers will be published in the Proceedings of CIP2010.

More information can be found on the workshop website at:

http://www.conference.iet.unipi.it/cip2010/

2010 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME 2010)

With around 1000 submissions and 500 participants each year, the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME) has been the flagship multimedia conference sponsored by four IEEE societies since 2000. It serves as a forum to promote the exchange of the latest advances in multimedia technologies, systems, and applications from both the research and development perspectives of the circuits and systems, communications, computer, and signal processing communities.

Paper Submission:

Prospective authors are invited to submit a full paper (two-column format,

6 pages maximum) according to the guidelines available on the conference website at http://www.icme2010.org/. Only electronic submissions will be accepted.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Speech, audio, image, graphics, video, text processing

- Signal processing for media integration

- Animation, virtual reality, and 3-D imaging

- Multimedia human-machine interface and interaction

- Multimedia communications and networking

- Multimedia security and content protection

- Multimedia databases and digital libraries

- Multimedia computing systems and applications

- Multimedia analysis and social media

- Hardware and software for multimedia systems

- Multimedia standards and related issues

- Multimedia quality assessment

ICME 2010 aims to have the top 15% papers accepted for oral presentation and additional 15% papers accepted for poster presentation. Several awards sponsored by industry and institutions will be given out. Best papers will be presented in a single-track session to all participants. Accepted papers should be presented, or else they will not be included in the IEEE Xplore Library.

Workshops, Tutorials, Demos and Special Sessions:

A number of Workshops will be organized by the sponsoring societies. To further foster new emerging topics, ICME 2010 also welcomes researchers, developers and practitioners to organize regular Workshops. Interested organizers please contact the Workshop Chairs for further details. Proposals for Special Sessions, Tutorials, Demos, and Exhibitions are also encouraged.

Please visit the ICME 2010 website for submission details.

Important Dates:

Regular Paper Abstract Submission: December 18, 2009

Regular Paper Submission: December 31, 2009

Notification of Regular Paper Acceptance: March 15, 2010

Camera-Ready Paper Due: April 15, 2010

Special Session Proposal Due: December 5, 2009

Workshop Proposal Due: December 31, 2009

Tutorial Proposal Due: January 31, 2010

Conference Website: www.icme2010.org

Google Introduces 'Go' Programming Language

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) on Tuesday released a new open source programming language called Go that's optimized for applications designed for massive scalability and multi-processor systems.

"I've never felt as productive as I have working with Go," said Rob Pike, a principal engineer at Google.

Go is the second programming language Google has released this year. In July, the company released Simple, a BASIC dialect for developing Android applications.

Pike says Go's goal is to serve as a systems language, in the way that C++ or C does today.

"It's fast for development but it also is a true compiled language," he explained. "We're opening sourcing it now because we think it's reached the point of being fun and useful and powerful."

Go began in 2007 as a group 20% project -- Google allows its workers to spend 20% of their time pursuing projects outside of their job responsibilities. In addition to Pike, contributors include Google engineers Robert Griesemer, Ken Thompson, Ian Taylor, and Russ Cox.

Compiled Go code runs at close to the speed of C, says Pike, adding that compilation happens almost instantly. "It's like using an interactive language," he explained.

Existing languages haven't been optimized for multi-core processors or massive scaling. Pike says that Go was conceived as a language for the kinds of programs written by Google engineers.

It's not intended for beginners, but it's also not terribly difficult to learn. It's object-oriented and boasts features like true closures and reflection.

Pike compares Go to Java in terms of its learning curve. "It's probably around the same level as Java," he said. "If people can learn Java out of the box, they shouldn't have too much trouble learning Go."

One reason for releasing Go as an open source project is to provide the open source community with the opportunity to create of better tools for using the language, like a plug-in for the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE). At present, there's no IDE support for Go.

Go has not played a role in the development of any of Google's publicly facing Web applications so far. But Google has several internal projects developed that were created using the language. "We have some cool demos," Pike said.

Pike says it's too early to say whether Go will play a part in Google's forthcoming Chrome OS, but he adds that Go does work with Native Client, Google's open-source technology for running native code in Web applications.

"Go has properties that make it really nice for running inside the browser for your apps," he said.

As an example, he said that Wave, which consists of JavaScript on the front-end and C++ server code, might be more efficiently implemented using Go on both the front-end and back-end.

Go has two compilers at the moment, Gccgo, which relies on the GCC as a back-end, and a suite of compilers (6g and 8g) for 64-bit x86 and 32-bit x86 machines respectively. Support for ARM chips and Android devices is being worked on. "The problem with Android phones is we have don't have a [floating point unit]," said Pike.

Additional details and documentation can be found at golang.org and on YouTube.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/web_services/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=221601138

CFP: ICMB2010

International Conference on Medical Biometrics 28-30 June, 2010, Hong Kong http://www4.comp.polyu.edu.hk/~icmb2010/

In the medical field, personal medical feature data, especially digital images, can be referred to as medical biometrics.

Such data are produced in ever-increasing quantities and used for diagnostics and therapy purposes. Medical biometric research aims to use personal medical features in different formats such as images, signals and other sources for solving medical problems and to provide high-performance services in medical field.

Medical biometric systems integrate multidisciplinary technologies in biology, medicine, electronics, computing, and statistics.

The importance of computer-aided diagnosis and therapy has drawn more and more attention worldwide and laid the foundation for the modern medicine with excellent potentials for promising applications such as telemedicine and web-based healthcare.

ICMB 2010 has an emphasis on efficient and effective medical biometric technologies and systems. It will provide a central forum for researchers, engineers and vendors from different disciplines to exchange most recent results, identify future directions and challenges, and initiate possible collaborative research and system development. This conference will significantly benefit

a large variety of audience from both academia and industry.

The topics to be addressed at ICMB 2010 will include, but are not limited to:

Medical device technologies:

- Digital sensor for signal detection

- Medical imaging devices

- Image reconstruction

Medical data processing and management:

- Medical information systems

- Medical data processing

- Medical information retrieval

Medical pattern recognition:

- Feature extraction and selection

- Feature matching and classification

- Decision theory

Medical biometric systems and applications:

- Computer-aided diagnosis

- Telemedicine systems

- Computerized Traditional Chinese Medicine

- Other applications

- System performance analysis