1286 Folsom @ 9th
San Francisco, California

Pavel Machalek - From Pixels to Exoplanet Atmospheres
Hundreds of planets have now been discovered around other stars and for those that orbit their star in our line of sight we can observe them transit in front of and behind their star. I will briefly talk about how observations with the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes has enabled astronomers to study the atmospheres of transiting planets and what the near future holds for such studies.


Camp L. Peavy - Homebrewed Robots
Camp L. Peavy, Jr. has been building robots for over 20 years. Highlights include creating the 1996 autonomous Robot Wars champion "Gladiator Rodney" and the Burning Man ARTBot "Springy Thingy". In 2003 Peavy and others founded the "TABLEBot Challenge" currently in its 8th year of coopetition. He has written several articles for SERVO magazine and earnestly desires total world domination. It all started with a book by David L. Heiserman entitled "How to Build Your Own Self-Programming Robot". After years of wrestling with this graduate level engineering course Peavy eventually applied Heiserman's "Alpha" level machine intelligence theory to a store-bought PC and is still working on "Beta" and "Gamma" level experiments. Come hear about the three levels of machine intelligence and discover the craft of "Homebrewed Robots!"


Eric Boyd - North Paw: Haptic Compass Anklet
Augmented reality usually means overlaying information on your visual field. But humans have a lot more senses than just vision, and for something as physical as direction, touch seems like a more natural interface anyway. North Paw is an anklet which contains 8 small vibrating pager motors, a microcontroller, and a compass IC. The original German guy who pioneered the haptic compass idea (in a belt form) reported an unerring sense of direction after wearing it for six weeks. The talk will focus on the details of how the device works and the experience of wearing it. Plus open ended discussion of our cyborg nature and the plasticity of the brain - what other senses do you want?



FREE Admission but donations to the space much appreciated!


Official Website: http://dorkbot.org/dorkbotsf/archive/201001

Added by k0re on December 22, 2009