Catchup post

It's been a while since I updated, reason being it is exams/assignments marking period, and I had two GPU industry projects due (3D groundwater flow fluid simulation and a pathfinding/travelling salesman with profits project). 

The biggest news item was that the ACM decided to start (over)enforcing its rules saying that you can not link to preprint and author pages. Thankfully, it started a call-to-arms and prominent pages like Ke-Sen Huang's SIGGRAPH links have been restored. I wonder how many less public pages have silently slipped away. Frankly, I can't wait until the concept of conferences and journals disappear. My websites have always had far more impact that my publications, and it can't be long until the same can be said universally.

A short update with some interesting things in the last while:

• Obama has made a comment about robotics, it's great to hear the field is getting a lot more visible and more support, but I still feel we have a very long way to go to break the western cultures distrust of robotics.
• Sony/Toshiba/IBM CELL is now officially dead.
• There is a new GPU computing community website, just started up: http://gpucomputing.net/
• nVidia's raytracing technology Optix is finally available, but only for next-gen GPU's. The "RealityServer" was also released, to great disappointment to many.
• Tech report has a more detailed report on nVidias new Fermi based GPU's.
• Caustic claims to be selling raytracing accelerators, but they haven't been able to sell me one yet. Smells like vapourware.
• Chromium OS was released. Not sure who wants this? Fast starts haven't been an issue for me since laptop's could sleep. I guess they are aiming for very low prices.
• Peteris Krumins posted a great blog post on the highlights of MIT's algorithms lectures
• Wolfire did an interesting post on generating vertex weights.
• Felix von Leitner put together a very interesting presentation on compiler optimization tricks. It's good proof that compilers are much better than humans for most optimizations, plenty of new things I learnt from this.
• Finally, I saw a link to this paper:Aggregate Dynamics for Dense Crowd Simulation. I've not had a chance to read it yet, but the results look fantastic and the idea is novel. (Using fluid-simulation techniques for representing crowds.) Video below:

   

Learn CUDA - Perth, Western Australia

iVEC IGUP cordially invites you to a CUDA GPU tutorial tomorrow afternoon.

The iVEC Industry and Government Uptake program with Adrian Boeing from ECU will be hosting an introductory tutorial on CUDA GPU programming with a focus on graph algorithms and search trees.

17 November 2.30 - 4.30 pm

Edith Cowan University School Of Computer And Security Science

13.225 - Games & Simulation Lab

2 Bradford St

Mount Lawley WA 6050

The tutorial is free but places are limited.

MAGIC 2010 - Team MAGICian - ECU, UWA, Flinders, Thales

Fantastic news, the team I put together for the DSTO MAGIC 2010 competition has been pre-selected into the top 10 teams, and won $50,000 USD in seed funding! Now we just need to make it past phase 2, and then take away the million dollar prize!

Our team consists of two parts, Edith Cowan University, School of Computer and Security Science, and the University of Western Australia, School of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering which make up the WA team that I am coordinating, and Flinders University in Adelaide that David is coordinating.

The competition is quite tough, were up against a number of veterans from the DARPA grand challenge. This was a series of events where robot cars raced through the Mojave Desert, and then navigated through an urban environment. There is a pretty good PBS/NOVA documentary on the original challenge The Great Robot Race. I was involved on the sidelines with the Urban challenge with the TUM/UniBW/Karlsruhe AnnieWAY entry.

Some of the key competitors include Carnegie Mellon University (Who won the DARPA urban challenge, and came second in the DARPA grand challenge), Virgina Tech (3rd in urban), University of Pennsylvania and Cornell who tied at 5th. You can read about the whole list of competitors on a Dr Dobb's Journal article covering the MAGIC 2010 selection event. Naturally, these teams will be fooled into a sense of complacency and they won't stand a chance against our home-grown team.

We are building 7 robots in WA, and approx 10 robots in SA. You can see the WA robot in the picture with this post, it is based on the Pioneer All-Terrain robotic platform. The WA robots will have DGPS, inertial measurement systems (gyroscopes & accelerometers) for relative positioning, various laser range finders for mapping and collision deteciton, stereo cameras for distance measurement and object recognition and PTZ cameras for object tracking. This should be a very exciting project!

Some of the key areas for software work include building the simulator, developing the computer vision algorithms for object recognition and tracking (including tracking people), the LIDAR data processing, sensor fusion algorithms, SLAM algorithms, the multi-agent team coordination and planning, the data-communications, path planning, trajectory generation, influence mapping, the list goes on!

So if you have any interest in the project, please drop me a line! It's your chance to be famous, and to be part of this history-making event!