The Patent Plaque

My company gave this plaque to me a while ago for a patent I co-created that was granted by the USPTO last fall.

Syndicated 2011-06-06 02:48:08 from SynapticNulship

The Future of Crowd Madness

“Nothing New Under the Sun” is the title of Robert Silverberg’s column for the June 2011 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. Although the sobering thought that humanity keeps repeating certain types of mistakes is not one I particularly relish, it should be discussed. Crowd Stupidity “Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable [...]

Syndicated 2011-05-03 00:41:54 from SynapticNulship

Emotion, Spirituality, and Words

In 2003 I started looking at the science of emotion in order to determine if it would be useful for robots. When I had to do an English paper that year (middler year writing at Northeastern University) I decided it would be something about emotions, but I wasn’t sure at first what the specific [...]

Syndicated 2011-04-11 06:24:06 from SynapticNulship

Architecting Emotional Robots

Creating a robot with emotions is a software development problem. Emotion is a matter of cognitive architecture.  It is part of the information system of the mind.  Recreating “emotions” really means recreating a type of mind that uses internal mechanisms similar to our minds.  Making an emotional machine requires the proper design and implementation and deployment. The [...]

Syndicated 2011-04-08 02:02:46 from SynapticNulship

Prototyping with the Same Tools Developers Use

As I said in the last post, I appreciate the power of GUI prototyping tools.  And I will definitely use them when appropriate. However, I still stand by my philosophy that in many cases a good choice is to make a prototype or mockup with the actual visual development environment that the developers use.  For [...]

Syndicated 2011-03-28 05:13:07 from SynapticNulship

GUI Prototyping at a BostonCHI Seminar

On Friday I attended BostonCHI’s seminar Tools of the Trade: User Experience Research and Design Skills. Since all courses were day-long, I had to choose only one.  My choice was Prototyping Tips and Tools for Effective UX Design. Here is an embedding of the instructor’s Prezi used during the course.  It’s pretty good, except for the [...]

Syndicated 2011-03-28 04:26:33 from SynapticNulship

The 5 Year Memento

This is a snowglobe featuring a sculpture of the robot Genghis.

Syndicated 2011-03-21 01:25:07 from SynapticNulship

Flashback: The Mini-Me Robot

I just rediscovered some photos of a robot I threw together in about an hour back in 2003. This was made out of an Innovation First educational robot kit which came with the official FIRST robotics kit (which also had parts made by Innovation First). That kit later evolved into the VEX robotics kit. [...]

Syndicated 2011-03-14 01:35:53 from SynapticNulship

Evolution is the Greatest Force in the Material World

“Evolution is the greatest force in the material world” is said by Jeff Bridges in this newly leaked video. “Flynn Lives: The Next Day” is a TRON:Legacy epilogue for the Blu-Ray release, but it is perhaps also a teaser for TR3N. Via Tron-Sector.

Syndicated 2011-03-13 21:29:09 from SynapticNulship