Beginning October 1st 2007, I will be working at Microsoft EMIC in Aachen, Germany. I will be mainly working on embedded systems. I will continue to maintain CubeOS.
H.
Beginning October 1st 2007, I will be working at Microsoft EMIC in Aachen, Germany. I will be mainly working on embedded systems. I will continue to maintain CubeOS.
H.
I’m currently visiting the SSRR 2007 workshop. We had quite a time here in Rome.
Together with Alexander Kleiner and Christian Dornhege, I was showing a demonstration of RFID SLAM-based cooperative pedestrian indoor localization. I collected quite some pedestrian data by walking around the campus of ISA Campus in Rome. Unfortunately, the data recording and processing did not work out as planned so we did not have any conclusive results yet, but we will try to use some of the data later on.
The SSRR workshop program this year is a very good mix of robotics research and information from the application side of safety, security and rescue robotics. Espechially the talk by Robin Murphy illustrated the problems occuring when using a simple robot system for a search-and-rescue operaton. Of the 9 possible failures they anticipated, they faced 6 during the operation.
Peter Corke’s keynote on robots used in mining was also very interesting, concluding in the end that using robotics technology before an accident happens in order to prevent people from working in dangerous situations might be much more beneficial than building robots for search and rescue operations.
There are two talks by Johann Borenstein. The first one, a keynote, showed research results from building snake robots. An interesting conclusion was that there is a lot of room for AI research to support operators of such robots, as currently, 3 trained operators are needed to operate a single 7-segment snake robot and even then, they need a lot of time to coordinate their control commands to make the robot behave the way they want. However, the capabilities of the robot were very impressive, including the robot going up an “inverted J” type air inlet like you would find on ships and in bunkers.
The second talk he gave was on personal dead reckoning, the techniques presented are quite similar to Stephane’s research. He reports a distance error of less than 2% of the distance traveled. That’s impressive…
At the moment, I’m attending Mensch und Computer 2007. The invited talk of this morning was very nice, altough it was given via Skype as the speaker, Adrian David Cheok fell ill and was not allowed to travel. The talk had also some funny parts including a wearable suit for a chicken equipped with vibration devices. The idea is that by interacting with a chicken puppet, the user can remotely stroke his pet chicken. The puppet is mounted on a XY plotter-like device that can then display the motions of the chicken in its cage.
Tomorrow, our workshop on nomadic and wearable user interfaces will take place and I hope that we will have interesting discussions.
A while ago, on August 1st, scientist Andrej H. has been arrested. His subject is political science, his research topic is urbanization. According to his former Ph.D advisor, Andrej H. calls himself a marxist. The Public Attorney’s Office calls him a terrorist. In the warrant, this claim is based on rather interesting reasoning.
Aparently, Andrej H. has met with a person that has been recently arrested for arson on a military truck. No casualties, just lots of damage.
That person seems to be a member of what is called “militante gruppe” or “mg“, a group of pathetic left-wing hobby “terrorists” that cause more (brain-)damage by the intellectual blabla that they print on pamphlets than the arson attacks and threat letters they send around.
And since some time, there is a chain of arson attacks on premium vehicles in Berlin. Understandably, the political pressure to stop these arson attacks is quite high at the moment, as burned-out luxury cars in a touristic neighborhood don’t look so nice on postcards and as the owners and their insurance companies aren’t very happy about this either.
The car burnings happen often in neighborhoods such as Prenzlauer Berg and Friedrichshain that were formerly cheap and occupied by an urban Bohéme after the Berlin wall came down and are now being nicely renovated and sold piece-by-piece to wealthy individuals that want to breathe the air of the authentic. And can afford to buy appartments. And luxury cars.
This process is called Gentrification in the social science research of Andrej H. And here, as Bill says: “the plot thickens”…
The Public Attorney’s Office reasons as follows:
This scared me a bit. How do I do in this respect?
To avoid misunderstandings here: I am not promoting any left-wing propaganda, especially none of the brain-confusing leftish bla-bla that the “mg” is so famous for. If Andrej H. would be a potential right-wing or islamic terrorist, my reasons would still apply.
What I don’t like in this procedure is that one can base a german arrest warrant on facts that apply to millions of researchers on the planet. Yes, I can go to a library and I am not completely stupid. I may meet and talk to all kinds of people, I hear their arguments and I claim that I can think for myself. Does that make me a terror suspect? I don’t think so.
Similar “reasoning” could be applied with the recently passed new law (StGB 303b) on “hacking“, which threatens all computer security researchers that write software that could be used for criminal purposes. Mixed with the terrorist paragraph 129a StGB that has also been used in the case of Andrej H., this threatens all members of organizations that work on IT security. Maybe I should cancel my membership in IEEE and GI
Currently, I’m reading a book called “What terrorists want” by Louise Richardson. (German version) Richardson claims that the three personal reasons for terrorists are Revenge, Fame and Response. The case of Andrej H. and the group of “mg” members could in a twisted way be a reason for “Revenge” against a state that seems to be using very weak reasoning for prosecuting intellectuals. With the actions of the Public Attorney’s Office, the “Fame” point clearly goes to “mg” and so does the “Response” point. This blog post is obviously and unfortunately a part of all this.
On August 24th, the warrant of Andrej H. will be reviewed. If there’s real and factual evidence against him, keep him locked up and put him to trial. If there isn’t anything but him having access to a library, let him go.
For some time now, I had a problem using the IMAP e-mail client with my own mailhost. When using unencrypted POP3 or IMAP4, everything was fine, but when I tried to use SSL to protect my password, the phone refused to establish an SSL connection. The certificate I use is self-signed. As there is no trusted CA certificate installed in my phone that certified the authenticity of the SSL key my imapd uses, it correctly refuses the connection. But unlike desktop browsers or mail clients, it did not ask me if I wanted to trust the certificate presented but just disconnected. 🙁
So I found a solution to this on the Zimbra wiki: The way to go is to create a certificate file on a webserver and make the phone download it using its internal web-browser. The phone installs this certificate together with the root CA certificates and thus trusts the imapd when it presents a key signed by this certificate.
I tried this with my SonyEricsson K750i and it worked immediately.
Step by Step intstructions:
And since, the IMAP4 over SSL works as expected.
This week, Ingrid Rügge defended her Ph.D entitled “Einsatzpotenziale, Nutzungsprobleme und Lösungsansätze mobil tragbarer Informations- und
Kommunikationstechnologien”. Being a member of her Thesis Committee, I was very impressed with the broadness of her work and she gave one of the best defense talks I ever heard.
Congratulations!
(Pictures of the reception afterwards will follow…)
…underwater. The name of their robot is really cool.
And it’s yet another robot with a RoboCube inside.
The Jacobs foundation will fund my previous employer, the International University Bremen with a €200M grant over the next years. IUB will change its name to Jacobs University Bremen. This makes it highly likely that IUB (now JUB) will be around for the long run. IUB will receive the money in annual payments of €15M that will cover a significant part their annual budget.
Congratulations!
H.