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Archive for September, 2009

Our xylophone has been ordered!

25 Sep
A $150 Xylophone from EBay

A $150 Xylophone from EBay

For this project to support research in the area of computational creativity, we’re building a robotic xylophone.  Well, we’ve got the approval for funding and the xylophone has been ordered.  Naturally, this is exciting!  This means that soon, we’ll be opening a box like children at birthday parties, putting it together and playing with it.  It might actually get a little loud around the 2nd floor of Nedderman Hall for a few.

Now, the next order of business is to settle on the solenoids and get those ordered as well.  Perhaps, we’ll get one to test our construction ideas.  Brandon Skinner has agreed to help put together the controller.  His help is greatly appreciated!

 
 

Weekly Digest

25 Sep
The weekly digest is a new Design Perceptive feature that brings you interesting bits of news related to Science, Robotics and Artificial Intelligence.  We hope you enjoy!

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72A2E048-B20B-0D77-0F8E96BE546D649A_4From Scientific American magazine
5 Future Robotics Expeditions and What They Could Reveal.
This is a slight misnomer.  The only future robot is the Mars Science Laboratory.  The remaining have been already launched.  Yet, they are still on their respective journeys to their destinations.

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This was my Tuesday-morning Ted Talk watching experience this week.  It resonates with my current interests in Computation Creativity.  It’s a brief lecture by Tim Brown running about 28 minutes long.  He talks about play in the form of exploration, building and role-playing and their roles in creativity.  You should take a gander when you have the time.

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troxlerWe here at Design Perceptive are always interested in the way humans perceive things.  It gives us direction and clues in designing towards artificial perceptive agents.  So, the interest here is to ask how and why do perceptual illusions work?  Consider the illusion in this article – The importance of perceptual illusion research from Cognitive Daily.

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The brain is amazing.   I really think many people (members of the medical/scientific community excepted) misunderstand how amazingly robust the brain really is.  This article in this Neurophilosophy blog shows how the brain can just keep going and going and going.

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I love the Study Hacks blog.  This article address the age old problem of procrastination and analysis paralysis.  I’ve run across this problem.  You most likely have as well.  Almost all of the classes in my major have semester projects, but this Ice-bath method could be applied to individual homework assignments as well.

 

A Computational Creativity Project at AAAI.UTA

01 Sep

I want to try something new at UTA that takes a look at creativity.  This is a grassroots startup of a multidisciplinary project to explore how creativity develops by looking into the research field of computational creativity.  It probably isn’t ground-breaking.  In fact, I’ve seen others do work in this area.  But, this might be an interesting platform to get others involved in AI, to help expand AI research at UTA, etc.

So, specifically, I want to take this: And wire it up with these:

A $150 Xylophone from EBay

A $150 Xylophone from EBay

A Powerful 12VDC - 24VDC Solenoid

A Powerful 12VDC - 24VDC Solenoid

The solenoids would be used as strikers which would be controlled by a computer program.  I envision the program exploring its range of motions that result in notes, chords and sequences.  I want to explore different models of how a system might learn what sounds good and what doesn’t.  I want to explore models of learning structure.

I want, foremost, to provide a platform for people who are interested in doing the same.