Cool stuff

Today in my Multi Agent Systems class we were offered to try out some of our stuff (Multi-Agent Game theory, mostly) for the new DARPA Grand challenge. It's about Junior!

(You might want to look at the old material, particularly this is, ahem, funny (75 Mb video, careful, (my) Firefox tried to display it; use "Save As..." - but just funny) ;-) ).
We can do that for the paper that is due to pass the class (you need to do an exam and problem sets, too).

And then I was at a talk by Rana el Kaliouby, from MIT. That's really cool stuff: her software is recognizing facial expressions! :-) She's devised it to train autists about facial expressions. Autists are not disinterested in this stuff (they tend to look to the floor and cannot empathize - meaning feel with other people, communicate adequately and generally act socially), but are just overhelmed by the input from the environment. She teaches them slowly by showing them how they reacted and how the other people reacted in different situations and what that meant - this last part comes from the computer!
There's other applications - more later I guess :-)

Now what do I do? Only 3 weeks of the quarter left...

Ongoing work and other sites

Oh ho, I have to meet this prof here for the research for my term paper and he got a blog! Wow, that seems to be a cool guy, read his article on "Why specialists are grumpy and generalists are happy" or the rest of his blog!
Hope he'll have time to meet with me!

And then I found my friend G-Tech describing his HCI course: Projekt in meinem HCI-Kurs.
It's in German, sorry for all the German-illiterates, but I want just to point out some specialities of the approach to design I'm learning here. You can take them as is, or if you know German you may contrast them with what my friend describes.
We also do

Understand -> Ideas -> Prototype -> test -> start over!

But in 2h! At least to start with. We generate an insight that is usable for brainstorming, 50 ideas or something. Then we make (say) 6 prototypes. Then we test - and we are happy if they fail! Then we have learned something, we do not want those "Oh yeah, cool.....!?"-type answers.
Learn by doing prototypes. Learn by talking with the people. And throw them away afterwards - do not be emotionally attached to them! So do NOT invest too much work into a single prototype! Fail fast, fail early, fail gloriously. And LEARN!
(Georg prototypes a user interface - new screen: flip page! It's the only one lying around here - I'm not proud of it, but you get the idea! You make people talk with it, that's GREAT!)

The Stanf. principles

Just coming back from the presentation of Hasso's class of next quarter. Good food, some people from Hasso's company and Terry a prof from the University. After the talk of Terry he asked the students to make a short presentation and afterwards he laughingly quoted a principle of this University:

Bring together exciting students in a course and let them learn from each other.

A third of the people is already running at least one business, others come from research managing backgrounds, have several years of experience in something else - you get the picture.
The course looks great. We'll have to improve the administration of the cities of PA and MV, how will be our task to find out. No limits! The core teaching team is comprised of Terry, Hasso, two higher level guys from Hasso's company and some teaching assistants. Of course there will be visiting profs. And we'll be going to this year's big customer event of Hasso's company, in Atlanta in April! Hey, some reader of this blog should be happy now that I might visit his place!
Hope that I'll be in this class!
Oh, I try to keep complete names out of here, as you might have noticed.

(RED)

Also: Spend and destroy, Fact 1, Fact 2

Social marketing ::= Use business techniques to create good.
(RED) ::= Create a (global) brand that other brands can wrap around their brand to profit from social marketing. Split the profits 50/50: 50 go to AIDS projects in Africa 50 to GAP, for example:

My next design school project is all about that. Starting today.

Feynman, far future and crazy valley people

I just came home from a talk here. There are always all kinds of weird and/or interesting people coming to Stanford to give talks. This time it was Alexander Rose, the lead engineer of the Longnow Foundation. They want to design a clock that runs for the next 10,000 years (at least). They already built the mountain where they want to set it up in. Their first prototype went straight into the London Scientific Museum.

The original idea is from a guy named Danny Hillis who has co-founded thinking machines, a thousands-of-processors-computer company, in 01983 (mind the extra zero against the next bug!).
So what I found nice is this quote from Richard Feynman which Alexander cited as an inspiration of his:

I believe that it is quite reasonable for humanity to be making mistakes - it is still so young! (Free after Richard Feynman)

Maybe someone can find the original quote to this. I was unsuccessful.
It is even more interesting as Feynman had worked on the Manhattan project and was generally known for his feeling sorry about any new bridges and buildings being built: "What a pity, this isn't going to survive for long..." alluding to the bomb.

Anyways, we had nice stormy weather during the talk, lots of thunder and lightning, and someone in the audience could not refrain from remarking: "Your great adversary is speaking!"

They got me locked down! (House pix)

Yeah, I am fighting currently. It could be easier: How much time for university and how much for the city and so on? The blog is already suffering, I know.

(There it is, the bridge. Pic from Felix. Check out the links!)

Anyways I had quite an interesting week! Just this Friday we had a grad party on Campus, after that I was at a house party till later that night, three people stayed at my home... Saturday team meeting, work and the city in the evening. Been to a white trash bar/party. White trash are people in trailer home cities. Cheap beer - but the bar was in SF downtown, no sweat. Somebody came over from Potsdam last week for a month's worth of Internship at that big German software company. Coool!
Apropos, you meet those people from said company everywhere. One talked to me after the halfmarathon from last Sunday, because he recognized us as Germans when he read the imprint on my jogging suite and later this week when going swimming on campus a friend and me stumbled on him when he was leaving the aquatic center. Small (German) world.
(Picture from their campus with Fefe and Tomtom)

By the way there was the Golden Gate halfmarathon last Sunday and I participated! 2:02 for the interested. Very easy going! Look:
(Right after the start: Golden Gate Park)
(Finish in Golden Gate Park: Heba, Chris, Mary and me)
All runners prepared with a pasta dinner at Mary's house, which happens to be Heba's, and slept there to be ready for the early start. The rest was smooth running through the park, a little bit of lower SF and ocean beach. No mountains! And I had prepared for mountains...

If you did not notice sport is a big thing here. I am infected. Frequent running, swimming, dancing and - newest - squash! There are amazing, truly incredible facilities available free of charge to all students. Look at the aquatic center:

Two 50 m, one 37 and one for jumping with 1, 3, 5, 10 m towers. Outside. Heated! Yeah. Tennis courts, multiple stadiums, 9 squash courts, halls, gym, golf, yachting...

But I am often here, too:


And I have got to return there soon. We still have a meeting tonight. Have been in the city to do some prototype testing in the company's shop. We are to redesign their customization experience. Tomorrow is presentation.
Here are pix of my room.


And now after having been to IKEA:



Well, and this I wanted to share with you. Opening the fridge for the first time offered me this view:

(The preferred drink of my rommie's girlfriend)


And now I gotta go. Sometimes I look like this now. By the way, the wall behind me is already covered with more post-its! (See you) later!