Positive Technology Journal

From the Neuro-IT mailing list 

The Department of Neural Information Processing at the University of Ulm invites applications for a post-doc (or PhD student) position to begin November 1 2006, or later.

The Institute for Neural Information Processing at the University of Ulm (Germany) has two full professors, 4 postdocs and about 12 students and researchers in different areas of neural network research. Ongoing work includes mobile autonomous robots, computer vision, neural modelling, and pattern recognition.

Successful applicants will be expected to conduct research involving:

- pattern recognition or sensor fusion with artificial neural networks, or
- information processing in networks of spiking neurons, or
-large associative memory systems with possible applications in autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, medicine, speech or vision, or modelling and recognition of emotions.

Post-doc candidates should have a recent PhD-degree for example in computer science, physics, mathematics or electrical engineering.

They will have some small teaching obligations, so some knowledge of German would be useful.

Applications for PhD-work are also possible. In this case the applicants should already have some experience in one of the fields mentioned above.

The appointment will be for at least 2 years. Salary will be BAT IIa (details depend on age and family status).

See for application details http://www.informatik.uni-ulm.de/neuro/

Via Medgadget

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have designed a system (dubbed SWAN) that can guide people with or without vision through a difficult terrain. The SWAN system, consisting of a small laptop, a proprietary tracking chip, and bone-conduction headphones, provides audio cues to guide the person from place to place, with or without vision.

From the press release

“We are excited by the possibilities for people who are blind and visually impaired to use the SWAN auditory wayfinding system,” said Susan B. Green, executive director, Center for the Visually Impaired in Atlanta. “Consumer involvement is crucial in the design and evaluation of successful assistive technology, so CVI is happy to collaborate with Georgia Tech to provide volunteers who are blind and visually impaired for focus groups, interviews and evaluation of the system.”

Collaboration
In an unusual collaboration, Frank Dellaert, assistant professor in the Georgia Tech College of Computing and Bruce Walker, assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Psychology and College of Computing, met five years ago at new faculty orientation and discussed how their respective areas of expertise — determining location of robots and audio interfaces — were complimentary and could be married in a project to assist the blind. The project progressed slowly as the researchers worked on it as time allowed and sought funding. Early support came through a seed grant from the Graphics, Visualization and Usability (GVU) Center at Georgia Tech, and recently Walker and Dellaert received a $600,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to further develop SWAN.

 

 

Dellaert’s artificial intelligence research focuses on tracking and determining the location of robots and developing applications to help robots determine where they are and where they need to go. There are similar challenges when it comes to tracking and guiding robots and people. Dellaert’s robotics research usually focuses on military applications since that is where most of the funding is available.

“SWAN is a satisfying project because we are looking at how to use technology originally developed for military use for peaceful purposes,” says Dellaert. “Currently, we can effectively localize the person outdoors with GPS data, and we have a working prototype using computer vision to see street level details not included in GPS, such as light posts and benches. The challenge is integrating all the information from all the various sensors in real time so you can accurately guide the user as they move toward their destination.”