IEEE Spectrum, the award-winning technology magazine, published in October 2012 an interactive iPad app featuring the world’s most amazing robots.
IEEE Spectrum iPad App main page
IEEE Spectrum iPad App webpages
The most advanced robots on the planet (more than 120 are presented with 360° views, interactive images, detailed specs, exclusive articles, and hundreds of photos and videos.
IEEE Spectrum presents on its website more resources about robots :
Last update : June 1, 2013
At recent robotic and toy fairs (Japan 2012, Innorobo 2013, Toyfair 2013, …) several machines were presented that are basically mobile phones on a robotic trolley. The most advanced robots of this type are presented below :
| SmartPet by Bandai ; TechPet in Europe and USA |
iPhone | three colors : black, white, pink ; SmartPet App |
 |
| Name | Smartphone | Features | Picture |
| ROMO by Romotive |
iPhone 4 iPod Touch 4 |
face detection, telepresence, navigation, machine vision, SDK |
 |
| RoboMe by Wowwee |
iPhone | telepresence, speech recognition, face tracking |
 |
| SmartBot by Overdrive Robotics |
iOS Android Windows Phone |
expansion port, Arduino support, front lights, wheel encoders, NFC, 14 mounting holes for accesssories, speaker + buzzer |
 |
| R.Bot by rbot.ru |
iOS Android |
connectivity : WiFi, 3G, 4G, continous operation up to 8 hours |
 |
| Yo!Bot by Zeon Tech |
iPhone, iPod Touch, Android device with Adobe Air support |
Apps available to control the bot |  |
| Romibo by Origami Robotics |
iPod Touch | configurable companion, for therapy and research |
 |
www.science.lu, le site scientifique du Luxembourg destiné au grand public, vient d’être lancé. Il s’agit d’un portail internet commun consacré à la médiation scientifique de tous les acteurs de la science et de la recherche au Luxembourg. Une trentaine d’institutions et d’associations participent à ce site. Le portail dispose également d’une page Facebook.
Portail luxembourgeois des sciences; rubrique Juniors
Today I created the following Twitter timeline widget and downloaded an offline archive of my Tweets for test purposes.
[HTML1]
Last update : May 25, 2013
WowWee Group Limited is a Hong Kong-based company that focuses on breakthrough consumer technologies. The company was formed in 1982 by the two brothers Richard and Peter Yanofsky. In 1998 the company was purchased by Hasbro (formerly Hassenfeld Brothers, founded in 1923 by Henry, Hilal, and Herman Hassenfeld). In 2007, WowWee Ltd was acquired by Optimal Group Inc. (NASDAQ: OPMR).
Wowwee is best known for their BEAM (acronym for Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics, and Mechanics) robots created by physicist/roboticist Mark Tilden, starting in 2001 and by Sean Frawley, starting in 2007.
The different robots created by Wowwee are listed in the following table :
| Release Year | Robot Name | Picture |
| 2001 | B.I.O. Bugs |  |
| 2003 | G.I. Joe Hoverstrike |  |
| 2004 | Robosapien |  |
| 2005 | Robosapien V2 |  |
| 2005 | Robosapien Junior |  |
| 2005 | Roboraptor |  |
| 2005 | Robopet |  |
| 2006 | Roboreptile |  |
| 2006 | RS Media |  |
| 2007 | Roboquad |  |
| 2007 | Roboboa |  |
| 2007 | Robopanda |  |
| 2007 | FlyTech Dragonfly |  |
| 2008 | Femisapien |  |
| 2008 | Rovio |  |
| 2008 | Tri-Bot |  |
| 2008 | Mr. Personality |  |
| 2008 | Wrex The Dawg |  |
| 2008 | Bugbots four different styles : Flapper, Trax, Skipper, Zook |
 |
| 2009 | Joebot |  |
| 2009 | Roborover |  |
| 2010 | Roboscooper |  |
| 2013 | Robosapien X |  |
| 2013 | Zombiebot |  |
| 2013 | RoboMe iPhone controlled Best of Toy Fair 2013 |
|
Additional informations about Wowwee robots are available at the following links :
High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is a video compression standard, a successor to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding), currently under development by a Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) of the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG), defined as ISO/IEC 23008-2 MPEG-H Part 2 and ITU-T H.265. HEVC is said to improve video quality, double the data compression ratio compared to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, and can support 8K Ultra high definition television (UHD) and resolutions up to 8192×4320.
CIRCL (Computer Incident Response Center Luxembourg) is the national Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT – CERT) coordination center for the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg. CIRCL is operated by SMILE (Security Made in Lëtzebuerg), a State funded groupement d’intérêt économique (GIE), designed to improve information security and create new opportunities for Luxembourg.
On April 23, 2013, CIRCL published a real-time map of the attacks targeting IP addresses located in Luxembourg. CIRCL sensors to provide the data for this map are installed in the networks of P&T Luxembourg, RESTENA and ION group.
CIRCL map showing real-time attacks targeting IP addresses in Luxembourg
Today I enhanced my Serviio DLNA server hosted on my Synology DS412+ diskstation to show videos of my Youtube playlists on my connected TV’s. I installed the Youtube online content plugin (Youtube.groovy, version 29.12.2012) in the NAS /volume1/public/serviio/plugins folder. I stopped and restarted the Serviio server in the NAS package center to activate the plugin.
The next step was to install the chrome extension Serviiotube in the Chrome browser which allows to add videos and playlists in the Serviio Online Resources Library from the Youtube webpage.
Serviiotube in Youtube
The resulting source page in the Serviio webconsole is shown hereafter :
Serviio Console, Online Sources
Last update : August 27, 2013
The best known musical scores library is IMSLP (International Music Score Library Project), also called the Petrucci Music Library, after publisher Ottaviano Petrucci. IMSPL is a project for the creation of a virtual library of public domain music scores, based on the wiki principle. It was launched on February 2006 by Edward W. Guo (pseudonym Feldmahler), a graduate of the New England Conservatory and Harvard Law School.
Links to other musical scores library are provided in the following list :
Vladimir Viro & Michael Scott Cuthbert at the 1st Classical Music Hack Day, Vienna 2013 – Photo by Thomas Bonte
Vladimir Viro, a computer scientist at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, Germany, is founder and lead developer of Peachnote, a classical music search tool. Vladimir Viro published a research paper on Peachnote at the 12th International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) conference in 2011. The service enables a user to freely search IMSLP, the US Library of Congress, and other archives for classical music. Peachnote uses a music N-gram Viewer, that’s analogous to Google’s N-gram Viewer.
Werner Schweer, Hervé Bitteur, Nicolas Froment, Thomas Bonte at the 1st Classical Music Hack Day, Vienna 2013
Michael Scott Cuthbert, Associate Professor of Music at MIT and creator of music21, a flexible toolkit for computer-aided musicology, is impressed by the impact of Peachnote on musicology.
Vladimir Viro and Michael Scott Cuthbert presented their projects at the 1st Classical Music Hack Day which took place at the mdw-University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, February 1st – 3rd, 2013. Werner Schweer, Nicolas Froment and Thomas Bonte presented at the same days their free open-source musical notation program MuseScore.
MuseScore open-source program
An alpha version of an embeddable score viewer is provided by Peachnote :
Peachnote Score Viewer
Links to additional informations about Peachnote, music21 and MuseScore are listed hereafter :
Last update : July 24, 2013
SHIVA : Anatomy of a VisualEyes Project
VisualEyes is a flash-based authoring tool developed at the University of Virginia to weave images, maps, charts, video and data into highly interactive and compelling dynamic visualizations.
The project was started at the Virginia Center for Digital History with continued support from the University of Virginia’s Sciences, Humanities & Arts Network of Technological Initiatives (SHANTI). SHANTI promotes innovation at the University of Virginia through the use of advanced digital technologies in research, teaching, publishing and collaborative engagement.
The online VisualEyes edit-tool VisEdit is available at the VisualEyes website. The latest offering from SHANTI is SHIVA (Interactive Visualization Application), a first HTML5 tool that makes it easy to create interactive visualizations. MapScholar is another HTML5 tool to create visual narratives using historical maps, media clips, and other visualization techniques.
After a beta trial, the full version of SHIVA Visualization was released mid July 2013. The login page for registrated users is avaialble at the Shiva website.
Bill Ferster is the VisualEyes Project Director. At CTTE (Center for Technology and Teacher Education) he directs the PrimaryAccess Project, which enables middle and high school students to create digital documentaries using primary source documents online, and won in 2009 one of the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) 25 Best Educational Websites award.