Free and legal computer science books

Hi everyone!!

A couple of days without posting, but you are lucky, if you like computer related stuff, This time I give you a link two literally hundreds of free and legal computer related books. Enjoy:

http://freecomputerbooks.com/

Canarian Fight Show, new season

Yesterday 7/10/2006 a new Canarian Fight Show´s season began. This firts match took place in San Mateo, a pretty village in the center of Gran Canaria:

In San Mateo there is a lot of liking for this sport. As a proof look at this poster. It´s about the junior Canarian Fight team:

The Canary Islands are a land with a very strong identity, this way is understandable to see suppoters of this traditional sport every where, thus this is one of the tv shows with the higher audience.

The future of Blacboard by MIT

About 20 inmigrants dead

Today I´ve been broadcasting about the death of about 20 inmigrants while sailing to the Canary Islands. Suposedly their boat turned upside down when a wave crashed into it. Sad story. Here you can se some of my fellows at the spanish public television, TVE.

Vector

A vector is an oriented line segment.

(SLAM) SIMULTANEOUS LOCALIZATION AND MAPPING I

Have you ever wondered why we don´t see robots everywhere? You may think technology isn´t mature enough, or they are too expensive to be built massively. You are wrong. We don´t see robots everywhere because they don´t know how to figure out where they are.

It may seems a simple task. We, as humans, only have to look around and get a general idea of where we are. But when we are talking about robots it´s not that simple. A robot must get information of the environment throug it´s sensors. Then this information (actualy only numbers or voltages), must be interpreted in some manner. A number of methods exists that make a computer or a robot able to extrac some information from images, or from laser range measurements, but most of them are computationally expensive, too much to be aplied in real time.

SLAM is a generic group of methods that try to solve the problem of localization (where am I in a given map?) and mapping (build a map of the environment where I am). Almos all state of the art SLAM methods are probabilistic. They try to model the uncentainties existing everywhere over the process. Robot movement (odometry), sensors readings, map belief, are some examples of the kind of uncertainties mentioned before. One of the most important researchers in mobile robotics and, particularly, in SLAM is Sebastian Thrun. Visit his webpage to get a huge amount of information (some technical background needed).

The day we completely solve the SLAM problem, we will see robots everywhere. An autonomous robot will be able to know where it is, and to recognise some elements in the environment necesaries to achieve it´s goals.