James and I stopped by last week to check out the what members were doing at Microcontroller Mondays! We talked to several people working on cool projects. Pictures below you can see someone knitting. You might wonder, as we did, what that has to do with microcontrollers. They are actually working on a piece of installation art where the piece of knit will be controlled by the microcontroller.
As you can see, we love having visitors at the space. Dale Dougherty (pictured on right), the founder and general manager of Maker Media division of O’Reilly Media, Inc., and Gareth Branwyn, Editor in Chief: Make Online, stopped by the space on October 18th for a surprise inspection. Both were impressed by what they saw. That is all.
On Monday, October 3 we had the opportunity to welcome a couple of guests from Xin Che Jian, a hackerspace in Shanghai, China. Min (left) and Ricky (right) stopped by to see our space as part of their North American East Coast Hackerspaces Tour. (That’s me, Alli, in the middle.) I asked Min and Ricky about their projects. They are doing amazing things over there including urban farming, roboracing, and of course microcontrollers. Check out their projects here.
Learn about robots! The University of Maryland is hosting its second Maryland Robotics Day. The event will showcase the wide range of robotics research taking place in the Maryland Robotics Center.
You’ll see research in:
-Collaborative, Cooperative, Networked Robotics
-Medical Robotics
-Miniature Robotics
-Robotics for Extreme Environments
-Unmanned Vehicles
Registration is required by September 7, 2011. Registration is free but
needed to plan for parking and box lunches. Your day will begin on campus in College Park, Md., at 10 a.m. You’ll learn about the Maryland Robotics
Center, hear a keynote address by a robotics industry expert, visit the
university’s robotics labs and see demonstrations of our robots in action.
There will be plenty of time to speak with robotics faculty, students and
researchers about their research, and explore future collaborations. You can register here.
Read about last year’s Maryland Robotics Day here!
When: Friday, September 9, 2011, 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.
Where: A. James Clark School of Engineering, University of Maryland
Interested in Artificial Intelligence? Should that even be a question? Stanford is offering their Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class online for free this fall! Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig will be teaching the class. Thrun is a Research Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, a Google Fellow, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the German Academy of Sciences. Norvig is Director of Research at Google Inc. He is also a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery.
HacDC members have been thinking about starting a study group for the class at the space. If you’re interested in studying with us, we set up a doodle poll to pick a time.
For more details on what the class covers, check out the syllabus.