Jibo is dead (again)

In 2020 I recorded a podcast episode entitled “Why do all social robots fail in the market?“. I interviewed Tomas Concha from NTT Disruption, the company that had bought the commercially unsuccessful robot Jibo. I already had my doubts about NTT Disruption in 2020. In 2023 NTT Disruption was disrupted. Meaning that it closed down and with it Jibo. This does seem to be the end for this little useless robot.

But don’t worry! Other companies continue to build largely useless robots that are not much more than smartphones on wheels. Have a look at Samsung’s Ballie robot.

The idea of a smart home robot is not new. Amazon developed their Astro robot, but did not sell it to the general public. LG is also presenting a robot at CES2024 with roughly the same features.

I wonder if Samsung or LG will sell their robots to consumers. Or is this just another robot PR gag?

Posters of famous computer scientists

There are many important computer scientists and innovators. I created a small and very personal list and created posters to honour their contributions.

computer-scientists-posters

Beautiful options for creating PDFs with LaTeX

Adobe’s PDF format has become a standard for the exchange of beautiful documents. Let’s start with some less obvious options for the meta data of PDF documents. These are important for search engines, both online and locally, to correctly index your document. It can dramatically improve the ranking of your documents.

Acrobat knows title, author, subject and keywords to describe your document:

In LaTeX, these options can be set using the popular hyperref package. I barely create any LaTeX project without it. You can setup the meta data for the PDF document with pdftitle, pdfauthor, pdfsubject and pdfkeywords:

\usepackage{hyperref}
\hypersetup{
    pdftitle={Swim Training Patterns},
    pdfauthor={Christoph Bartneck},
    pdfsubject={Exercise your body and mind.},
    pdfkeywords={swimming, XML, language, program, training},
    pdfpagemode={UseOutlines},
    pdfcenterwindow={true},
    pdfdisplaydoctitle={true},
    pdffitwindow={true},
    pdfpagelayout={SinglePage},
    pdfstartview={Fit},    
    pdflang={en-US},    
}

Acrobat also offers options for how PDFs are displayed when first opened:

Important options here are the presence of the bookmarks. These will be based on the headlines used in your LaTeX code (pdfpagemode). I normally use a single page for the layout (pdfpagelayout) that is fitted to the screen (pdfstartview). The enclosing window can be resized to the initial page (pdffitwindow) and centred on the screen (pdfcenterwindow). Last, it makes sense to use the document title for the window title instead of the file name (pdfdisplaydoctitle).

If you set all these parameters, you get a beauatiful and functional PDF that gives a perfect first impression when the user opens it.

Overleaf supports visual tables directly

In the past, I used the TableGenerator to create tables for LaTeX. It was quick and easy to upload a CSV and then format the table. I then copied the LaTeX code to Overleaf.

Overleaf always had a macro for the generation of tables on the code level, but now they also have a visual table editor. To use it you have to switch to the Visual Editor and clicking on the three dots icons reveals the new insert table option. Similar to office applications, you can draw the number of rows and columns you want.

It is not yet possible to draw individual borders, such as horizontal lines. You can only select all or no borders. The menu does, however, announce that they are working in more border settings. TableGenerator is still ahead on this one.

You can enter data directly or copy and paste data from your spreadsheet program. You can also set the alignment of columns.

Merging cells also works already.

The complied table is clean and simple.

The resulting code is clean and correct.

\begin{table}
    \centering
    \begin{tabular}{lrr}
 & \multicolumn{2}{c}{Data}\\
         Month&  Sales& Profit\\
         January&  100& 50\\
         February&  200& 70\\
    \end{tabular}
    \caption{Test of the table feature}
    \label{tab:my_label}
\end{table}

Publishing in an HRI Journal

I just published a new HRI Podcast episode on publishing in HRI Journals. Here is the summary:

Publishing your human-robot interaction study in a journal is an excellent way to share your insights. But in which journal should you publish and what do the journals expect? In this episode, we talk to editors from the three dedicated HRI journals, Agnieszka Wykowska (International Journal of Social Robotics), Selma Sabanovic (ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction) and Bilge Mutlu (Frontiers in Robotics and AI | Human-Robot Interaction). We talk about Open Access publishing and what the future of scientific publishing might look like. Besides the three dedicated journals, there are also some journals that encourage HRI topics without focusing completely on them. I talked with Kerstin Dautenhahn from the Interaction Studies journal and Ramanarayan Vasudevan from the IEEE Transactions on Robotics.