Category: Research

iOS Just Got A Paper On Nuclear Physics Accepted At A Scientific Conference

Automatically generating scientific articles has become easy with dedicated software such as SCIgen. Even a paper that only repeated the sentence “Get me of your fucking mailing list” was recently accepted for publication. Today I received an invitation from the International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics to submit a paper. Since I have practically no knowledge of Nuclear Physics I resorted to iOS auto-complete function to help me writing the paper. I started a sentence with “Atomic” or “Nuclear” and then randomly hit the auto-complete suggestions. The text really does not make any sense. After adding the first illustration on nuclear physics from Wikipedia, some references and creating a fake identity (Iris Pear, aka Siri Apple) I submitted the paper which was accepted only three hours later! I know that iOS is a pretty good software, but reaching tenure has never been this close.

UPDATE (27/10/2016): Turns out that conference organizer, OMICS Group, is currently under federal investigation.

Here is a short demonstration on how I wrote the paper:

 

Here is the acceptance notification:

 

 

Robot Philosophy Conference 2016

I had the pleasure of giving a keynote at the Robot Philosophy Conference 2016. The people in Denmark have been very friendly and our hotel is great. It is very interesting to see Human-Robot Interaction being discussed from the perspective of philosophy. Below is the recording of my keynote:

 

 

 

Presentation at the Materials Science Engineering Congress in Darmstadt

I had a great time at the Materials Science Engineering Congress in Darmstadt on September 29 2016. I met with Frank Fischer and had some great discussions about future projects. The event was extremely well organized. Below is the recording of my keynote.

Here are some more pictures:

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Quincunx LEGO GBC Module (Galton Board)

Today I would like to show you my latest GBC module, a Quincunx also known as a Galton Board, named after its inventor Sir Francis Galton who used it to demonstrate the central limit theorem in 1894. The balls are being transported up with a conveyer belt and a light sensor counts how many balls have passed. The balls then roll down the board and at each peg they can either bounce left or right. After the last peg the ball is caught in a repository. Once 100 balls made their way down, the gate opens and releases all the balls. Probably no GBC module could deal with 100 balls at a time, so I queued them up and deliver them one at a time.

Continue reading “Quincunx LEGO GBC Module (Galton Board)”

LEGO bans large weapons from their Ideas Process

I am not sure if our study had any influence on this, but the LEGO company just updated their LEGO Ideas Policy and they now explicitly exclude submissions of large or human-scale weapons or weapon replicas of any kind, including swords, knives, guns, sci-fi or fantasy blasters, etc. This is certainly a step in the right direction.