iRobot

Was at the Lifelong Learning Institute this afternoon for the SkillsFuture Festival 2018, a month-long event organized by SkillsFuture Singapore, aimed at inspiring citizens to develop a passion for learning and pursue skills mastery. There were plenty of activities going on there but what caught my eyes was this particular SG social robot at one of the booths:

Meet Edgar version 2, a robot with the ability to ad-lib, i.e. come up with his own responses to questions posed at him. Its maker, Dr Wong Choon Yue, is a research fellow at the Nanyang Technological University's (NTU) School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Edgar is more than just a robot avatar; with his in-built sensors to detect human facial expressions and gestures, voice recognition and knowledge database, he is able to engage living people for autonomous and intelligent interactions.

What he lacks now is realistic facial feedback but it probably should not be long before he gets one in the next model. That's kind of exciting and scary at the same time!

0x90 - Riding the NOP sled since 1998

There was this guy who bought my first full-colored PCB-RE book and left a book review on his blog, with the name as title above. Here is a small snapshot:

Those interested to read the whole article, please click here.

After reading his review, I wrote him an email expressing my appreciation and informed him that I was in the works of coming out with a sequel that would address his concerns. That got him excited and wrote another post, New Book Cooking. You can read it here.

Recently, I was surprise to receive an email from him out of the blue. Evidently, he had bought my second book PCB-RE: Tools & Techniques, and was totally happy with the topics covered that he decided to write a good review on it.

Well, I'm keeping my fingers crossed... ;)