The Hackerspace Movement: Mitch Altman at TEDxBrussels

Hi! Following my previous post about the eLab Makerspace Today I'm just going to share a video that I saw today and honestly think that everyone who loves learning, making, tinkering, should see (and everyone who doesn't should see it too!). It's a video about the history of Hackerspaces and the Maker movement that includes some valuable lessons about hacking yourself, about changing your life to do what you love. Some other messages rely on making ideas come true and how it is possible to make the "impossible" with only a few resources and a big "go for it" mentality. Basically it all comes down to three words: "Teaching. Learning. Sharing.".

Hope you liked it as much as I did! :)

Take care!

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The birth of eLab Hackerspace

Hi! Today I'll let you know about a Hackerspace that I have founded together with my friends João Duarte, Goncalo Pereira, Fábio Martins and Hugo Santos in September of 2011 inside the University of the Algarve. The electronics engineering department had been providing a room for students to do their projects for a few years but it had never got much use.

It all started with the Electronics Club some years ago which was founded by my friend Zé Luis (currently doing some cool stuff at his company, Metalideia) and some of his friends. After some years it changed name twice and became NEEST, then NOISE, but unfortunately only the names were changing and not much was being done, except keeping it "alive", which was also important. Otherwise the room would have been lost. We had been talking about how the space wasn't being properly used for a while and then we finally decided to go ahead and turn it into a real Hackerspace, eLab. As far as we know it's the first Hackerspace hosted inside a university in Portugal, having great benefits like free space, free internet and free electricity. Also, sometimes we get to borrow some tools from the electronics engineering department which is always handy.

We began by meeting once every week to clean everything, scavenge components from all the electronic devices that had been gathered throughout the years, put some shelves on the walls, organize all the components and tools and take out the trash.

(Click the photo for better resolution in Picasa Photostream)

Then we had to make the Hackerspace rules, so that everyone can use the space in harmony.

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Pictobrowser, a great slideshow for Flickr and Picasa

Hi! When I was setting up this new version of "the BiT Bang Theory blog" in Blogger I had to make some choices. One of them was which free image hosting to use, Picasa Web Albums or Flickr? I ended up choosing Picasa Web Albums (if you're wondering why, check the link). With this choice, I had to make another one: which slideshow should I use? Well, I could just use the slideshows from Picasa but, honestly, they look very ugly and do not fit into the blog's color scheme. They should have added some options to customize them. After some searching through the web I found two slideshows that I really liked. The one I liked the most is the one featured on the title of this post: Pictobrowser.

(Click the photo for better resolution in Picasa Photostream)

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New Publication: Multi-scale cortical keypoints for realtime hand tracking and gesture recognition

Hi! This post is just to let you know that there is a new publication in the Publications page named Multi-scale cortical keypoints for realtime hand tracking and gesture recognition. It was presented in the 1st International Workshop on Cognitive Assistive Systems: closing the Action-Perception Loop, held in conjunction with IROS2012.

(Click the photo for better resolution in Picasa Photostream)

Here's the abstract:

"Human-robot interaction is an interdisciplinary research area which aims at integrating human factors, cognitive psychology and robot technology. The ultimate goal is the development of social robots. These robots are expected to work in human environments, and to understand behavior of persons through gestures and body movements. In this paper we present a biological and realtime framework for detecting and tracking hands. This framework is based on keypoints extracted from cortical V1 end-stopped cells. Detected keypoints and the cells’ responses are used to classify the junction type. By combining annotated keypoints in a hierarchical, multi-scale tree structure, moving and deformable hands can be segregated, their movements can be obtained, and they can be tracked over time. By using hand templates with keypoints at only two scales, a hand’s gestures can be recognized."

If you wish you can download it in the Publications page or just click here.

Take care! :)

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Did you find this post helpful? Do you wish to contribute to other projects regarding computer science, electronics, robotics or mechatronics that will be posted in this blog? If you wish to do so, you can donate via paypal using the button below. Thanks! :)