Hi, I’m Anthony Francis, and I teach robots to learn, particularly deep reinforcement learning for robot navigation as well as the intersection of memory, emotion, and planning for contextual control. …
SO! I love to write, and four of my novels are published – FROST MOON, BLOOD ROCK, LIQUID FIRE, about magical tattoo artist Dakota Frost, and JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE…
So I read a lot and write a lot and occasionally edit what I write and even more rarely, something gets sent to an editor and turned into a publication.…
“Robots in Montreal,” eh? Sounds like the title of a Steven Moffat Doctor Who episode. But it’s really ICRA 2019 – the IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation, and, yes,…
So, this happened! Our team’s paper on “PRM-RL” – a way to teach robots to navigate their worlds which combines human-designed algorithms that use roadmaps with deep-learned algorithms to control…
SO! There I was, trying to solve the mysteries of the universe, learn about deep learning, and teach myself enough puzzle logic to create credible puzzles for the Cinnamon Frost…
Wow, it’s already here – my flash fiction short story “One Day Your Strength Will Fail” is about to appear in the very first issue of the Bay Area’s new…
Wow. After nearly 21 years, my first published short story, “Sibling Rivalry”, is returning to print. Originally an experiment to try out an idea I wanted to use for a…
Why yes, I’m running a deep learning system on a MacBook Air. Why?
Yep, that’s Python consuming almost 300% of my CPU – guess what, I guess that means this machine has four processing cores, since I saw it hit over 300% –…
(Self-deprecating note: this blogpost is a rough draft of an essay that I’m later planning to refine for the Write to the End site, but I’ve been asked to share…
Let me completely up front about my motivation for writing this post: recently, I came across a paper which was similar to the work in my PhD thesis, but applied…
In many ways, Howard Philips Lovecraft and Jorge Luis Borges are different. Howard Philips Lovecraft wrote dark, atmospheric American horror at the dawn of the twentieth century. Jorge Luis Borges,…
Worldcon is over, and people are now returning to their lives. I've got a day and a half here to enjoy Seattle, but the funny thing is, right now I'm in the same hotel bar where the above die-hards were closing out Worldcon last night - it's got a great high-top table at the window, which is great for writing.
Which I need to do, after reading more of Dwight Swain's Techniques of the Selling Writer over breakfast. You'd think I'd have finished this book given that I lecture on Swain, but I got introduced to him through his audio lectures, so the lead up to my Worldcon talk was my first time to go through this book cover to cover, and even then I focused on the scene-and-sequel stuff that I was discussing. His discussion of openings - focusing on where, what's going on, and to whom, with what conflict, expressed with showing through immediate action - got my brain thinking about how to rework the opening of WATCHTOWER OF DESTINY. My room's being cleaned, so I decided to sit down and write my notes on these ideas right now.
Even though I'm a night owl, sometimes it's good to start the day with food for body and mind.
It can inspire you.
-the Centaur
Pictured: The Fountain bar last night, the Fountain bar this morning, and yet another breakfast at Alder and Ash - smoked salmon omelet, dry toast and fresh fruit.
So! Worldcon 2025 is at an end! And what a wild blast it was. I enjoyed the previous Worldcon I attended in San Jose, but I wasn't really prepared to take advantage of it. This year, I couldn't swing a sonic screwdriver without bapping a friend or colleague, or without making a new business or academic contact. I credit at least some of that to the prepwork that I and the Thinking Ink Press team did, and at least some of it to having the Clockwork Alchemy / Milford Workshop table as a "home base" to go back to.
After the Hugos, the Fountain bar at the Sheraton was so packed they couldn't even take my order before close, but I wanted to get more writing done, and I was just up the street last year for CVPR 2024, so I remembered the Elephant and Castle bar, right up the street, open until 2. I got a goodly chunk of THE WATCHTOWER OF DESTINY done right here in the table in the center, until roughly 1am.
BUT! Even as a night owl, I understand the value of early to bed, early to rise, and to convince myself to do that, I try to get up for a hearty breakfast. I don't always make it, but I made it today. The TIP gang has been keeping tabs of each other on Signal, and so my colleague Liza Olmsted and I realized we were at the same restaurant, got together (as I was starting my breakfast and she was finishing hers) and during our discussions came up with the idea for a brand new anthology! Woohoo.
The simple expedient of bringing Clockwork Edgar (Sandra's messenger raven) attracted a lot of people to the Clockwork Alchemy table, and the backstory Sandra had built around Edgar's messenger bag (complete with spare gear, compass, message and a few other items) was very entertaining.
After a neurodivergence talk at noon, which was very productive for me and Liza, I returned to the show floor to close up and found that we had two more hours before close due to a typo in an email. So, I had one last chance to attend a talk by my new friend Dr. Paul Price, who lectured on "exponential plots" (think Goku getting more and more powerful in Dragon Ball Z) with a strongly evidence-based lecture built on a close read of old space opera.
Paul showed that cyclical (episodic) plots work well with no-growth (think Sherlock Holmes versus case of the week) or slow-growth plots (think a slowly learning protagonist) but can get out of hand if a ridiculous enemy attacks every week with a similarly ridiculous growth in the protagonist's power - nevertheless, if you build in humanizing elements from the start, it can still work.
The coolest thing in his lecture was his critique of gender roles in the old space operas - I don't remember the precise numbers, but the gist was, in an entire space opera series by John Campbell, there were 25 instances of the pronoun "she" - but 18 of those referred to a ship, 6 to love interests, and the remaining was a stenographer who was alien, but was nevertheless depicted in a stereotypical gender role.
After that, we did close, and even as we did so, I kept on making contacts, meeting people, and so on. Even trying to buy a last-minute gift from a friend ended up with a vendor taking my card and inquiring about my writing as they were a voracious reader and were interested in my series.
Paul and I, who just met, nevertheless found many similarities in our research styles, and got together tonight to discuss next steps on using his data in our corpus or our code to analyze his data. A laser-guided question from an audience member at my talk got me thinking about DEI issues with our corpus, and Paul's "usages of the pronoun she" analysis sounds like a perfect candidate for implementation by an LLM.
On the way back, we had an interesting conversation about religion, mortality, transhumanism, the weird giant statue we saw in front of an art museum, and the crowd of filkers still filking away in the hotel when we finally got back.
I ended up retiring to the hotel bar - which I interpreted as the right thing to do because on my way down there I ran into someone I had wanted to run into at the con but had only passed and waved. We had a great conversation, and I got a lot of work done at the hotel bar before closing it up.
On that note, that's a wrap for Worldcon 2025. I may have more to say about it ... but it's gonna have to be tomorrow.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Me at the photo booth, the courtyard of Elephant and Castle, fresh fruit for breakfast, Edgar the clockwork raven, Paul giving his talk at the academic track, packing up our booth at the con, a giant statue on the street, a giant crowd of filkers, and me and a giant tray of oysters - all rendered with my "make it look like an illustration" series of Photoshop filters.
Well, we made it through WorldCon Day 4! My talk apparently went well, as I was mobbed when it was over and a half-dozen people actually dropped by the poster session - some of them, interested in serious academic followup! And one guy said, "Your talk was the fastest thirty minutes of my life. I loved it."
Mission accomplished!
The Clockwork Alchemy contingent finally arrived in force, so we at last had a proper table setup!
So I got to head out to see the show floor, which was pretty amazing! There was a Star Trek Jack Skellington, holding what appears to be either a Babylon 5 Shadow Ship or a modified Klingon batleth sword.
There were too many cool things for this post, but, I always have time for ... robots!
Sonic screwdrivers!
Wand duels!
Our books continuing to sell! (The stack isn't shorter, but we've been replenishing it)
Later that night I attended the Hugo ceremony, which was pretty awesome, with singing by Nisi Shawl that is still echoing in my head because they did it as a "bit" between the different presentations ("Down, down, down the Hugo road ...) and a really funny video bit from the actual Hugo Best Novel winner.
Afterwards, some of the award winners came to the Fountain bar in the Sheraton for a victory lap!
I also got to see a lot of friends at the con. All in all, a pretty good day!
-the Centaur
Pictured: The fan tables, me at my poster, Sandra Forrer talking to a steampunk fan, our table, the giant Jack Skellington in a Next Generation uniform, a youth robot team, a sonic screwdriver collection, a LARP wand duel, the Neurodiversiverse at the Liminal Fiction table, the Hugos, and the hotel afterparty.
Not a lot of pictures from today proper because our Friday volunteer had an unexpectedly rough trip in, and I'm again stuck at the Clockwork Alchemy / Milford Workshop table:
But the costumes have been great! I've seen a fair bit of Oz this year ...
Some Star Trek / Steampunk riffs:
And whatever these folks sitting at the far table are:
My buddy RM Ambrose gave a good talk on framework for discussing violence and nonviolence in fiction:
I have even finished a rough cut of Saturday's presentation, and despite the fact that it is +110 plus slides, because many of my slides are sequences that add elements to existing slides, there are only like 30-40 content slides, and I was consistently able to get through it in ~20 minutes, well under time.
Don't you think he looks a little tired?
-the Centaur
Pictured: The WorldCon Bar, our table, various costumes, Ralph's talk, my slides, and the Centaur, sleepy.
Day Two of Worldcon! And The Neurodiversiverse is already selling out at Liminal Fiction! (Apparently someone mentioned it at a panel!) But if you want forty-plus hopeful, empowering own-voices stories of neurodivergent people encountering aliens, conveniently packaged with poetry and art in an award-winning anthology, please drop by their booth and buy up the rest of their stock of the NDV!
We still don't have a fully staffed table as some people couldn't make it to the con (one, yesterday, held up when their train stopped while the police resolved an active shooter situation (!)). But I am getting work done on my presentation for Saturday (and on my blogging!)
Some great costumes and t-shirts this year, even though traffic near the CA/Milford booth is a bit thin.
I particularly liked this Oz guardsman!
Also met many authors and friends of authors I know. And, at breakfast at Alder and Ash this morning, I got in line at the host stand, only for the guy in front of me to step aside and say "Sorry! Still waiting for my party to arrive." I was seated promptly ... and then, moments later, the guy saw the woman sitting at the table next to me and joined her, saying "You were seated at the only table I couldn't see from the door. THEN this random dude starts mentioning that The Shattering Peace was doing well and discussing panels, and a quick glance confirmed it was John Scalzi, my favorite blogger, who apparently also writes books or something, which some of you may have heard of, discussing publishing with someone in the industry.
I let them eat, and finished my delicious breakfast so I could staff the table.
-the Centaur
Pictured: NDV at the Liminal Fiction booth, the booth itself, the view from the CA/Milford table, a t-shirt, an Oz guardian costume, and breakfast at Alder and Ash (with John Scalzi just outside the frame to the right).
SO! We're out at Worldcon. I've already run into fellow TIPster Betsy Miller, author Clara Ward, and several other folks who either knew me or I knew them.
Today and tomorrow I am volunteering at the Clockwork Alchemy / Milford Workshop joint table! Compared to the GeekGirlCon and LARP booths around us, our table display is a little underwhelming as a lot of the Milford and Clockwork contingent either couldn't make it or were delayed. So we just have the brochures and stands I could fit in my suitcase, which was a fair trick as I brought 30 books to the Book Nook!
I'll be signing there today at 3pm. Then on Saturday at 11, I'll be in Room 320 presenting on "The Cognitive Science of Scenes and Sequels," joint work with my colleague Kenneth Moorman of Transylvania University. The poster session will be from 12-1 on the fourth floor Paramount Lounge:
I hope to see you there! You'd appear somewhere in the image below ...
-the Centaur
Pictured: Some Daleks and the TARDIS, the Clockwork Alchemy / Milford shared table, my book at the Book Nook, my poster up at the Paramount Lounge, and the view behind the table.
This series began because I was recruited by my church board to pinch hit while our leader was busy. In more detail if you need it, the Vestry (the church board) of Saint Stephens-in-the-Field Episcopal Church (the church right up the street from my house in San Jose, and on whose board I still sit) asked its Vestry members to contribute "reflections" to our church newsletter (the Friday Journal) while our leader (Janet, the "Senior Warden") was busy teaching summer swimming classes.
SO! I wrote some things. And, now, present them to you! Please enjoy these thinkerly ruminations ...
A Red-Letter Reading from a Red-Letter Bible
This June began with a red-letter day: June 1st, the Seventh Sunday of Easter … where the entire Gospel reading would have been printed in red in a “red-letter” Bible.
In a movie, that red text would be foreshadowing: Sunday’s Gospel was Jesus’s farewell address to his disciples, immediately prior to his arrest and execution. And perhaps that red text is foreshadowing for us as well, as all of us will face trials and tribulations in our lives.
But in a Bible, that red text draws our attention to Jesus’s words. And Jesus’s farewell draws our attention not to trials and tribulations, but to love. Jesus reveals the Father’s name so that the Father’s love for Jesus may live in his disciples, and the disciples may live in Jesus.
I inherited my red-letter Bible from my parents. It’s a big, heavy Catholic Bible, with a somewhat intimidating picture of Pope Paul VI staring intently out of the frontispiece, and is copyrighted the year after my birth, so I often like to think that my parents probably bought this Bible for me.
But they forgot to fill in the page titled “This Bible Is Presented To,” and I like to think that’s another kind of foreshadowing. The Bible is presented to everyone, and its red letter text draws our attention to the words of Jesus, which culminate in a message of love in the face of death.
Earlier in the readings, Paul is jailed for curing a woman of demonic possession, then sings hymns to his fellow prisoners. When an earthquake frees them, the jailor is so distressed he wants to kill himself; but rather than escape, Paul ministers to the jailor so he can be saved.
We often think we need to rescue ourselves from the situations we find ourselves in. But the Psalm in Sunday’s reading reminds us that God saves his faithful from the wicked … and Paul reminds us that God can even help us save the wicked from themselves, with God’s help.
In this world, we all face trials and tribulations. But Jesus’s red-letter words help us focus on what’s important: not our immediate challenges, but our relationships with each other, and how those relationships should be not aligned with the world, but in mutual love guided by God.
-Anthony
Pictured: The third edition of the New Oxford Annotated Bible, which is my favorite Bible, even though it is not the version of the Bible that my parents got me as a kid. But I'd rather post this post with a related, if not completely on-point image, than wait for a picture of the right Bible, which, no sacrilege intended, only God knows when I would actually get around to taking.
Hey folks! I'll be attending WorldCon as part of the Academic Track! My presentation is on "The Cognitive Science of Scenes and Sequels" - an exploration of the real science behind writing teacher Dwight Swain's theory that you should write stories in action scenes followed by reaction sequels - and will be held Saturday, August 16th, at 11am, with a poster session in the Paramount Lounge from 12-1:
Many of my colleagues will also be there - Liza Olmsted and Betsy Miller of Thinking Ink, and our Neurodiversiverse authors Clara Ward (author of Be the Sea) and Cat Rambo (author of You Sexy Thing). Fellow Taos Toolbox alumnus RM Ambrose, editor of Vital: The Future of Healthcare will also be on a panel.
I'm working on a paper on "The Cognitive Science of Scenes and Sequels" with my friend Kenny Moorman. We're attempting to harmonize "scenes and sequels" from professional writing craft with the findings of the cognitive science of story understanding ... and I'm presenting it at WorldCon in a little over a week.
It's been slow going due to the amount of research involved---at least seven narrative disciplines affect our work, and relevant papers and projects go back fifty years---not to mention my periodic struggles with writer's block whenever I switch projects (as two other writing deadlines are overlapping this one).
SO! I've been working on the paper a lot of late, scribbling on printouts over coffee, then editing over dinner, staying up late at night to harmonize details. And I was plugging away at the "WC:AD" (WorldCon ACademic) paper when I hit a new section my collaborator had added on "the Lorentzian Argument."
Huh, I thought, I've been working on general relativity, where Lorentzian metrics show up; I wonder if this is the same Lorentz? Surely, I thought, I could take a stab at the section. Then I saw Kenny had moved the section on "Implications for the Transgender Narrative" to just after "The Lorentzian Argument."
He'd done so on purpose. There were notes there. There was a deep connection between them.
I realized there was no way I could fill out this section; I had to move on.
Then I woke up.
-Anthony
Pictured: Working on WC:AD at Monterey by the Mall. I wonder if the strength of the margarita has any effect on the bizarreness of the dreams?
P.S. In case it wasn't clear, our paper doesn't have implications for the transgender narrative, nor is there a Lorentzian argument in narrative theory---at least, that I am aware of. My brain made it all up probably because I'm also studying general relativity and transgender issues in the background for other projects.
Whew! What a few months it's been. I've been so busy I haven't even had time to publicize some of the stuff that I'd naturally use this blog for (like the Embodied AI Workshop). But, we're through most of that now. And the most important thing is completing my 42nd successful Nanowrimo challenge!
The Nanowrimo organization imploded this year, but the challenges roll on - and for me, this year, it was working out the complicated plot of JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE WATCHTOWER OF DESTINY. Finding out what the Watchtower really was and what the bad guys were up to was hard enough, but weaving into the plot all the threads of inspiration that led to the story was ... quite the challenge. But I got there.
Still, it led to another blood-in-the-water month, which felt pretty bad, but which (after I fixed a bug in my tracking system) doesn't appear to have been too much worse than other bad months: other than a few blips around the 22nd to the 24th, it seems to have been slow but within the envelope:
And, oh great, images are doing something weird again. Joy. Okay, that seems to be fixed. But I will say, this month felt like the research required on this novel was much greater than normal. No matter! I finished! Oh yes, the traditional excerpt. Sometimes we're our own worst critic:
“What an untapped well of self-loathing I have discovered,” Jeremiah wondered. “Yes, I’m a thirty-two year old three-star general and award-winning athlete, and that’s exceptional. But I’ve cracked my skull, broken my arm, even broken my back through my own carelessness—”
“Oh, the hard life,” Firamiah scoffed, “of the decorated veteran—”
“—and, also, I’ve been exiled, dismissed, even temporarily blinded, because I’m such a whiny Cassandra,” Jeremiah said. “I don’t understand how I rub people so the wrong way that they’d rather stand on their heads than help me fight a monster standing in the very room—”
“Ever consider,” Firamiah barked, “it’s because that smug, annoying smirk of yours annoys people so much that they want to punch you straight in your smug, punchable face?”
Firamiah got nose to nose with Jeremiah in a roaring display of righteous flame.
“If you’re quite done browbeating me,” Jeremiah said stiffly, “please get on with delivering your nodes of the directed acyclic graph, so I can connect the dots and get your self-righteous, unfortunately not-punchable face out of my suitably-chastened, yet still-punchable one.”
Anyway, no celebratory dinner yet: time to move on to the two scientific papers I need to finish editing, one due tomorrow, one due in a week.
I'm a pack rat, and this tendency isn't helped by being an omnivorous author and researcher with a broad range of interests - nor is it helped by my tendency to let piles just pile up while I rabbithole on whatever major project I am working on at my primary work. But I'm between contracts right now, I survived the trio of ICRA-ConCarolinas-CVPR, and my wife's mother is moved into her new home, so I don't really have an excuse not to go through the piles and try to return them to some semblance of order.
Also, I'm tripping over stuff.
Now, I don't throw away things because other people want me to: I throw away things when I've decided to. Because my interests are, um, broad, and the projects I use to tackle these interests are even broader, I have a vast number of project folders and project stacks. But a stack isn't a pile: a stack is an organized collection of items of interest that enables you to make intellectual progress on a project, like the "storytelling and the sciences of mind" and "creative endurance" stacks I have to my left, the "mental models and explanation patterns" stack in front of me, and the "taido and jeet kune do" stack I have to my right.
A pile is something different - it's the detritus of "company's coming over and I gotta clear off this table" or "I need space to work on this important thing so these other projects gotta go on hold". Like the "robotics consulting" pile in front of me. It's not about robotics consulting. That's just the top action item on the pile. Below it are my theological studies folder, some bills, some items to file, Thinking Ink Press stuff, and more theology, which it looks like I put in the pile for this week's Saint Stephens in-the-Field Friday Journal entry that I have already written and submitted two days ago. It's a mess.
More specifically, a pile is a stack-like mess that hides its information and actionable content. You can't tell what you need to do to a pile just by looking at it the way you can a stack or a folder. (Folders are also dangerous for a similar reason if you're not strict about what you put into them, but that's a problem for another day). And so, the reason that I don't throw piles away without processing them is that it's all too easy to not realize what's in a pile, and to lose an opportunity - or even money - by chucking it prematurely. In the piles in the banner image, I found roughly $50 bucks in foreign currency and a stack of gift cards.
The rest was easy. 80% of that just needed to be filed (a less pack-ratty person would throw some of this stuff away, of course, but I genuinely enjoy reminiscing over keepsakes from old trips, especially abroad). 10% could be thrown away or recycled immediately. And only 10% or so were actually actionable items.
I learned a lot about my own past going through these piles. I recalled things I did, places I'd been, stores that had closed, people I talked to but had fallen out of contact with, people who had retired or died. The pile processing worked both against me and for me; there were a handful of "action" items that dated back to the last millennium, which was great to harvest for keepsakes, but meant that there literally were several inches of that particular pile that had repeatedly gone through a "company's coming, better move this aside" cycle over literal decades, yielding a stack that mostly just needed to be recycled or trashed.
There's a value to throwing stuff away. It keeps your environment clean so you can feel good about your space and focus on what's important. But if you're a pack-rat person, it's really important to make sure that the stuff you have around you are actual stacks and folders of actionable stuff, and not piles that have been piling on top of each other since the last millennium.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Remains of a pile spread across the kitchen table, exploded into stuff that will be filed into topical binders or trashed; and the sorted remains of the same pile spread over the nearby builtins, ready to be filed into my filing system (or trashed). Now I kinda wish I had also taken a picture of the pile itself ...
... when you're a publisher and you get a book proposal that makes you feel: "This is an important book and I want to publish it." No more details for now - don't count your chickens before they're hatched, and all that - but that feeling, I just wanted to share.
-the Centaur
Pictured: my portable office, with said book proposal on display, and a nice pair of drinks at Brixx. Full disclosure: I had made that decision about the book before the drink arrived. ;-)
Speaking as a technically-oriented software engineer who's built some pretty crappy interfaces in my day, it continues to surprise me that people build interfaces without thinking through how people will use them.
For example, Panera Bread has a "you pick two" order, where you can get two half-orders of a sandwich, salad or soup, along with a side like bread, chips or fruit. One would naturally think that the interface where the cashiers would enter your order would allow you to specify the two halves, then the side. Logical, yes?
But if you order that way, the cashiers often seem a little thrown off. And if you give your order slowly - rather than just rattle it off because you've probably ordered it a thousand times at this point - they'll ask a stereotyped series of questions which I impute are being presented in this order by the interface:
(1) Is this for here or to go?
(2) What do you want on your You Pick Two?
(3) Would you like anything to drink?
(4) What do you want as your side?
Now, note that a You Pick Two doesn't come with a drink (like Captain D's or Chic-Fil-A's value meals). So the interface. The drink isn't part of the You Pick Two order. Yet if you try to specify your side, the cashiers will have to do a little fiddling in the interface. It's easier just to present information in the order above:
"(1) This is for here. (2) I'd like a You Pick Two, with (2a) a Bacon Turkey Bravo and (2b) a Strawberry Poppyseed (2b1) with Chicken Salad. (3) I'll take a large beverage. (4) Bread as the side. (5) [wait 5 seconds] I don't need the cup - I already have a to-go cup, I just need to pay for the drink."
Note that in (2b1), even though the Strawberry Poppyseed salad normally has chicken on it, if you don't specifically emphasize the fact that it has chicken, sometimes they'll ask if you want to leave it off, and in (5) you have to wait 5 seconds for them to complete the order, or they may delete the drink.
[Why insist on paying for the drink? Because I eat out a lot, and use insulated to-go cups to save on the waste of buying and discarding a cup once or twice a day. But once I was at Panera in Campbell and the Panera district manager complained to me that if I was using a to-go mug I should be paying for my drink. I insisted that I did and showed my receipt ... and found the cashier had taken the drink off the order without telling me. The manager took my word for it, but it made me feel both embarrassed and unwelcome, which is not why I go out to eat - I have work to do, damn it, and need to do my reading in a place where I can't be distracted by doing laundry or whatever - so I always insist on paying for my drink.]
Anyhoo, weirdness of interfaces can be found everywhere. Just today, I was trying to log into a website, and the website authors had put the login button in a popup that disappeared when you hovered over it. Presumably it was meant to go away if you didn't click on it, but the actual effect was, you couldn't log in on the company's home page and had to hunt through pages to find a login button that was a real button.
As another example, the interface for AT&T's voicemail in my area recently changed. Instead of saying "end of message" and giving you an opportunity to delete a message, it just goes straight to "saving message", which means if you got a spam call which hung up rapidly - and silently - there's no way to delete the message before it gets saved. If you try, it will delete the next message in your messages. So this "update" is strictly worse than the previous interface, making you hear each message a minimum of twice.
So, I guess what I'm trying to say here is, don't fall in love with your new interface before thinking through - and testing out - how people will actually use it, OR, as we used to say back in my day:
Still not running at full thrusters, but my wife and I did go see Rainbow Kitten Surprise at the nearby CCNB Amphitheatre at Simpsonville's Heritage Park. They were good! Sandi's description made me think they'd be more electronic dance music, but actually they reminded me more of prog rock viewed through an indie lens, with surprising influences from both rap and metal - four, sometimes five guitars were on stage at any one time, and the lead singer memorably rocked a day-glo electric guitar for one number. The opening band was also memorable - Michael Marcagi, a good singer whose band was pretty tight.
The best part was the company, of course.
Moments. Seize them when you've got them. Because one day, they'll run out.
Hey folks, I will be at Con Carolinas this weekend. This year I'm on four panels: "Playing with AI", "Science Fiction, Science Fact, Science Future", "Neurodiversity in Science", and "There and Back Again: A Doctor Who Tale". I'll be moderating the AI and neurodiversity panels (natch?) and the full skinny is below:
Please come join us in Charlotte for a very writer-friendly, fan-friendly convention at the Hilton!
Or we'll send the cow catcher your way.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Events from Con Carolinas 2024, since my time machine is on the fritz, along with a screencap of my schedule, because I'm too lazy^H^H^H^Hout of time to cut-and-paste it and reformat it, much less type it all in if the PDF ends up being persnickety.
The final session of the Advances in Social Robot Navigation Workshop at ICRA 2025 is happening NOW. It's been a great conference so far, with lots of great talks and debate ...
Even though there's no-one in the row in front of me, we've had 50-60 people in person or online all day:
More on the workshop later ... back to taking notes now!
Lots of great social navigation work this conference ... we are really seeing some advances. Even in the proliferation of form factors, some of which you can see above, such as the base with humanoid, looks like it will help social robotics. More and cheaper robots - and more varied form factors - should make it easier to find the right robot for the job.
Onward! Three or four more sessions of talks, and then it's the workshop ...
-the Centaur
Pictured: The room our workshop will be held in, and two robots "shaking hands".
Due to a snafu with the way the date and time were programmed into OpenReview, and having NOTHING AT ALL to do with us getting slightly fewer papers than we wanted (well, actually ....) we have extended the deadline for the Embodied AI Workshop's Call for Papers to Friday, May 23rd, AOE (Anywhere on Earth):
Please submit your 2-page extended abstracts on embodied AI, especially related to this year's themes of Embodied AI Solutions, Advances in Simulation, Generative Methods for Embodied AI, and Foundation Models for Embodied AI!
SO! I'm at ICRA, the big robotics conference (okay, okay, ONE of the big robotics conferences, the others being IROS and RSS) and I would be remiss if I didn't point out that our workshop, "Advances in Social Robot Navigation: Planning, HRI and Beyond" will be held this Friday, May 23rd!
Building on our successful series of workshops at ICRA'22, IROS'23, and RSS'24, as well as the Social Navigation Symposium, the AISRN workshop aims to investigate key aspects that make robot navigation more acceptable, legible, and social. It's been a great year for social navigation at ICRA; come join us!
