Funny story about my name

Hu is He
By Jeff A. Benner

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Fred approached John. "Hello John, I heard you know Hebrew"? "Yes I do." replied John.

Fred: I was wondering what the Hebrew for he is?
John: Hu.
Fred: Not any one in particular, I just wanted to know what is he?
John: Hee is she.
Fred: Who?
John: No, Hu is he.
Fred: I thought you said he is she?
John: Yes, that is correct.
Fred: What is correct?
John: Hee is she.
Fred: I have no idea what you said. Who is she?
John: No, hu is he.
Fred: I dont want to know who he is, now I want to know what she is in Hebrew?
John: Hee.
Fred: He Who?
John: Yes that is correct. But, hee is she.
Fred: Who is she?
John: No, Hu is he.
Fred: Why do you keep asking me "who is he"?
John: I thought you were asking me what he is in Hebrew?
Fred: Me?
John: That is who.
Fred: Who is me?
John: No, Hu is he, mee is who.
Fred: I don't want to know who you are, I want to know who is he?
John: That is correct.
Fred: But, I have no idea what I am saying.
John: But you say it so well.
Fred: Who me?
John: Why are you asking me who he is?
Fred: No, I am asking you what is he.
John: Hee is she.
Fred: Who is she?
John: No, hu is he.
Fred: I am very lost. Me is who? Who is he? He is She?
John: Very good, you said that very well.
Fred: What did I say?
John: Mee is who, hu is he and hee is she.
Fred: Well if you must know, you are crazy, I don't know who he is and if she is a he, I sure don't want to know her?

refer from http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/19_hu.html

Impact Factors for Robotics Journals

refer to http://www.hizook.com/blog/2011/11/02/impact-factors-robotics-journals

This article is specifically for folks in academia... When writing a journal paper, targeting the right venue is an important consideration.  There are lots of factors that go into this decision: audience, prestige, historical topics of interest, turn-around time, open access, etc. Discussing all the considerations in detail is too taxing and is probably not actionable (it's too dependent on your research and goals). But I thought I'd share... I'm tracking the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) impact factors for various robotics journals.  In very general terms, the impact factors can give you a rough approximation of journal quality and help you target your publications.  You can find a historical plot of robotics journals' impact factors (along with the latest values) below.  I'll try to keep these up to date.

Update 11/3/2011: Jan Peters from TU Darmstadt's Intelligent and Autonomous Systems group also maintains a historical account of robotics (and machine learning) journals' impact factors, complete with discussion and analysis.  He also has a page that discusses AI / Machine Learning / Robotics conference quality (a pseudo-ranking).

Current Data (2010 end-of-year results, valid through 2011):

Impact Factor	Journal Name
4.095	International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR)
3.593	Journal of Field Robotics (JFR)
3.063	IEEE Transactions on Robotics (TRO)
2.187	IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine (RAM)
2.033	Autonomous Robots (AURO)
1.845	Bioinspiration and Biomimetics
1.313	Robotics and Autonomous Systems
1.254	Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing
1.032	Journal of Bionics Engineering
0.939	Robotica
0.879	International Journal of Humanoid Robotics
0.757	Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems
0.655	Industrial Robot: An International Journal
0.653	Advanced Robotics
0.326	International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems
0.206	International Journal of Robotics and Automation

Discussion:

You'll notice that some journals are not represented in this list; these are the ones listed in ISI's "robotics" category and do not include diverse fields related to robotics (eg. machine learning or computer vision).  Sometimes these other domain-specific journals may be a better fit for you work, so consider them too!

As of right now (November 2011, so 2010 end-of-year rankings), the top robotics journals by impact factor are IJRR (4.095), JFR (3.593), TRO (3.063), RAM (2.187) and AURO (2.033).  This isn't too surprising.  Drastically over-generalizing: IJRR is the dominant "theory" venue; JFR for long-term (real-world) deployments; TRO for  applications, systems, and sensing; RAM for a more general-purpose audience; and AURO for autonomous systems. Many of the journals also have "special issues" that focus on a particular topic and have blinding-fast turn-around times.  These are a great option when they're available!

Still... the robotics journals pale in comparison to  the "top" scientific publications: Science (31.377) and Nature (36.104).  Every now and again, we'll see a really nice robotics paper crack into one of these venues -- usually with a more biological bent.

But on the plus-side, it looks like robotics is generally trending up. Plus, I think a lot of momentum isn't accurately reflected in this graph.  There has been quite an uptick in publications at conferences (eg. ICRA, IROS, RSS, HRI, etc).  Much like computer science, robotics conference papers are highly-regarded on their own -- plus you get to travel!   More seriously, now that IROS / ICRA are ~15 simultaneous tracks... I don't understand why some of the major journals (particularly the IEEE ones) haven't teamed up to create a "journal" track at the conferences.  This would give researchers in more traditional fields (eg. EE, ME, BME) the best of both worlds: a journal paper to appease their home schools and a chance to present to self-selecting peers (networking and travel!).  Get on that IEEE folks!  ;-)

Anyway, this topic is particularly salient for me right now -- I'm currently writing journal paper(s) using my dissertation material.  I hope you find the data useful.  Oh yeah, I wrote a glorious python script to (semi-)automate the impact factor parsing from HTML, so this should be pretty easy to update in the future.  If this post gets out of date, just let me know!

Also here is another good website to look up the impact factor for robotic related journals.

bzr: ERROR: This tree contains left-over files from a failed operation.

When I use Bazaar and Dropbox for version control system, I encounter a problem like "bzr: ERROR: This tree contains left-over files from a failed operation." when I retry to update the repository after network is down or similar thing stopping update.

The prompted solution is to delete files in the limbo folder which is under $PathofYourCodes\.bzr\checkout\. Currently the error still stays there even if you remove the whole limbo folder. In order to fix this issue, you should remove limbo and pending_deletion at the same time as they are sort of like associated folders.

How to calculate the distance between a arbitrary point to a plane?

refer to ( http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Point-PlaneDistance.html  ) Point-Plane Distance

Given a plane (1) and a point , the normal to the plane is given by (2) and a vector from the plane to the point is given by (3) Projecting  onto  gives the distance  from the point to the plane as (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) Dropping the absolute value signs gives the signed distance, (10) which is positive if  is on the same side of the plane as the normal vector  and negative if it is on the opposite side. This can be expressed particularly conveniently for a plane specified in Hessian normal form by the simple equation (11) where  is the unit normal vector. Therefore, the distance of the plane from the origin is simply given by  (Gellert et al. 1989, p. 541). Given three points  for , 2, 3, compute the unit normal (12) Then the distance from a point  to the plane containing the three points is given by (13) where  is any of the three points. Expanding out the coordinates shows that (14) as it must since all points are in the same plane, although this is far from obvious based on the above vector equation.

Matlab symbolic math toolbox is awesome!

Here I really want to recommend the matlab symbolic math toolbox which refers to as MuPAD notebook. It is really convenient to derive formulas as well as simulate a system.

For more information, please refer to this link.

MIUI and XiaoMi Smartphone from China

http://en.miui.com/


One of Chinese smartphone developper teams releases their first Android based OS and their first generation smart phone recently, which almost sweeps the entire smartphone market in China. I will cross my finger to wish this product can bring some new ideas into mobile industry, not only from visualization level, but also communication technology side.


The following contents are from the forum of Xiaomi.


MIUI is one of the most popular Android ROMs in the world. It is based on Android 2.3, featuring better experience and richer themes. MIUI is updated every Friday based on the feedback from its test users.

Core Features

1. MIUI Desktop

Widgets and apps are displayed together on the desktop.
Long-pressing the desktop lets the user rearrange and add widgets, and organize their apps.
An app can simply be dragged to the top of the screen (where a rubbish bin will appear) to uninstall it.
There are 8 different screen transitions which can be applied at the touch of a button.

2. Smart-Dialer

The T9 Smart-dialer can search for contacts by name, by phone number, and even lists results based on how often you call them.
By default, no apps installed from the Android market can monitor users' phone activity.
Currently, there are over 200,000 phone number codes known to MIUI. These are updated frequently.

3. Messaging

A contact can be added at any time;
It is simple to send a message to an entire group;
Users can make use of websites, email addresses and phone numbers in a message simply by tapping them;
There are many pre-written messages for all occasions available to users.

4. Phonebook

Easy searching of contacts;
Simple to add a new contact;
Advanced group-management;
Users can set large images (full photos) as a contact's display image.

5. Themes and Appearance

Super-fast applying of themes;
Themes can be applied as a whole, or the user can mix and match different parts from different themes;
There are many customizable components, including the ringtone, wallpaper, and fonts.

6. Camera

Opens fast so you don't miss that photo opportunity.
A myriad of new features including Continuous shooting, Timers, special effects, and ISO adjustment.

7. Gallery

Sleek and smooth image browsing - much faster than normal Android;
Users can browse images either by album or in 'Folder-View'.

8. Music

A huge online music resource is available at the tap of a button;
Lyrics, album art, and track ID3 information can be edited right from within the app;
Gestures and shaking are supported, allowing the user to change track without looking at the screen;
Sleep mode allows the music to be switched off after a set amount of time without any user action

9. Notifications

All important controls (such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Brightness) are acessible from within the Notification bar. Just drag it down, tap the 'Controls' tab and you have access to twelve of the most commonly used settings.

10. MIUI apps

MIUI supports online backups and storage;
MIUI AppShare and MIUI Marketplace allow users to discover new apps and download them with a single tap;
MIUI AppShare will notify the user when installed apps have updated.