Sony claims they created a running robot. Go QRIO, go!

From their press announcement:

The new 'walking, jumping, running movement control' technology which Sony has developed this time accomplishes motion involving both feet losing contact with the floor at the same time, which means it is a motion control technology enabling stable running and jumping. The seamless addition of motion control based on this new technology enabling running and jumping, has lead to the development of a robot having outstanding motion capabilities.

Furthermore, together with this new control technology, in addition to powering-up and enhancing the output torque of Sony's original and unique robot actuator, ISA (Intelligent Servo Actuator), a new hardware unit suitable for the running feature has been developed. By implementing this newly developed ISA in QRIO and optimizing the new control system, Sony has successfully created the world's first running feature for a humanoid robot.

And here's a photo of the OSPNL development team. And here's Intels introduction to the PNL.

Intel today announced the OSPNL at Neural Information Processing Systems 2003, a tool for working with graphical models. It supports directed and undirected models, discrete and continuous variables, various inference and learning algorithms. That means Bayesian networks most of the time. They haven't published any files for download yet.

When you create web applications, there's always this trouble with designing and integrating the actual front end. I've finally found a really good book about stylesheet design. "Cascading Stylesheets" by Ulrike Häßler gives a useful, entertaining and beautiful overview of CSS use from a designers point of view. It clearly shows how to move from a "paper idea" to a working screen design using CSS. Highly recommended!