Friday Hacks #113, April 15
Posted on by Varun
For our final Friday Hacks this semester, we’re inviting Melvin from Cosmiqo and Jimeno and Alvin from iDA Labs Engineers.
Facebook Event here.
Date/Time: Friday, April 15 at 7:00pm
Venue: Seminar Room 3, Town Plaza, University Town
Talk 1: Building a Turing Machine emulator to explore Turing’s great ideas.
Talk Description:
Turing’s classic 1936 paper launched the field of Computer Science by introducing the Turing Machine model of computation. The popular retelling of Turing’s work focuses on the halting problem but Turing prefer his machines to never halt. His demonstration of a universal turing machine showed that software can be separated from hardware and paved the way for the stored-program computer.
In this talk, we will develop our own Turing Machine emulator and execute some of Turing’s machines and show how his ideas shaped our understanding of Programming and Computer Science.
Speaker Profile
Melvin is an avid programmer who enjoys designing and implementing novel algorithms. As the CTO of Cosmiqo, Melvin is in charge of developing its sensor data aggregation and analytics platform. In his spare time, Melvin works on the AI for Magarena, an open source card game project. Melvin received his B. Comp (Hons) and Ph.D. degrees from NUS School of Computing.
Talk 2: ROS and Linorobot.
Talk Description:
Robot Operating System (ROS) is an open-source robotics software development framework typically associated to modern robots like Atlas, PR2, and Husky UGV. It offers a robust robotics infrastructure that features inter-process communication, robot geometry, pose estimation, localization, navigation and mapping.
Linorobot aims to provide students, developers, and researchers a low-cost platform for learning ROS and hopefully used in new innovative applications. It was designed and built using easily accessible hardware which allows anyone to build it from home. It’s powered by a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 1.6 GHz CPU Radxa Rock board as its main brain and an XV11 Neato Vacuum Lidar as its main sensor for obstacle avoidance and localization. With these features, users can learn the fundamentals of robotics development like SLAM( Simultaneous Localization and Mapping), localization techniques like AMCL ( Adaptive Monte-Carlo Localization), motion planning and many more.
You can find out more at:
linorobot.org and
github.com/grassjelly/linorobot
Featured on Hackaday:
hackaday.com/2016/03/13/petite-package-provides-powerful-robot/
Speaker Profile
Alvin Ng and Juan Miguel Jimeno are engineers at iDA Labs. They have recently been spending their free time building robots hoping to bring homebrew robotics to students and developers in Singapore. You can find them at iDA Labs where they work as full-time Engineers developing prototypes for government agencies.