SciAutonics among Semi-Finalists in DARPA Grand Challenge!

As indicated earlier, DARPA announced on 9. August 2007 the 36 semi-finalists, which were selected after site visits to each of the teams. And, our team SciAutonics is among them!

Congratulations to the team, and best wishes for the remaining work!

I remember what a hard struggle this was in preparation for the first Grand Challenge in 2004...

Currently I am uploading photos about the DARPA Grand Challenge 2004 preparations from my large archive onto Flickr, placing them into a collection of several sets. The original RASCAL which is depicted in these pictures will no longer run; instead the team has now a more conventional vehicle, suitable for the anticipated urban scenario near Victorville.

Wiki School Competition

That was a busy time last week: the 3-day Innovation North Faculty Conference, the launch of the Centre for Creative Technology, the visit of our Austrian students from the Danube University Krems, the ethics debate, and on Thursday the Post-Graduate conference. After those 4 days, I took off one day on Friday.

But this week, the activities continue: this Monday was a Wiki School Competition, organised by David Griffin from Innovation North. School from the region have been invited to present their Wiki, with the theme "Why Technology Matters". Initially there had been 20 candidates, by last Friday the field had narrowed, and by Monday there have been 3 candidates left. Shame on those who withdrew! But these remaining candidates were able to demonstrate their excellence and their enthusiasm for Web 2.0 projects in their Wiki: in the lounge behind the MetCeno, they set up their laptops, and each of these Wiki sites showed something unique. I was one of the 7 judges, and it was difficult to pin down and weight the contribution of each team fairly. But in the end, the prices were distributed among the teams: 4 mountain bikes (donated by Red Hat), 4 iPods (donated by Apple), and e book vouchers (donated by the British Computer Society).