Wow! What a wonderful surprise to be featured on the University of Texas at Austin Environmental Science Institute website and in their feature article.
Thank you so much for the honor. I really love their Hot Science – Cool Talk lectures, and I’ve attended many since I was in first grade. It’s a great way to learn, both with the fun activities before the talks and the fascinating talks themselves. Dr. Jay Banner, director of the Environmental Science Institute, always makes everyone feel welcome.
I remember a great talk from fall 2010, “Autonomous Robots Playing Soccer and Traversing Intersections“. The robots they used for their soccer matches were amazing. They used little robots in the beginning that looked like dogs and moved up to ones that looked like people. During one of the videos shown during the presentation, one of the people robots quickly figured out a way to block a shot by lying down in front of the goal. That’s a move the other robots didn’t see coming!
The talks this fall have been outstanding, from learning about the hippocampus at the “Building Memories for Tomorrow” presentation to discovering how robots could explore new worlds at the “Astronauts, Robots and Rocks” talk. At the last Hot Science – Cool Talks presentation in 2011, on Friday, December 2, “Your Eye, My Eye & the Eye of the Aye-Aye”, Dr. Chris Kirk will discuss how humans came to have the best eyesight out of any living mammal. Sounds cool! (Be sure to check back in the coming weeks to watch my video with Dr. Kirk.)
I hope to see you there!
Commander Ben
Commander Ben 