Visiting radio host

We had a visitor earlier in the week: Rod Taylor, of Fuzzy Logic 2XX and "Ask Fuzzy" from the Canberra Times, came to visit the NICTA Canberra lab on Tuesday. Rod saw a few of the projects around the lab, including

• our foosball playing robot setup: a robot that plays against mortals (not well yet, but that's the point... it's an ongoing summer scholar project)
• Some of our toys, like the nifty wireless gloves
• Mark Reed and the Interferex lab: building wireless interference cancelling systems to extend the range of your phone
• The Bionic Vision clinical test lab: where NICTA researchers place volunteers in a specially designed maze to test out depth-of-field algorithms
• Automap: a team that delivers automatic sign recognition for GPS-map devices
• Opinion Watch: extracting meaningful information from the blogosphere.

Rod also took some photos: you can see them on the Fuzzy Logic blog, in gallery 1 and gallery 2.

Pusing Human Performance

This week in radio: Fuzzy Logic 2XX FM's Rod Taylor interviewed Leif Hanlen, on how NICTA is "pushing human performance"

You can listen online: http://fuzzylogicon2xx.podbean.com

What does it take to win an olympic gold medal? Humans are pushing the limits of performance. The difference between a gold and a tin medal can be a tiny percent. In today's ultra competetive events you need every ounce, and the ability to closely monitor an athelete during training can be key.

Dr Leif Hanlen is a senior researcher at Australia's IT research body NICTA where they are building devices for real-time evaluation of atheletes. But it's not just about elite sport stars because anybody who wants their health closely monitored will be interested. Then, what do you do with the data? This can be mined for insights into the individual or the population.

Leif interviewed by Rod, Arwen and Michael, who also brought his own beautiful music into this show.