A little tidbit for all of you in the greater Bay Area – Ken Goldberg, robot god of UC Berkeley, will be speaking at Science Cafe on August 18th at the Atlas Cafein San Francisco.

Photo Courtesy Berkeley Engineering Forefront
Ken Goldberg: Not just a robot guy, but the frontman for his very own telerobotic emo band*

Is there decision-making strength in numbers? Professor Goldberg and his students are looking into questions raised by robots and social networks — and working on a new class of interfaces and games based on networked robots and cameras that quantify a measure of “leadership” to bring about group discovery and decision-making based on the power of crowds.

Ken will report on experiments and questions raised by robots and social networks, ranging from Ouija boards to human “tele-actors,”and tell a true story about how invasions of privacy led him and his students to study how robots can assist in monitoring the natural environment. Ken will describe a robotic system they’ve deployed to assist the search for the Ivory Billed Woodpecker, a bird of extreme interest to birdwatchers, ornithologists, and conservationists whose last confirmed sighting was in 1944. Ken will also describe the Berkeley Center for New Media, a highly cross-disciplinary center with over 110 affiliated faculty from 30 Cal Departments.

*not really

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