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Sebastian Thrun of Stanford Racing gives a great a talk on what it took build an autonomous vehicle to win the DARPA Grand Challenge. There are lots of cool technical details on the use of machine learning to achieve this. You can watch it on Google Video here.

The guys from Juice Analytics have put together an interesting series on in cell graphing (parts 1, 2, & 3). This is a feature that is due in the upcoming version of Excel 2007, however the technique the Juice guys use works across all versions of Excel and is quite visually appealing too. Added bonus, [...]

For any machine learning based SPAM filters, such as the popular Bayesian methods, the key to success is the body of previously identified SPAM and HAM (valid emails) or training data. In order for the spammer to trick the filter, they must try to be more HAM-like. The way to beat this is by giving [...]

Start your engines, the DARPA Grand Challenge is on again only this time its an urban challenge! The last two competitions were to race an autonomous vehicle through a desert, with the 2005 winner, Standford, taking home a US$2 million prize. Stanford’s software in action: Input from GPS and many sensors feed the algorithms to [...]

While writing a thesis it is obviously imperative to have foolproof backups in place. So why not backup to that free 2.7Gb Gmail account? Here’s what you have to do: Install “email” (Gentoo users: emerge net-mail/email) Edit /etc/email/email.conf (Gentoo users: as a minimum you must set REPLY_TO) Test the commands. They are: cd /path/to/your/thesis/ tar [...]

Digg, The Blog has info on a nice visualisation of activity on digg.com. Kevin mentions the zip-line effect in the videos are probably bots. Pretty cool!

Check out the R Graph Gallery which includes not only detailed descriptions of graphs you can produce in R, but also R source! Props to Martin for the link.

Dennis Forbes gives a fantastic analysis of one of the biggest databases on the Internet – the DNS records. His analysis includes insights into domain name length, personal and family name usage and other characteristics. For example, did you know that all 2- and 3-letter domains are taken? Dennis is planning a second part so [...]

You may have listened to Internet radio before, but Pandora is a station of a different kind – totally personalised. Its a Flash based player (sorry Andy!) that sits inside your browser, so no problems with firewalls. But the real innovation is that when you start it up, you tell it the artists you like, [...]

One common complaint from Windows enthusiasts is that image editor on Linux, The GIMP, is somehow lacking compared with Photoshop. Those people will be happy to know you can now use Photoshop plugins in The GIMP on Linux. The GIMP really is a fantastic tool for both Windows and Linux, so give it a go [...]