ROILA · News

ROILA – PhD defense

June 3, 2011 in News by mubin | 2 comments

On June 1, Omar Mubin successfully completed his PhD defense on ROILA and was awarded the dr. title.

The ROILA team would like to thank the following committee members and experts without whose cooperation, feedback and support neither the defense nor the research would have been possible.

– Prof. Lyons (Ritsumeikan University, Japan)
– Prof. Krahmer (Tilburg University, Netherlands)
– Prof. de Lange (Utrecht University, Netherlands)
– Dr. Terken (Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands)
– Steven Canvin (LEGO Mindstorms, Denmark)
– Marjolein Seegers (Christiaan Huygens College, Eindhoven)

A special word of appreciation to Prof. Feijs, Dr. Hu and Dr. Bartneck (who travelled all the way from Christchurch, New Zealand).

Tags: defense

ROILA Article in the Cursor Newspaper of the TU/e

June 3, 2011 in News by mubin | No comments

The local newspaper of the TU/e, Cursor did an article about our research in ROILA. Here is a link to the article (in Dutch).

Tags: cursor, newspaper

ROILA – Robot Interaction Language thesis by Omar Mubin

May 5, 2011 in Event, News by mubin | No comments

The thesis “ROILA – Robot Interaction Language” has been printed. Please join us for the defense on June 1st, 16:00h in lecture theater 4 of the Auditorium at the Eindhoven University of Technology. This will be followed by a reception in Senaatszaal.

Tags: defense, thesis

Research Grant from NZILBB

April 18, 2011 in News by bartneck | No comments

Good news! We received a small research grant from NZILBB to create full course book about ROILA. This book is intended to help students to learn ROILA. Dean Sutherland will help with supervising a student that can create this course book.

Tags: grant, NZILBB

Documenting the ROILA project

February 23, 2011 in News by mubin | No comments

At this moment, we are documenting the entire ROILA project. Soon we will provide this information. It will also include details about the ROILA curriculum and the controlled experiment that we conducted at the Huygens College Eindhoven.

Tags: ROILA documentation

ROILA and its Future

December 20, 2010 in Event, News by mubin | No comments

Recently we concluded the first ever ROILA course at the Huygens College Eindhoven. The course lasted for three weeks and was taught to 100 Dutch high school students students spread over 4 classes. The lessons involved practicing ROILA and playing with LEGO robots. All of us (teachers and students included) had alot of fun. So much so the school wants to make it a permanent part of their Science curriculum. They plan to do a repeat of the course for another class in January next year. A follow-on controlled experiment was also conducted which compared the efficacy of learning ROILA to control a robot vs controlling English-savvy robot. ROILA was found to better on both subjective and objective accounts (details coming soon).

We would like to thank the staff and teachers of Huygens College Eindhoven for their support and appreciation. Needless to say the children deserve a special mention too.

Tags: Huygens College Eindhoven, ROILA

Updates to the ROILA Academy

November 17, 2010 in Event, News by mubin | No comments

We will be continously updating the ROILA academy section as we progress with the ROILA course at Huygens College, Eindhoven. Please visit the academy to know more about the course and our efforts at the school.

Tags: Huygens College Eindhoven, ROILA course, ROILA lessons

First Set of ROILA Lessons

November 1, 2010 in News by mubin | No comments

The first set of 10 ROILA lessons are now uploaded in the ROILA academy. This set is the first version and may be subject to slight revisions. Please feel free to join the ROILA academy which is setup in Moodle. Also uploaded is the relevant glossary for these lessons, both here on the website as well as in the academy on Moodle. Alternatively you might want to have a look at the HTML version of the lessons. We would like to acknowledge the contributions of Jerry Muelver towards the design of the lessons. Please let us know if you have any comments or would like to give us some feedback.

The entire ROILA audience is welcome to study the ROILA lessons. If you are interested in subscribing to the academy please send us an email with your name and location so that we can make an account for you.

Tags: lessons, ROILA course

Color/Light Sensor Lejos

October 15, 2010 in News by mubin | 1 comment

We are busy implementing small scenarios/concepts for students of ROILA so that they can interact with Mindstorm NXT robots while talking in ROILA. One of them is a simple shooting game, where we wanted to get the color sensor to work. However the “new” color sensor in Mindstorms NXT 2.0 does not work with lejos NXJ 0.8 and neither with some versions of 0.85. Please use the following classes.jar file to make your sensor work, courtesy of the lejos team. Remember to replace your old version of the jar file in two places: lib folder in the projects folder and lib folder where you installed lejos. A simple replace worked for us and we did not have to rebuild any code. But, remember to download your java program on the NXT again.

Tags: Color Sensor, Lejos, Light Sensor

Learning ROILA with the help of Moodle

September 28, 2010 in News by mubin | No comments

At this moment we are busy designing lessons for ROILA. These lessons will be used by high school students to learn ROILA in our upcoming project. We are using Moodle an open source e-learning tool. Moodle provides various functionalities and features which make designing lessons fun and simple. One of the interesting challenges that we are contemplating is how to provide a dictionary or a glossary with audio pronunciations of ROILA words. An alternative could be to accomplish this externally using word press on the ROILA website (see first version). We aim to use Text to Speech recordings as the sample pronunciations for ROILA as that would be consistent and efficient. The recognition accuracy of the TTS sentence recordings was found to be very high (just 1 word error in about 120+ words) for a list of 30 sentences. This figure was generated by passing recordings offline in the Sphinx-4 recognizer.

Tags: Moodle, ROILA lessons

News