Alan Winfield's Web Log

Our subjective experience of the 'continuity' of consciousness is surely an illusion. But what makes that illusion and why is it so ...

Ok, I admit it. I have an Xbox 360. Of course I'm hopeless at playing video games, which is perhaps just as well because it means that I...

Had a remarkable couple of days last week. Walking with Robots (WWR), the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE) and the London Engineering Proj...

A day off sick with a head cold and painful sinuses had one consolation. I had a little time this afternoon to install Leopard - the new ver...

The projected ubiquity of personal companion robots raises a range of interesting but also troubling questions. There can be little doubt th...

Fed up with airports and - perhaps rather pathetically trying to do my bit for climate change - I'm taking the train from Bristol to Lis...

Between 13th and 16th August thirteen teams descended on Monte Ceneri in Ticino, Switzerland, for C-ELROB - the Civilian European Land Robo...

One of the great pleasures of giving public lectures is the questions that come from the audience, and my talk last week to the Bath U3A gro...

Spent the last two days at a really interesting workshop: Practices of Anthropomorphism: from Automata to Robotics . The best thing about th...

In Daniel Dennett 's remarkable book "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" he describes the Tower of Generate-and-Test ; a brilliant c...

Heard some great lectures yesterday evening at the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institute . John Sloboda gave a wonderful talk about...

Last night's Horizon was promising: what might have happened if the asteroid that is generally agreed to have triggered the extinction ...

My friend, erstwhile mentor and visiting professor colleague Rod Goodman and I were reminiscing a few days ago about our first experiences ...

At a little over 5 cm tall the e-pucks are remarkable little robots. Here is a picture from the web pages of supplier and all round good peo...

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote about wild predictions of human level AI . Another prediction that has caught the attention of the general...

Back in March I described problems compiling and installing new applications onto Linux and suggested that until this problem is solved, Lin...

The really great memes* don't just emerge by chance. They have to be thought of, discovered, invented, created; not necessarily intentio...

A few weeks ago we had a visitor to the lab who asked a seemingly straightforward question: "what is a robot?". A perfectly reason...

Or, why GNU/Linux isn't going to take over the world just yet. I just spent a gruelling weekend installing the excellent open source Pla...

I came across the Edge website last week, whose home page declares the rather grand aim: To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge...