The owner of Truck Gear SuperCenter, a Houston-based truck-accessory retailer, Towry, 62, once served as CEO of Leer, a $400-million-a-year manufacturer of truck accessories. "I'm very seasoned at managing a business," he says. And he appeared to be doing a good job at Truck Gear since he started the company in 2001. Revenue rose 25% to $2.5 million in 2004, while profits climbed 32%. When he learned about ProfitCents, a web-based accounting software program, he tried it mainly out of curiosity.

Welcome to the On-Line Guide to CONSTRAINT PROGRAMMING designed and maintained by Roman Barták. I have opened this site as an on-line tutorial or, if you want, a textbook for beginners to the area of constraint programming. This area belongs to the less known software technologies but it rapidly evolves and brings a significant commercial interest.

In recent years, the range of sensing technologies has expanded rapidly, whereas sensor devices have become cheaper. This has led to a rapid expansion in condition monitoring of systems, structures, vehicles, and machinery using sensors. Key factors are the recent advances in networking technologies such as wireless communication and mobile ad hoc networking coupled with the technology to integrat... View full abstract» This paper provides a review of the literature in on-road vision-based vehicle detection, tracking, and behavior understanding. Over the past decade, vision-based surround perception has progressed from its infancy into maturity. We provide a survey of recent works in the literature, placing vision-based vehicle detection in the context of sensor-based on-road surround analysis.

Dubai: In the build-up to the International Aerial Robotics Competition (IARC), students from 28 universities across the globe have been developing prototypes for flying robots that can "think" for themselves. No longer the domain of science fiction, autonomous aerial vehicles have uses in the military, natural disasters, medical emergencies and other areas that have yet to be looked into. This year Bits Pilani's Dubai team came first in the IARC held recently in North Dakota. The eight students, whose majors include electronics, mechanical engineering, computer science and IT, built an autonomous indoor flying vehicle that could navigate through an unknown environment and retrieve a 100-gram object. Although the prototype didn't manage to retrieve an object -- to win the $20,000 prize money -- it got the maximum number of points.

You don't have a big Hollywood marketing budget. How do you market your film? "Flatland was a different kind of film; strange, intellectual, bizarre," said Ladd Ehlinger Jr., director of the animated feature. "So I wanted something different to promote it." Chat room regulars may be familiar with the concept of a "chatbot."

Ryszard Michalski, PRC Professor of Computational Sciences and Health Informatics, died from cancer on Sept. 20, Provost Peter Stearns announced Tuesday. He joined the Mason faculty in 1988. A memorial will be held at Bellarmine Chapel, 4515 Roberts Road, at 1 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 28. A reception at the same location will follow the service. All members of the university community are invited to attend.

Last August, Sebastian Thrun, the brains behind Google's self-driving cars and one of the world's top AI experts, offered an online version of Stanford's Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course to absolutely anyone who wanted to take it, for free. It turned out to be just a little bit popular (over 150,000 students enrolled), and now Thrun is offering a new, totally free, seven-week online course called Programming a Robotic Car. Can I really learn how to build a self-driving car in 7 weeks? In seven weeks, you will learn the basics of all the primary systems involved in programming a robotic car. Mad props to Professor Thrun for staying focused on the camera and barely glancing once at where the car was taking him.

An example of object detection and recognition application. Classifier networks are used to inspect, sort, identify, and discriminate minute details in biological or machine systems that human beings cannot discern. They are used in everything from inspecting spark plugs to face recognition. Classifier networks are becoming the basis of machine vision systems. The students' projects are designed to give them practical experience, and to ground graduate students in the field so that they are able to perform this type of research.

Collective Intelligence: It's All in the Numbers (Abstract)