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CNBC covering underwater bots tonight @ 7PM.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/19988641/for/cnbc/
Robots Clear Waterways of Deadly Mines
By MELISSA NELSON
Updated: 4:43 a.m. ET July 27, 2007
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PANAMA CITY BEACH, Fla. - As it slowly moves in the shallow water along a beach, the robot splashes its fins like a small child playing in the surf. But the prototype device has a serious mission: destroying mines that could kill Marines and Navy SEALs as they come on shore. Such technology is considered the future of underwater bomb detection.
"It's a kamikaze vehicle, a suicidal robot," said Mathieu Kemp, a scientist with Durham, N.C.-based Nekton Research, LCC, which created the Transphibian.
The 3-foot-long device, which will some day carry 14 pounds of plastic explosives and attach itself to an underwater bomb before igniting, can be maneuvered by a joystick, which Kemp demonstrated last month at the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Fest, an annual two-week gathering of researchers who design robots for military use.
Experts with the Panama City Beach-based Naval Surface Warfare Center say such robots eventually will replace minesweeping ships and perform dangerous jobs now done by specialized divers.
A 2003 mine-clearing operation in the port of Um Quasar, Iraq, was a major test for autonomous underwater vehicles. The technology helped the U.S. Navy clear a path for a British ship carrying 200 tons of food and emergency supplies. It took the AUVs about 16 hours to search nearly a square mile and help divers locate an undisclosed number of mines _ a task the Navy says would have taken 21 days for divers working without the technology.
In the future, scientists plan to put explosives on the AUVs to destroy the mines. Meanwhile, they are using them to quickly and accurately differentiate ocean clutter from mines.
"The closer in you get to any port or harbor, the greater amount of clutter you will encounter _ tires, rocks, coral reefs _ there can be so much clutter you would not believe it," said Daniel Broadstreet, a spokesman for the Naval Surface Warfare Center, which specializes in neutralizing underwater mines.
"To screen out all that clutter is a huge job and it takes some very, very technologically advanced sensors," Broadstreet said.
The Um Quasar operation was a milestone for AUVs because it marked the first wartime use of the technology, said Tom Swean, team leader of the Office of Naval Research's Mine Warfare Science and Technology Program.
Swean joined the Office of Naval Research in Arlington, Va., in 1981, but his work took off in 1997 when the Navy SEALs got involved. They tailored the systems for missions including surveying the seabed, finding channels near the shore and locating mines.
"It was important that they have underwater vehicles that could not be seen very easily," Swean said. "Their missions are near shore and are very dangerous."
A decade later, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have pushed advances in unmanned and robotic technology, especially on land and in the air where robots routinely inspect improvised explosive devices and drones conduct air reconnaissance.
"It's gone from zero to 60 pretty fast," said Jeffery Bradshaw, a scientist at the Pensacola-based Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, which is working with the warfare center on a project to use robots for port security.
The military is expected to spend more than $50 million on the acquisition of AUV technology in the next five years, Swean said. At the same time, more than $12 billion is expected to be spent on unmanned aircraft programs.
The next steps for the researchers include creating robots that function alongside troops as members of an operational team and ones that work with other robots.
"If one robot breaks or if one of the human team members is in trouble, they would know how to coordinate interactions _ sort of like buddies," Bradshaw said.
Despite the interest in robotic technology, changes won't be immediate, Swean said. The Navy likely will phase out large mine sweepers, but it will need ships to deploy the robotic systems, he said.
Among the robots with the most promise is the Transphibian, which is still being developed.
"It's a good example of a hybrid concept, it can swim in the water and it can crawl on the sea floor," Swean said as he watched a prototype splash along the waters near Panama City Beach. "The last piece is to efficiently and cheaply go out to a real mine and place a charge on it."
___
On the Net:
http://www.nektonresearch.com/
http://nswcpc.navsea.navy.mil/
http://www.onr.navy.mil/
http://www.ihmc.us/
Another Hedge Fund Discloses PIPEs Probe
By Matthew Goldstein
Senior Writer
12/1/2005 7:12 AM EST
Cornell Capital Partners, a hedge fund that specializes in finance for ailing penny-stock companies, is being investigated by securities regulators for its trading activity in shares of nine companies.
The Jersey City, N.J.-based hedge fund, which has more than $200 million in assets, disclosed the investigation in its most recent audited financial statement, a copy of which was obtained by TheStreet.com. Copies of the hedge fund's 2004 financial statement were mailed to Cornell investors in late August.
The Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of Cornell stems from a broad-based regulatory inquiry into allegations of manipulative trading in the $17 billion-a-year market for PIPEs, the Wall Street acronym for private investment in public equity.
For the past two years, securities regulators have been looking into the activities of hedge funds that invest in PIPEs and the brokerages that help arrange these private stock sales for companies in desperate need of cash. TheStreet.com previously reported that at least three other hedge funds -- HBK Investments, Gryphon Partners and Alexandra Investment Management -- are being investigated by regulators.
PIPEs are a popular financing route for tiny, cash-strapped companies, which raise money by selling discounted shares to investors in a privately negotiated transaction. But the ability of a big trader to purchase thousands of shares of discounted stock also makes the PIPEs market ripe for abuse by unethical short-sellers -- traders who bet a stock will decline in price.
Mark Angelo, the founder and president of Cornell, says regulators haven't told him they've found any wrongdoing involving the hedge fund. Angelo says Cornell is probably being investigated because it's a major PIPEs player and is involved in so many deals each year.
"I think they're looking at all people in the PIPEs space,"' says Angelo. "Most of our investors view it as non-issue."
Since its inception in 2001, Cornell has provided financing to more than 120 speculative, mostly money-losing companies, many of which trade shares on the over-the-counter Bulletin Board. In the third quarter of this year, Cornell was the ninth most active PIPEs investor, sinking $38 million into 10 different deals, according to PlacementTracker, a private placement research firm.
The PIPEs market has been a profitable niche for Cornell. In 2004, it realized a $20 million net gain on investments, according to the financial statement. It took in another $3.4 million in investment income.
The investigation of Cornell began in July 2004 with the SEC requesting information about its "funding of and trading" in shares of Bio-One, a defunct nutritional supplement company that had operated out of Winter Springs, Fla. Cornell had been the primary investor in two PIPEs deals that raised $25 million for Bio-One and enabled the company to make two small acquisitions.
By this summer, the SEC investigation had expanded to include eight other companies Cornell had invested in. The audit doesn't disclose the names of the other companies. However, the 13-page report notes that Cornell received a subpoena from the SEC on July 18, 2005, seeking documents "related to the funding of and trading in the common stock of Bio-One and eight other portfolio companies in which the partnership is invested."
Two months ago, the SEC reached a settlement with Bio-One over allegations that its financial statements failed to disclose an August 2004 default on a $15 million promissory note to a company it had acquired earlier that year.
Angelo says the SEC began investigating Cornell because it had provided financing to Bio-One. But he says Bio-One company kept the default on the promissory note hidden from Cornell, too.
"We have no idea why we were named in this, other than that we are an investor," says Angelo. "I have no idea why we were named."
Angelo declined to discuss the eight other companies the SEC has asked for information about. An SEC spokesman declined to comment.
One of the allegations regulators are looking at in the PIPEs probe is that some hedge funds routinely shorted a stock once they learned a PIPEs deal was in the works. Regulators contend that such premature short trades are illegal, because knowledge of such deals is confidential, nonpublic information.
It's not uncommon for stocks of companies doing PIPEs deals to drop in price after it becomes public that the company has sold thousands of shares at a discount.
Hedge funds, however, aren't the only target of the investigation, which is being coordinated with the National Association of Securities Dealers and in some instances, the Department of Justice. Investigators also have targeted brokerage firms that serve as placement agents for PIPEs deals by lining up investors.
To date, the broad-based inquiry has led to the criminal conviction of a former SG Cowen managing director on insider trading charges, and a $1.45 million civil settlement with a former First New York Securities hedge fund manager. Emanuel Friedman, former co-CEO of Friedman Billings Ramsey (FBR:NYSE) , also faces potential civil charges, as does the investment firm he co-founded.
Other Wall Street firms that face potential regulatory action arising from the probe include Knight Trading (NITE:Nasdaq) and Refco (RFXCQ:Other OTC) , the scandal-tarred commodity and derivatives brokerage.
http://www.thestreet.com/markets/matthewgoldstein/10255157.html
Holyfield to face Ibragimov for WBO title
August 2, 2007
HOLLYWOOD, FLORIDA (TICKER) -- The "Real Deal" has the opportunity he was looking for. Evander Holyfield will face Sultan Ibragimov for the WBO heavyweight title at Khodynka Arena in Moscow on October 13.
The chance for Holyfield to win a heavyweight title for the fifth time in his Hall of Fame career came when WBA heavyweight champ Ruslan Chagaev pulled out of the bout against Ibragimov for undisclosed reasons.
"This is the first step on my quest to become the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world, and I'm glad Sultan Ibragimov was willing to step up and give me a shot," Holyfield said. "I'm looking forward to fighting in Moscow for the first time and winning my fifth heavyweight title there."
Not nearly the fighter he used to be when he defeated the likes of Mike Tyson, Riddick Bowe and Larry Holmes among others, the 44-year-old Holyfield (42-8-2, 27 KOs) has won his last four bouts. He won a unanimous decision over Lou Savarese in his last fight on June 30.
Holyfield's winning streak has come on the heels of losing a unanimous decision to Larry Donald in New York in 2004. In August 2005, the New York Daily News reported that the New York State Athletic Commission had banned Holyfield from boxing in New York due to "diminishing skills."
A 2000 Olympic Silver medalist for Russia, Ibragimov (21-0-1, 17 KOs) won the WBO belt in June when he won a decision from Shannon Briggs.
"Of course I'm disappointed that Chagaev pulled out of our fight and won't allow me to unify our titles, but fighting a legend like Evan Holyfield is even better," Ibragimov said. "And though I respect what he has done in his career, once the bell rings it will be all business, because he is trying to take what I have worked so hard for - my world championship."
http://sports.yahoo.com/box/news?slug=txholyfieldtitle&prov=st&type=lgns
OTish: F+INRA = new regulator. what an appropriate acronym IMO.
Alphabet soup: NYSE Regulation + NASD = FINRA
By Nicholas Rummell
July 27, 2007
There’s a new sheriff in town for financial services firms: the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.
Well, maybe not that new. The new acronym comes from the merger of the NASD and the regulatory arm of the New York Stock Exchange, which officially merged yesterday after the Securities and Exchange Commission gave final approval. The two self-regulatory organizations last year announced plans to consolidate their regulatory functions late last year.
FINRA, like all self regulatory organizations, or SROs, will operate under SEC oversight but will be the primary regulator for broker-dealers, as well as several stock markets, including the Big Board, Nasdaq and the American Stock Exchange.
Consolidating self-regulatory organizations into a single regulator has been something many industry members have called for. It’s also one of the issues being bandied about in several studies of U.S. competitiveness. Many felt that the NASD and NYSE operated using different rules and procedures, leading to duplicative regulation.
However, the NASD-NYSE merger also had its share of opposition, mostly from small, independent broker-dealers who felt that the Big Board was more focused on large firms. Negotiations had been held after a protest that finalized how many small-firm representatives would sit on the new regulator’s board of governors.
http://www.financialweek.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070727/REG/70727002/1036
maybe they can apply for this SBA federal robotics loan program?
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/industry/sensors_automation/pdfs/robotics_roadmap.pdf
heh. Ballard's even mentioned. Maybe the "Queen" can fling her hair around and distract the underwriters from the details?
dumpster diving update...
when asked what was recently found in the company's garbage, a person on another board posted this:
I got to think about it. I don't know if I want to start a Witch Hunt right now. I think the best thing for you guys can do is "keep asking the company questions".
"the company is indebted to him for $1m."
wow is your research flawed. show me what you think supports this claim. perhaps it is this BS by "robotic stocks" that has you so persuaded?
The files also show Weisel signed personaly for $1,000,000 to go into the company to protect guarantee the loan from the SBA when the company could have easily gone under. The filings show he is still on the hook for that amount. How many CEO's believe that much in their company....How many? Most are going to jail for taking off with funds and false filings. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=21475257
what "files" show this? the X-Files?
btw, wweisel498@aol.com is still listed on Raynell1's iHub profile. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/profile.asp?User=103745
do you think it's weisel using that iHub alias? if you think so, do you think he might be using any others?
please feel free to speculate about things like why this company has not been bought out, why it isn't doing work for defense contractors, etc., etc. of course, all of that is pure conjecture, yet is totally permissible discourse here.
numerous Ft. Myers locals have previously reported during prior months that the This Old CEO's House show was the main thing on for quite some time. If you think that's not relevant, that's your perogative, and you can post other stuff to stir debate all you want. If you think the possibility of the CEO running this public company like a private ATM isn't relevant, or a legitimate issue, that's your problem and you can ignore those posts.
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.asp?Message_id=16072967
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.asp?Message_id=16106460
here's a post from another board on the issue of the potential abuses by penny CEOs and Cornell of average shareholders. IMO it is as relevant as it gets.
It's not just that Cornell is alleged to be a notorious toxic lender , but companies that engage Cornell become addicted to all the FREE money and thereby become toxic diluters of their own stock .
Free money can lead to careless , even reckless use of that money because more free money is readily available without commensurate accountability to shareholders . One particular stock comes to mind , when that company had an unearned and unwarranted market cap of over $350 million . Vast amounts of more free money from Cornell led to reckless acquisitions and unethical enrichments for insiders via the Company's permissable toxic borrowing acerbated by toxic dilution thereby causing a monstrous drop in market cap to approximately $25 million . Shareholders paid and are still paying a heavy price .
This board should be a must read for ALL investors who own stock in companies that use Cornell because it reflects on a borrowing company's typically poor business practices as well as Cornell's historical disposition for entangling a company's equity into their vice grip .
The SEC should minimally intercede by preventing companies from changing their tickers when reverse splitting their stock so that new investors can know of an offending company's toxic proclivities . At least it would stop the cycle of hiding abuses under a new ticker by the abusers .
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=21767713
nauseating... new weisel veep's LinkedIn profile
Annalisa Xioutas
Queen of all I survey
Fort Myers, Florida Area
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/3/526/B75
and then there's this:
http://www.firstassemblywomensministries.com/testimonies/annalisa.htm
won't surprise me if we later learn this hand-picked weisel veep is still selling florida real estate.
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=753819
here's some info about another Cornell "client."
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=21759252
heard that weisel once told a shareholder how much he liked his "relationship" with Cornell. if true, he actually had the stones to tell this shareholder, someone who followed and trusted this "company" for years and invested heavily in the past, that he LIKED his Cornell "relationship"!?!
that too IMO and in this context probably serves as a disqualifier IMO for this company to ever be considered as a legit candidate for the Nasdaq, and is more likely to be viewed as just another OTCBB outfit IMO.
is any member of that Yorkville posse a WASP or an Ivy alum? or perhaps are they simply trying to be perceived as such IMO, and maybe IMO they are better described as slimy con artists IMO and predators IMO who are currently targets of an SEC investigation and who IMO might allegedly work together with penny stock execs to IMO rip off shareholders IMO?!? they remind me of the "Webistics" P&D crew IMO, or the Farrow Tech "J.T. Marlin" chop-shop creeps on "Boiler Room" IMO. older versions of the "two Jasons" at Rutgers in Sopranos IMO.
JMHO of course.
wonder what former U.S. Attorney General Ashcroft's views are of the fact that he is only once removed from such a close linkage to the Cornell crew and that a shareholder said that weisel claimed to like his "relationship" with that Jersey outfit?
Ranyell1 of wweisel498@aol.com iHub profile fame wrote this on July 21.
I'm with you RS {nevermind that he was replying to the new 123}, being quite on this one isn't smart. I've never owned a penny stock until INRA but it can't stay pennies much longer for sure. I stay big board and NASDAQ but will dump several of them here sortly to get more pennies that will turn to dollars. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=21445364
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/profile.asp?User=103745
back to the topic at hand -- Mark Cuban's Sharesleuth has some info on "Yorkville." http://sharesleuth.com/2007/05/connecting_the_companies.html
Yorkville Advisors LLC is the general partner of Cornell Capital, and also was general partner of two other funds, Montgomery Equity Partners and Highgate House Funds Ltd. The latter two funds have been consolidated into Cornell.
Mark A. Angelo, the managing member of Yorkville Advisors and president of Cornell, was the co-portfolio manager of all three funds.
Cornell said it no longer has any association with Press, noting that “it didn’t work out, so we parted ways.’’ However, Press still has an active telephone extension that is reachable through the hedge fund’s main switchboard.
Sharesleuth’s investigation shows that Press and the Cornell family of funds participated in at least two financing deals alongside Robert H. Pozner, who was one of the original defendants indicted in the New Jersey fraud case in 2005.
Pozner, a former stock broker and trader, has signed a plea agreement that calls for a maximum of five years in prison. He previously pleaded guilty to securities fraud and perjury charges in another stock manipulation case and served three months in prison.
Pozner also settled civil fraud charges with the SEC in the prior manipulation case. He neither admitted nor denied the allegations but agreed to disgorge profits and accept sanctions. That case was public information at the time Pozner was included in the deals with Knightsbridge and Cornell.
The hedge fund said it was unaware of Pozner’s past.
Cornell also has provided financing to companies that have direct ties to Press and whose officers, major shareholders or consultants included:
* Rafael D. “Ray” Bloom, a onetime stockbroker who went to prison after being convicted of securities and wire fraud in 1989. Bloom had a long disciplinary record even before that scheme, involving a company called European Auto Classics.
* Leonard M. Tucker, former chairman and part-owner of F. D. Roberts Securities Inc., a boiler room brokerage that cheated investors out of $67 million. He pleaded guilty to a racketeering charge in 1990 and served 15 months in prison.
* Donna M. Silverman, an oft-disciplined broker and manager for Investors Associates Inc. Investors Associates shut down its brokerage business under regulatory pressure in 1997. Its top executives later pleaded guilty to criminal charges involving the manipulating of share in five companies that the firm took public, and also settled civil charges.
* William A. Calvo III, a disbarred lawyer who was found guilty in 2002 in a civil fraud case involving the manipulation of shares in Systems of Excellence Inc. http://sharesleuth.com/2007/05/connecting_the_companies.html
Pozner plea deal ---> http://sharesleuth.com/Poznerplea.pdf
Where oh where does the time go?
Lately, it has gone into the book and an incredibly exciting project. The book is coming along, though the labor pains are much more intense than I ever expected and the delays caused directly and indirectly by my illness earlier this year were more substantial than I (or the publisher) would have ever liked. That said, between reinvigorating my writing and picking up an expert-among-experts to co-author with me, the book is progressing very nicely and with all the depth and richness I had hoped for at the outset.
The project (http://research.microsoft.com/ero/) that has engulfed me since right after my illness has had me working in the UK. It has been a dream job, with elements of MSRS, hardware engineering, wireless sensor webs, extreme physical and networking environments, research, a chance to deeply investigate some new (to me) technologies like WPF and Compact Framework, and a chance to help out on some real honest-to-goodness save-the-planet eco/bio-science. I'd love to share more of the details of this project, but those will have to come out through other channels (like academic papers, MSR Tech Reports and the like), which they will. I will elaborate more here, when and how I can.
I'll use the next few posts though to pass on some very useful technical tips that I've learned in the process of doing this project. In particular, some tricks for MSRS cross-machine interactions, Compact Framework and a series of articles on integrating MSRS with WPF for true service-to-UI one-way and two-way data binding.
Posted by Martin R. Calsyn at 9:28 PM
http://robotsoftware.blogspot.com/
"expert-among-experts to co-author" -- hmmmmm. could it be Tandy?
fyi - this site says the book will be released this month on the 23rd. http://blogs.msdn.com/davbaker/archive/2007/02/08/pre-order-martin-calsyn-s-robotics-studio-book-on-...
fyi - Ranyell1 is still using wweisel498@aol.com in his iHub profile. rumor has it that he just heard about the book, btw. "not worth a PR" was supposedly overheard somewhere.
any idea where the ABB money went?!?
bloated comp scheme makes it fair game.
IMO lying to shareholders is inconsiderate.
so, now you're admitting he's on his "deathbed"?
"a few acquisitions after the settlement"? well there was that rumor about shopping for a yacht, but beyond that, all i know of is what looks like that Cronyism Nonsense Crap (aka "CNC") garage, the AL_Fleming Show, throwing more money into the swampland quicksand.
too bad iHub doesn't allow arabic characters, i wonder if in the middle east they consider that "subsidiary" to be The Tronics Service.
They Call It Stormy Monday...
touched a nerve, eh?
word is that he has a terminal illness for many months and that church has been circulating requests for prayers since at least May. http://www.ourladyoflight.com/5.06.pdf
yeah, bloated comp packages and absurd promotions aren't "real issues" for you and your ilk.
okay, here's one for you: whattaya think stormy455 found in the dumpster?
here's another: where did all the ABB money go?
is gartlan still alive?
http://www.ourladyoflight.com/7.15.pdf
gartlan's health issues were apparently kept way under the radar by management from what i've heard, but didn't weisel know that gartlan was terminally ill when he actually promoted him to these roles that sound so filled with promise and excitement? i doubt the guy has even been to work in who-knows-how-long, yet the PRs indicate substantially increased responsibilities?!?
seriously, it's unfortunate the guy is gonna die soon, but from the view of a shareholder, one can only wonder what was really going on there. my guess is it was some sweetheart "golden parachute" sort of thing for one of weisel's loyal buddies done totally at the expense of the company and investors, and that little if any benefit(s) ever found their way to shareholders.
one of the non-insniders recently asked about the appointment of VanDelay, and why it did not get more discussion here. maybe VanDelay is appropriate, maybe not. one thing i know for sure is a shareholder tried for weeks to reach VanDelay by phone and was disregarded (and we recently learned of Arrow's desire to make an introduction to the company of a Purdue space tech DoD engineer-type and his calls were also not returned)
my DD on VanDelay hasn't turned up anything even close to what one would expect to find based on the way the non-insnider presented it, especially with all the hype about his 70+ acquisitions, or whatever the claimed number was. but perhaps focus on VanDelay is something better left for another day.
what that non-insnider's remarks did prompt in my mind was to ask myself what was really going on by promoting gartlan when he was probably in, or soon to be in, a hospital or hospice nearly full time.
Innova Robotics & Automation, Inc. Announces Executive Appointments
Kenneth D. Vanden Berg Named Chief Financial Officer; Eugene Gartlan Appointed Executive Director of Strategic Development and Named to Innova's Board of Directors
FORT MYERS, FL -- (MARKET WIRE) -- December 18, 2006
{snip}
Mr. Weisel added, "Gene Gartlan's appointment as Executive Director of Strategic Development is designed to accelerate our growth strategy, underscoring our commitment to building the Company both organically and through acquisition. Mr. Gartlan has served our management team well as CFO, and we look forward to tapping his executive skill set and knowledge of a wide range of industries to help us identify opportunities to expand our business going forward. In addition, we welcome Mr. Gartlan to our Board of Directors, a move that enhances his advisory role at Innova and strengthens our Board." http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=712594
Innova Robotics & Automation Issues Update From Chairman and CEO Walter K. Weisel
FORT MYERS, FL -- (MARKET WIRE) -- February 22, 2007
{snip}
-- Eugene Gartlan, formerly CFO, was appointed Executive Director of Strategic Development, and also named to the Company's Board of Directors. http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=727186
yeah, maybe in some respects it's a harsh view, but i don't really care. if management uses the stock like a cookie jar, shareholders can hold the feet to the fire when deals are made with the devil to provide the funding.
the people who bought stock after BS statements like "fixed" rate financing @ $.40 pps, using new stock issuances "sparingly," and claiming to build shareholder value via reverse splitting, etc., etc., deserve better.
and so Harry, i don't know the answer to the question of where the ABB money went, whether it was used to pay for casa de weisel or not. you, however, have actually hinted a few times that weisel "pocketed" the cash.
for now i have strong suspicions, and expect that in the fullness of time, that the public, the robotics world, and history, will all know what happened here.
i can say that the ABB money SHOULD have been used to pay down the Cornell debt (though that is likely as obvious a statement as anyone could make here), and maybe this market cap destruction would have been avoided or at least diminished if Cornell received cash instead of stock. but i suspect it was all part of a deal with the devil, and ordinary investors are the one's footing the bill after believing in the company and the lies told.
also, IMO that stock has apparently been used with Cornell totally takes Innova out of that category of companies that an investor can perceive as one that might belong on an exchange someday (something i once totally believed btw after the CoroWare deal). instead, it's much more likely to be just another run-of-the-mill penny stock outfit.
you asked what can be done? if weisel did run this company into the ground and if he did stuff his pockets with cash while he was doing it, and made his deal with the devil in order to finance it, there are a wide variety of things that people can do to make sure that the world knows what happened here. tho i s'pose it's no wonder that so many Americans have such a low opinion of Florida in general, hey, it's the place where OJ went to buy a house after allegedly killing two people.
no matter the Heisman, NFL rushing records, etc., OJ's place in history is sealed. so too might the documentation of this company be preserved for all to know... all the Frankenfinkleburger awards in the world won't prevent it from being known.
maybe somebody is even planning to develop a comprehensive DD website dedicated to what went down here, something for posterity that will outlive gartlan, weisel, and all the rest of 'em?
btw, wweisel498@aol.com is still listed on Raynell1's iHub profile. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/profile.asp?User=103745
another one?
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/profile.asp?user=106654
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"As a fully-compliant SEC reporting company,..." that's sorta funny aries, in a sick way.
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supposedly up to 17.5M shares per filings for the Cornell debt (principal).
The total number of shares sold herewith includes the following shares owned by or to be issued to Cornell Capital Partners LP: (i) up to 17,500,000 shares issuable upon conversion of our principal amount $2,825,000 10% secured convertible debentures, which are convertible into shares of our common stock at a fixed price equal to $.40 per share
this whole episode started w/around 79.4M shares OS post-RS, and it's now at 94M per chunga, or, a ballpark of 14.6M shares issued since the RS (or, almost 20% dilution).
the other 12.2M shares in the registration (total 26.8M) are supposedly for warrants:
(ii) 1,000,000 shares issuable upon exercise of warrants at a price equal to $.50 per share, (ii) 1,500,000 shares issuable upon exercise of warrants at a price equal to $1.00 per share, (iii) 2,300,000 shares issuable upon exercise of warrants at a price equal to $0.25 per share, and (iv) 2,000,000 shares issuable upon exercise of warrants at a price equal to $0.65 per share, and (v) 2,500,000 shares issuable upon exercise of warrants at a price equal to $0.75 per share,.
and
This Offering
Shares offered by Selling Stockholders
Up to 26,800,000 shares, based on current market prices, including (i) up to 17,500,000 shares issuable upon conversion of our principal amount $2,825,000 10% secured convertible debentures, which are convertible into shares of our common stock at a fixed price equal to $.40 per share, (ii) 1,000,000 shares issuable upon exercise of warrants at a price equal to $.50 per share, (ii) 1,500,000 shares issuable upon exercise of warrants at a price equal to $1.00 per share, (iii) 2,300,000 shares issuable upon exercise of warrants at a price equal to $0.25 per share, (iv) 2,000,000 shares issuable upon exercise of warrants at a price equal to $0.65 per share, and (v) 2,500,000 shares issuable upon exercise of warrants at a price equal to $0.75 per share.
This number represents approximately 33.72% of our current outstanding stock.
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1156784/000114420406050988/v059435_sb2-a.htm
wonder just how many of those shares were issued at "a fixed price equal to $.40 per share,..."?!?!
here's some Cornell 411 from sharesleuth.com
"A closer look at that network revealed at least three people who did prison time in connection with previous fraud schemes and three others who either settled civil fraud charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission or were found guilty by a jury.
The network also included several more people who previously were suspended or barred by the National Association of Securities Dealers for violating brokerage industry rules.
Companies linked to the network have done numerous deals with Cornell Capital Partners LP, one of the top hedge funds providing PIPE (Private Investment in Public Equity) financing to penny stock companies."
there's more ---> http://sharesleuth.com/2007/05/connecting_the_companies.html
why didn't weisel pay off the Cornell debt with the ABB settlement? where did the ABB money go?
why is Raynell1 still using wweisel498@aol.com as his iHub profile e-mail? http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/profile.asp?User=103745
builds custom houses... one at a time...?
hey, it's JMO!
sure thing chunga.
scratch the father-in-law as generous landlord thing. somebody else w/same last name per obits and Tim's been in the X-Files for about 3 years now.
these guys? still under SEC investigation?
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.asp?Message_id=21248139
what exactly is the purpose of Innova Robotics, Inc.?
and what exactly is Tim's father-in-law's role in all of this stuff, besides perhaps being a generous landlord?
http://www.sunbiz.org/scripts/cordet.exe?action=DETFIL&inq_doc_number=P03000100287&inq_came_...
http://www.sunbiz.org/COR/2007/0504/10053641.tif
Ecosphere Announces $8 Million Technology Sale in the Clean Tech Market
STUART, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Ecosphere Technologies, Inc. (OTC BB: ESPH), a provider of clean air and water technologies that solve business and environmental challenges, announced today it has signed a binding letter of intent to sell $8 million of patents and environmental marine robotic technology. The technology sale is the first for Ecosphere since establishing its Innovation Network to create and develop patented clean air and water technologies.
Ecosphere's Chief Executive Officer, Dennis McGuire, stated, “This is a significant event for shareholders of Ecosphere. The sale of our first environmental technology provides proof of concept of our Innovation Network business model. We develop clean technologies from patenting, prototyping, and finally industry acceptance by an eventual sale and involvement in the technology going forward with the customer. Ecosphere will be a 5% owner in the new marine coating removal company that will be formed around our patented robotic technology. Ecosphere Technologies has an extensive patent portfolio of intellectual property, with respect to coating removal from aircraft and automobiles, which are not being sold as part of the transaction. Ecosphere will focus on developing these technologies while also executing its previously stated strategic plan of developing and marketing its state-of-the-art water filtration and renewable energy technologies to customers and licensing or selling it to larger corporations in the clean technology sector.”
The Company’s Chief Financial Officer, J. C. "Jim" Rushing III, commented, “This event is certainly the most profitable transaction in the Company’s history and will produce a multi-million dollar EBITDA in 2007 for Ecosphere. The consummation of this sale will validate the ability of Ecosphere to produce technology that is recognized by the clean technology community as a source of profitable investment.”
Stephen R. Johnson, President of UltraStrip Envirobotic Solutions stated, “It is gratifying to have participated in the development of Dennis McGuire's original concept for automated ultra high pressure hydro jetting from the early prototype into full maturity as a patented, customer accepted product. It is a tribute to his vision and persistence that we have now validated the capability of this technology to revolutionize shipyards all over the globe to improve productivity, worker safety, and to protect the environment. Truly, everyone profits."
About Ecosphere Technologies:
Ecosphere Technologies, Inc. (ESPH) develops and commercializes water and renewable energy technologies. Since it was founded in 1998, Ecosphere's mission has been to bring clean technologies to commercial reality. Ecosphere's products have been successfully licensed and commercialized by major corporations and have been used in several large-scale and sustainable applications across industries, nations and ecosystems. Ecosphere holds an extensive patent portfolio of clean air and water technologies. For more information, please visit: www.ecospheretech.com.
Safe Harbor
This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (the "Act"), including, but not limited to the closing of sale of the robotic coating removal patents and other assets and the reaching of other profitable achievements. Additionally, words such as "seek," "intend," "believe," "plan," "estimate," "expect," "anticipate" and other similar expressions are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Act. Some or all of the events or results anticipated by these forward- looking statements may not occur. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include the results of the buyer’s further due diligence, obtaining the necessary closing opinions, worldwide economic conditions, the potential of future competition and the ability of Ecosphere and third parties to consummate sales or licensing transactions at acceptable valuations. Further information on the Company's risk factors is contained in its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the prospectus filed February 1, 2007 and the Form 10-KSB for the year ended December 31, 2006. Ecosphere does not undertake any duty nor does it intend to update the results of these forward-looking statements.
To be included in Ecosphere's e-mail list click below: http://www.b2i.us/irpass.asp?BzID=1368&to=ea&s=0
Contacts
Ecosphere Technologies, Inc.
Alex Rivera, 772-287-4846
or
Alliance Advisors, LLC
Thomas Walsh, 212-398-3486
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20070731005...
O/S up almost 4M since last month.
June 20th O/S = 90,269,430
1 month increase = 3,928,860
HarryO on the linguistics interpretation!
here's a bit more:
July 24th PR
Innova operates through four subsidiaries, Robotic Workspace Technologies (RWT), CoroWare Technologies, Innova Robotics, and Altronics Service which offer convergent technology and expertise that bridge robots, facilities and business systems for greater functionality and ROA. Visit Innova online at www.InnovaRoboticsAutomation.com.
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=754047
July 30th PR
Innova operates through four subsidiaries, CoroWare Technologies, Altronics Service, Robotic Workspace Technologies (RWT), and Innova Robotics, which offer convergent technology and expertise for greater functionality and ROA. Visit Innova online at www.InnovaRoboticsAutomation.com.
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=755765
not listed in alphabetical order, perhaps by size of revs generated?
you seem really upset... i have a feeling you are on the brink of something really substantial too, "AS" if. but i'm just being conservative. are you a "company buddy"?
"Lets focus on the company buddy...Nobody is an insider here!!"
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=21671625
heh. Raynell1 seems to think he is.
http://www.roboticsonline.com/public/articles/articlesdetails.cfm?id=1456
For More Information Contact:
Walter K. Weisel
CEO
Robotic Workspace Technologies, Inc. (RWT)
16266 San Carlos Boulevard
Fort Myers, FL 33908
Phone: (239) 466-0488
Email: wweisel498@aol.com
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/profile.asp?User=103745
Profile for Raynell1
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EMail Address: wweisel498@aol.com
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"I know we definitely saw some shady stuff last week..."
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=21671260
ain't that the truth, "AS."
Why did you sign your first iHub post "AS"?
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=21444685
Why do you capitalize the word "Management"?
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=21665361
Why does Raynell1's iHub profile still include the e-mail address wweisel498@aol.com?
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/profile.asp?User=103745
Why do Raynell1 and robotic stocks both claim to be from "tampa florida"?
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/profile.asp?user=104215
Why did today's PR capitalize the word "Integrity"?
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=755765
"we expect to have approximately $1,800,000 in revenues for the first half of 2007,"
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=755765
Q1 (2007) revs = $671,679.00
$1.8M - $671,679.00 = est. Q2 (2007) revs of $1,128,321.00
roughly a 70% Q-to-Q est. revs increase -- up from a 37% sequential Q-to-Q revs increase (Q4 2006 v. Q1 2007)
Q2 (2007) revs = $1,128,321 (est.)
Q1 (2007) revs = $671,679
Q4 (2006) revs = $489,731
maybe this is what robotic stocks meant with his "making money," statement?
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=21444978
whether it translates into his claimed "now they reported profits and growth!" remains to be seen. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=21475257
link back for more info
The Real Transformers
By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG
Published: July 29, 2007
Researchers are programming robots to learn in humanlike ways and show humanlike traits. Could this be the beginning of robot consciousness — and of a better understanding of ourselves?
I was introduced to my first sociable robot on a sunny afternoon in June. The robot, developed by graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was named Mertz. It had camera sensors behind its eyes, which were programmed to detect faces; when it found mine, the robot was supposed to gaze at me directly to initiate a kind of conversation. But Mertz was on the fritz that day, and one of its designers, a dark-haired young woman named Lijin Aryananda, was trying to figure out what was wrong with it. Mertz was getting fidgety, Aryananda was getting frustrated and I was starting to feel as if I were peeking behind the curtain of the Wizard of Oz.
Robot Life Weight-loss coaches called Automs are about to receive a tryout. How would you react to hearing a robot comment, "It looks like you've had a little more to eat than usual recently"? Leonardo, another M.I.T. robot, peeks from behind.
Mertz consists of a metal head on a flexible neck. It has a childish computer-generated voice and expressive brows above its Ping-Pong-ball eyes — features designed to make a human feel kindly toward the robot and enjoy talking to it. But when something is off in the computer code, Mertz starts to babble like Chatty Cathy on speed, and it becomes clear that behind those big black eyes there’s truly nobody home.
In a video of Aryananda and Mertz in happier times, Aryananda can be seen leaning in, trying to get the robot’s attention by saying, “I’m your mother.” She didn’t seem particularly maternal on that June day, and Mertz didn’t seem too happy, either. It directed a stream of sentences at me in apparently random order: “You are too far away.” “Please teach me some colors.” “You are too far away.”
Maybe something was wrong with its camera sensor, Aryananda said. Maybe that was why it kept looking up at the ceiling and complaining. As she fiddled with the computer that runs the robot, I smiled politely — almost as much for the robot’s sake, I realized, as for the robot maker’s — and thought: Well, maybe it is the camera sensor, but if this thing wails “You are too far away” one more time, I’m going to throttle it.
At the Humanoid Robotics Group at M.I.T., a robot’s “humanoid” qualities can include fallibility and whininess as much as physical traits like head, arms and torso. This is where our cultural images of robots as superhumans run headlong into the reality of motors, actuators and cold computer code. Today’s humanoids are not the sophisticated machines we might have expected by now, which just shows how complicated a task it was that scientists embarked on 15 years ago when they began working on a robot that could think. They are not the docile companions of our collective dreams, robots designed to flawlessly serve our dinners, fold our clothes and do the dull or dangerous jobs that we don’t want to do. Nor are they the villains of our collective nightmares, poised for robotic rebellion against humans whose machine creations have become smarter than the humans themselves. They are, instead, hunks of metal tethered to computers, which need their human designers to get them going and to smooth the hiccups along the way.
But these early incarnations of sociable robots are also much more than meets the eye. Bill Gates has said that personal robotics today is at the stage that personal computers were in the mid-1970s. Thirty years ago, few people guessed that the bulky, slow computers being used by a handful of businesses would by 2007 insinuate themselves into our lives via applications like Google, e-mail, YouTube, Skype and MySpace. In much the same way, the robots being built today, still unwieldy and temperamental even in the most capable hands, probably offer only hints of the way we might be using robots in another 30 years.
Mertz and its brethren — at the Humanoid Robotics lab, at the Personal Robotics Lab across the street in another M.I.T. building and at similar laboratories in other parts of the United States, in Europe and in Japan — are still less like thinking, autonomous creatures than they are like fancy puppets that frequently break down. But what the M.I.T. robots may lack in looks or finesse, they make up for in originality: they are programmed to learn the way humans learn, through their bodies, their senses and the feedback generated by their own behavior. It is a more organic style of learning — though organic is, of course, a curious word to reach for to describe creatures that are so clearly manufactured.
Sociable robots come equipped with the very abilities that humans have evolved to ease our interactions with one another: eye contact, gaze direction, turn-taking, shared attention. They are programmed to learn the way humans learn, by starting with a core of basic drives and abilities and adding to them as their physical and social experiences accrue. People respond to the robots’ social cues almost without thinking, and as a result the robots give the impression of being somehow, improbably, alive.
At the moment, no single robot can do very much. The competencies have been cobbled together: one robot is able to grab a soup can when you tell it to put it on a shelf; another will look you in the eye and make babbling noises in keeping with the inflection of your voice. One robot might be able to learn some new words; another can take the perspective of a human collaborator; still another can recognize itself in a mirror. Taken together, each small accomplishment brings the field closer to a time when a robot with true intelligence — and with perhaps other human qualities, too, like emotions and autonomy — is at least a theoretical possibility. If that possibility comes to pass, what then? Will these new robots be capable of what we recognize as learning? Of what we recognize as consciousness? Will it know that it is a robot and that you are not?
The word “robot” was popularized in 1920, in the play “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” commonly called “R.U.R.,” by the Czech writer Karel Capek. The word comes from the Czech “robota,” meaning forced labor or drudgery. In the world of R.U.R., Robots (always with a capital R) are built to be factory workers, meaning they are designed as simply as possible, with no extraneous frills. “Robots are not people,” says the man who manufactures them. “They are mechanically more perfect than we are, they have an astounding intellectual capacity, but they have no soul.” Capek’s Robots are biological, not mechanical. The thing that separates them from humans is not the material they are made of — their skin is real skin; their blood, real blood — but the fact that they are built rather than born.
What separates the current crop of humanoid robots from humans is something harder to name. Because if roboticists succeed in programming their machines with a convincing version of social intelligence, with feelings that look like real feelings and thoughts that look like real thoughts, then all our fancy notions about our place in the universe start to get a little wobbly.
Eliminating the Cognition Box
We already live with many objects that are, in one sense, robots: the voice in a car’s Global Positioning System, for instance, which senses shifts in its own location and can change its behavior accordingly. But scientists working in the field mean something else when they talk about sociable robots. To qualify as that kind of robot, they say, a machine must have at least two characteristics. It must be situated, and it must be embodied. Being situated means being able to sense its environment and be responsive to it; being embodied means having a physical body through which to experience the world. A G.P.S. robot is situated but not embodied, while an assembly-line robot that repeats the same action over and over again is embodied but not situated. Sociable robots must be both, as well as exhibiting an understanding of social beings.
The push for sociable robots comes from two directions. One is pragmatic: if Bill Gates is right and the robots are coming, they should be designed in a way that makes them fit most naturally into the lives of ordinary people. The other is more theoretical: if a robot can be designed to learn the same way natural creatures do, this could be a significant boost for the field of artificial intelligence.
Both pragmatism and theory drive Rodney Brooks, author of “Flesh and Machines,” who until the end of last month was director of M.I.T.’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, home to the Humanoid Robotics lab that houses Mertz. Brooks is an electric, exaggerated personality, an Australian native with rubbery features and bulgy blue eyes. That mobile face and Aussie accent helped turn him into a cult figure after the 1997 theatrical release of “Fast, Cheap & Out of Control,” a documentary by Errol Morris that featured Brooks — along with a wild animal trainer, a topiary gardener and an expert in naked mole rats — as a man whose obsessions made him something of a misfit, a visionary with a restless, uncategorizable genius.
As Brooks sat with me in his office and reflected on his career from the vantage point of a 52-year-old about to return to full-time research — a man going through what he called “a scientific midlife crisis” — a theme emerged. Each time he faced a problem in artificial intelligence, he said, he looked for the implicit assumption that everyone else took for granted, and then he tried to negate it. In the 1980s, the implicit assumption was that abstract reasoning was the highest form of intelligence, the one that programmers should strive to imitate. This led to a focus on symbolic processing, on tough tasks like playing chess or solving problems in algebra or calculus. Tasks that, as Brooks slyly put it in “Flesh and Machines,” “highly educated male scientists found challenging.”
But Brooks wanted to build an artificial intelligence system that did the supposedly simple things, not mental acrobatics like chess but things that come naturally to any 4-year-old and that were eluding the symbolic processing capabilities of the computers. These cognitive tasks — visually distinguishing a cup from a chair, walking on two legs, making your way from bedroom to bathroom — were difficult to write into computer code because they did not require an explicit chain of reasoning; they just happened. And the way they happened was grounded in the fact that the 4-year-old had a body and that each action the child took provided more sensory information and, ultimately, more learning. This approach has come to be known as embodied intelligence.
That’s where the robots came in. Robots had bodies, and they could be programmed to use those bodies as part of their data gathering. Instead of starting out with everything they needed to know already programmed in, these robots would learn about the world the way babies do, starting with some simple competencies and adding to them through sensory input. For babies, that sensory input included seeing, touching and balancing. For robots, it would mean input from mechanical sensors like video cameras and gyroscopes.
In 1993, Brooks started to develop a new robot, a humanoid equipped with artificial intelligence, according to this new logic. His motivation was more theoretical than practical: to offer a new way of thinking about intelligence itself. Most artificial-intelligence programs at the time were designed from the top down, connecting all relevant processes of a robot — raw sensory input, perception, motor activity, behavior — in what was called a cognition box, a sort of centralized zone for all high-level computation. A walking robot, for instance, was programmed to go through an elaborate planning process before it took a step. It had to scan its location, obtain a three-dimensional model of the terrain, plan a path between any obstacles it had detected, plan where to put its right foot along that path, plan the pressures on each joint to get its foot to that spot, plan how to twist the rest of its body to make its right foot move and plan the same set of behaviors for placing its left foot at the next spot along the path, and then finally it would move its feet.
Brooks turned the top-down approach on its head; he did away with the cognition box altogether. “No cognition,” he wrote in “Flesh and Machines.” “Just sensing and action.” In effect, he wrote, he was leaving out what was thought to be the “intelligence” part of “artificial intelligence.” The way Brooks’s robot was designed to start walking, he wrote, was “by moving its feet.”
This was the approach that Brooks and his team used to design their humanoid robot. This one couldn’t walk. The robot, named Cog, was stationary, a big man-size metal torso with big man-size arms that spanned six and a half feet when extended. But it was designed to think. Perched on a pedestal almost three feet high, it seemed to hulk over its human creators, dominating the Humanoid Robotics lab from 1993 until it was retired 11 years later and put on permanent display at the M.I.T. Museum. (It has been lent out as part of a traveling exhibit, “Robots + Us,” currently at the Notebaert Nature Museum in Chicago.) Its presence was disarming, mostly because it was programmed to look at anything that moved. As one visitor to the lab put it: “Cog ‘noticed’ me soon after I entered its room. Its head turned to follow me, and I was embarrassed to note that this made me happy.”
Cog was designed to learn like a child, and that’s how people tended to treat it, like a child. Videos of graduate students show them presenting Cog with a red ball to track, a waggling hand to look at, a bright pink Slinky to manipulate — the toys children are given to explore the world, to learn some basic truths about anatomy and physics and social interactions. As the robot moved in response to the students’ instructions, it exhibited qualities that signaled “creature.” The human brain has evolved to interpret certain traits as indicators of autonomous life: when something moves on its own and with apparent purpose, directs its gaze toward the person with whom it interacts, follows people with its eyes and backs away if someone gets too close. Cog did all these things, which made people who came in contact with it think of it as something alive. Even without a face, even without skin, even without arms that looked like arms or any legs at all, there was something creaturelike about Cog. It took very little, just the barest suggestion of a human form and a pair of eyes, for people to react to the robot as a social being.
In addition, Cog was programmed to learn new things based on its sensory and motor inputs, much as babies learn new things by seeing how their bodies react to and affect their surroundings. Cog’s arm motors, for instance, were calibrated to respond to the weight of a held object. When a student handed a Slinky to Cog, the oscillators in its elbowlike joints gave feedback about the toy’s weight and position. After a few hours of practice, the robot could make the Slinky slither by raising and lowering its arms. If it was given a heavier Slinky or a drumstick, it would be able to adjust its motions accordingly. The learning was minimal, but it was a start — and it was, significantly, learning derived from the input of motors, gears and oscillators, the robot equivalent of muscles.
Cog was able to learn other things too, including finding and naming objects it had never seen before. (The robot had microphones for ears and was equipped with some basic speech recognition software and an artificial voice.) But while Brooks showed a kind of paternal delight in what the robot could do, he was hesitant to give it the label of “learning” per se. “I am so careful about saying that any of our robots ‘can learn,’ ” he wrote in an e-mail message. “They can only learn certain things, just like a rat can learn only certain things and a chimpanzee can only learn certain things and even [you] can only learn certain things.” Even now, 14 years after the Cog project began, each of today’s humanoid robots can still only learn a very small number of things.
Cynthia Breazeal came to Brooks’s lab as a graduate student in 1990 and did much of the basic computational work on Cog. In 1996, when it was time for Breazeal to choose a doctoral project, she decided to develop a sociable robot of her own. Her goals were as much pragmatic as theoretical; she said she hoped her robot would be a model for how to design the domestic robots of the future. The one she built had an animated head with big blue eyes, flirty lashes, red lips that curved upward or downward depending on its mood and pink ears that did the same. She called the robot Kismet, after the Turkish word for fate.
How Smart Can a Robot Be?
Kismet was the most expressive sociable robot built to that point, even though it consisted of only a hinged metal head on a heavy base, with wires and motors visible and eyes and lips stuck on almost like an afterthought. Breazeal is now 39 years old, an associate professor at M.I.T. and director of the Personal Robotics Group. She retains a polished, youthful prettiness, amplified these days by a late pregnancy with her third child. When she talks about Kismet, she is careful to call it “it” instead of a more animate pronoun like “he” or “she.” But her voice softens, her rapid-fire speech slows a little and it can be difficult to tell from her tone of voice whether she’s describing her robot or one of her two preschool-age sons.
The robot expressed a few basic emotions through changes in its facial expression — that is, through the positioning of its eyes, lips, eyebrows and pink paper ears. The emotions were easy for an observer to recognize: anger, fear, disgust, joy, surprise, sorrow. According to psychologists, these expressions are automatic, unconscious and universally understood. So when the drivers on Kismet’s motors were set to make surprise look like raised eyebrows, wide-open eyes and a rounded mouth, the human observer knew exactly what was going on.
Kismet’s responses to stimulation were so socially appropriate that some people found themselves thinking that the robot was actually feeling the emotions it was displaying. Breazeal realized how complicated it was to try to figure out what, or even whether, Kismet was feeling. “Robots are not human, but humans aren’t the only things that have emotions,” she said. “The question for robots is not, Will they ever have human emotions? Dogs don’t have human emotions, either, but we all agree they have genuine emotions. The question is, What are the emotions that are genuine for the robot?”
Unlike Cog’s, Kismet’s learning was more social than cognitive. What made the robot so lifelike was its ability to have what Breazeal called “proto-conversations” with a variety of human interlocutors. Run by 15 parallel computers operating simultaneously, Kismet was programmed to have the same basic motivations as a 6-month-old child: the drive for novelty, the drive for social interaction and the drive for periodic rest. The behaviors to achieve these goals, like the ability to look for brightly colored objects or to recognize the human face, were also part of Kismet’s innate program. So were the facial behaviors that reflected Kismet’s mood states — aroused, bored or neutral — which changed according to whether the robot’s basic drives were being satisfied.
The robot was a model for how these desires and emotions are reflected in facial expression and how those expressions in turn affect social interaction. Take the drive for novelty. With no stimulus nearby, Kismet’s eyes would droop in apparent boredom. Then a lovely thing happened. If there was a person nearby, she would see Kismet’s boredom and wave a toy in front of the robot’s eyes. This activated Kismet’s program to look for brightly colored objects, which in turn moved the robot into its “aroused” affective state, with a facial expression with the hallmarks of happiness. The happy face, in turn, led the human to feel good about the interaction and to wave the toy some more — a socially gratifying feedback loop akin to playing with a baby.
Kismet is now retired and on permanent display, inert as a bronze statue, at the M.I.T. Museum. The most famous robot now in Breazeal’s lab, the one that the graduate students compete for time with, looks nothing like Kismet. It is a three-foot-tall, head-to-toe creature, sort of a badger, sort of a Yoda, with big eyes, enormous pointy ears, a mouth with soft lips and tiny teeth, a furry belly, furry legs and pliable hands with real-looking fingernails. The reason the robot, called Leonardo (Leo for short), is so lifelike is that it was made by Hollywood animatronics experts at the Stan Winston Studio. (Breazeal consulted with the studio on the construction of the robotic teddy bear in the 2001 Steven Spielberg film “A.I.”) As soon as Leo arrived in the lab, Breazeal said, her students started dismantling it, stripping out all the remote-control wiring and configuring it instead with a brain and body that operated not by remote control but by computer-based artificial intelligence.
I had studied the videos posted on the M.I.T. Media Lab Web site, and I was fond of Leo even before I got to Cambridge. I couldn’t wait to see it close up. I loved the steadiness of its gaze, the slow way it nodded its head and blinked when it understood something, the little Jack Benny shrug it gave when it didn’t. I loved how smart it seemed. In one video, two graduate students, Jesse Gray and Matt Berlin, engaged it in an exercise known in psychology as the false-belief test. Leo performed remarkably. Some psychologists contend that very young children think all minds are permeable and that everyone knows exactly what they themselves know. Older children, after the age of about 4 or 5, have learned that different people have different minds and that it is possible for someone else to hold beliefs that the children themselves know to be false. Leo performed in the video like a sophisticated 5-year-old, one who had developed what psychologists call a theory of mind.
In the video, Leo watches Jesse Gray, who is wearing a red T-shirt, put a bag of chips into Box 1 and a bag of cookies into Box 2, while Matt Berlin, in a brown T-shirt, also watches. After Berlin leaves the room, Gray switches the items, so that now the cookies are in Box 1 and the chips are in Box 2. Gray locks the two boxes and leaves the room, and Leo now knows what Gray knows: the new location for the chips and cookies. But it also knows that Berlin doesn’t know about the switch. Berlin still thinks there are chips in Box 1.
The amazing part comes next. Berlin, in the brown T-shirt, comes back into the room and tries to open the lock on the first box. Leo sees Berlin struggling, and it decides to help by pressing a lever that will deliver to Berlin the item he’s looking for. Leo presses the lever for the chips. It knows that there are cookies in the box that Berlin is trying to open, but it also knows — and this is the part that struck me as so amazing — that Berlin is trying to open the box because he wants chips. It knows that Berlin has a false belief about what is in the first box, and it also knows what Berlin wants. If Leo had indeed passed this important developmental milestone, I wondered, could it also be capable of all sorts of other emotional tasks: empathy, collaboration, social bonding, deception?
Unfortunately, Leo was turned off the day I arrived, inertly presiding over one corner of the lab like a fuzzy Buddha. Berlin and Gray and their colleague, Andrea Thomaz, a postdoctoral researcher, said that they would be happy to turn on the robot for me but that the process would take time and that I would have to come back the next morning. They also wanted to know what it was in particular that I wanted to see Leo do because, it turned out, the robot could go through its paces only when the right computer program was geared up. This was my first clue that Leo maybe wasn’t going to turn out to be quite as clever as I had thought.
When I came back the next day, Berlin and Gray were ready to go through the false-belief routine with Leo. But it wasn’t what I expected. I could now see what I had seen on the video. But in person, I could also peek behind the metaphoric curtain and see something that the video camera hadn’t revealed: the computer monitor that showed what Leo’s cameras were actually seeing and another monitor that showed the architecture of Leo’s brain. I could see that this wasn’t a literal demonstration of a human “theory of mind” at all. Yes, there was some robotic learning going on, but it was mostly a feat of brilliant computer programming, combined with some dazzling Hollywood special effects.
It turned out Leo wasn’t seeing the young men’s faces or bodies; it was seeing something else. Gray and Berlin were each wearing a headband and a glove, which I hadn’t noticed in the video, and the robot’s optical motion tracking system could see nothing but the unique arrangements of reflective tape on their accessories. What the robot saw were bunches of dots. Dots in one geometric arrangement meant Person A; in a different arrangement, they meant Person B. There was a different arrangement of tape on the two different snacks, too, and also on the two different locks for the boxes. On a big monitor alongside Leo was an image of what was going on inside its “brain”: one set of dots represented Leo’s brain; another set of dots represented Berlin’s brain; a third set of dots represented Gray’s. The robot brain was programmed to keep track of it all.
Leo did not learn about false beliefs in the same way a child did. Robot learning, I realized, can be defined as making new versions of a robot’s original instructions, collecting and sorting data in a creative way. So the learning taking place here was not Leo’s ability to keep track of which student believed what, since that skill had been programmed into the robot. The learning taking place was Leo’s ability to make inferences about Gray’s and Berlin’s actions and intentions. Seeing that Berlin’s hand was near the lock on Box 1, Leo had to search through its internal set of task models, which had been written into its computer program, and figure out what it meant for a hand to be moving near a lock and not near, say, a glass of water. Then it had to go back to that set of task models to decide why Berlin might have been trying to open the box — that is, what his ultimate goal was. Finally, it had to convert its drive to be helpful, another bit of information written into its computer program, into behavior. Leo had to learn that by pressing a particular lever, it could give Berlin the chips he was looking for. Leo’s robot learning consisted of integrating the group of simultaneous computer programs with which it had begun.
Leo’s behavior might not have been an act of real curiosity or empathy, but it was an impressive feat nonetheless. Still, I felt a little twinge of disappointment, and for that I blame Hollywood. I’ve been exposed to robot hype for years, from the TV of my childhood — Rosie the robot maid on “The Jetsons,” that weird talking garbage-can robot on “Lost in Space” — to the more contemporary robots-gone-wild of films like “Blade Runner” and “I, Robot.” Despite my basic cold, hard rationalism, I was prepared to be bowled over by a robot that was adorable, autonomous and smart. What I saw in Leo was no small accomplishment in terms of artificial intelligence and the modeling of human cognition, but it was just not quite the accomplishment I had been expecting. I had been expecting something closer to “real.”
Why We Might Want to Hug a Desk Lamp
I had been seduced by Leo’s big brown eyes, just like almost everyone else who encounters the robot, right down to the students who work on its innards. “There we all are, soldering Leonardo’s motors, aware of how it looks from behind, aware that its brain is just a bunch of wires,” Guy Hoffman, a graduate student, told me. Yet as soon as they get in front of it, he said, the students see its eyes move, see its head turn, see the programmed chest motion that looks so much like breathing, and they start talking about Leo as a living thing.
People do the same thing with a robotic desk lamp that Hoffman has designed to move in relation to a user’s motions, casting light wherever it senses the user might need it. It’s just a lamp with a bulky motor-driven neck; it looks nothing like a living creature. But, he said, “as soon as it moves on its own and faces you, you say: ‘Look, it’s trying to help me.’ ‘Why is it doing that?’ ‘What does it want from me?’ ”
When something is self-propelled and seems to engage in goal-directed behavior, we are compelled to interpret those actions in social terms, according to Breazeal. That social tendency won’t turn off when we interact with robots. But instead of fighting it, she said, “we should embrace it so we can design robots in a way that makes sense, so we can integrate robots into our lives.”
The brain activity of people who interacted with Cog and Kismet, and with their successors like Mertz, is probably much the same as the brain activity of someone interacting with a real person. Neuroscientists recently found a collection of brain cells called mirror neurons, which become activated in two different contexts: when someone performs an activity and when someone watches another person perform the same activity. Mirror-neuron activation is thought to be the root of such basic human drives as imitation, learning and empathy. Now it seems that mirror neurons fire not only when watching a person but also when watching a humanoid robot. Scientists at the University of California, San Diego, reported last year that brain scans of people looking at videos of a robotic hand grasping things showed activity in the mirror neurons. The work is preliminary, but it suggests something that people in the M.I.T. robotics labs have already seen: when these machines move, when they direct their gaze at you or lean in your direction, they feel like real creatures.
Would a Robot Make a Better Boyfriend?
Cog, Kismet and Mertz might feel real, but they look specifically and emphatically robotic. Their gears and motors show; they have an appealing retro-techno look, evoking old-fashioned images of the future, not too far from the Elektro robot of the 1939 World’s Fair, which looked a little like the Tin Man of “The Wizard of Oz.” This design was in part a reflection of a certain kind of aesthetic sensibility and in part a deliberate decision to avoid making robots that look too much like us.
Another robot-looking robot is Domo, whose stylized shape somehow evokes the Chrysler Building almost as much as it does a human. It can respond to some verbal commands, like “Here, Domo,” and can close its hand around whatever is placed in its palm, the way a baby does. Shaking hands with Domo feels almost like shaking hands with something alive. The robot’s designer, Aaron Edsinger, has programmed it to do some domestic tricks. It can grab a box of crackers placed in its hand and put it on a shelf and then grab a bag of coffee beans — with a different grip, based on sensors in its mechanical hand — and put it, too, on a shelf. Edsinger calls this “helping with chores.” Domo tracks objects with its big blue eyes and responds to verbal instructions in a high-pitched artificial voice, repeating the words it hears and occasionally adding an obliging “O.K.”
Domo’s looks are just barely humanoid, but that probably works to its advantage. Scientists believe that the more a robot looks like a person, the more favorably we tend to view it, but only up to a point. After that, our response slips into what the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori has called the “uncanny valley.” We start expecting too much of the robots because they so closely resemble real people, and when they fail to deliver, we recoil in something like disgust.
If a robot had features that made it seem, say, 50 percent human, 50 percent machine, according to this view, we would be willing to fill in the blanks and presume a certain kind of nearly human status. That is why robots like Domo and Mertz are interpreted by our brains as creaturelike. But if a robot has features that make it appear 99 percent human, the uncanny-valley theory holds that our brains get stuck on that missing 1 percent: the eyes that gaze but have no spark, the arms that move with just a little too much stiffness. This response might be akin to an adaptive revulsion at the sight of corpses. A too-human robot looks distressingly like a corpse that moves.
This zombie effect is one aspect of a new discipline that Breazeal is trying to create called human-robot interaction. Last March, Breazeal and Alan Schultz of the Naval Research Laboratory convened the field’s second annual conference in Arlington, Va., with presentations as diverse as describing how people react to instructions to “kill” a humanoid robot and a film festival featuring videos of human-robot interaction bloopers.
To some observers, the real challenge is not how to make human-robot interaction smoother and more natural but how to keep it from overshadowing, and eventually seeming superior to, a different, messier, more complicated, more flawed kind of interaction — the one between one human and another. Sherry Turkle, a professor in the Program in Science, Technology and Society at M.I.T., worries that sociable robots might be easier to deal with than people are and that one day we might actually prefer our relationships with our machines. A female graduate student once approached her after a lecture, Turkle said, and announced that she would gladly trade in her boyfriend for a sophisticated humanoid robot as long as the robot could produce what the student called “caring behavior.” “I need the feeling of civility in the house,” she told Turkle. “If the robot could provide a civil environment, I would be happy to help produce the illusion that there is somebody really with me.” What she was looking for, the student said, was a “no-risk relationship” that would stave off loneliness; a responsive robot, even if it was just exhibiting scripted behavior, seemed better to her than an unresponsive boyfriend.
The encounter horrified Turkle, who thought it revealed how dangerous, and how seductive, sociable robots could be. “They push our Darwinian buttons,” she told me. Sociable robots are programmed to exhibit the kind of behavior we have come to associate with sentience and empathy, she said, which leads us to think of them as creatures with intentions, emotions and autonomy: “You see a robot like that as a creature; you feel a desire to nurture it. And with this desire comes the fantasy of reciprocation. You begin to care for these creatures and to want the creatures to care about you.”
If Lijin Aryananda, Brooks’s former student, had ever wanted Mertz to “care” about her, she certainly doesn’t anymore. On the day she introduced me to Mertz, Aryananda was heading back to a postdoctoral research position at the University of Zurich. Her new job is in the Artificial Intelligence Lab, and she will still be working with robots, but Aryananda said she wants to get as far away as possible from humanoids and from the study of how humans and robots interact.
“Anyone who tells you that in human-robot interactions the robot is doing anything — well, he is just kidding himself,” she told me, grumpy because Mertz was misbehaving. “Whatever there is in human-robot interaction is there because the human puts it there.”
Nagging, a Killer App
The building and testing of sociable robots remains a research-based enterprise, and when the robots do make their way out of the laboratory, it is usually as part of somebody’s experiment. Breazeal is now overseeing two such projects. One is the work of Cory Kidd, a graduate student who designed and built 17 humanoid robots to serve as weight-loss coaches. The robot coach, a child-size head and torso holding a small touch screen, is called Autom. It is able, using basic artificial-voice software, to speak approximately 1,000 phrases, things like “It’s great that you’re doing well with your exercise” or “You should congratulate yourself on meeting your calorie goals today.” It is programmed to get a little more informal as time goes on: “Hello, I hope that we can work together” will eventually shift to “Hi, it’s good to see you again.” It is also programmed to refer to things that happened on other days, with statements like “It looks like you’ve had a little more to eat than usual recently.”
Kidd is recruiting 15 volunteers from around Boston to take Autom into their homes for six weeks. They will be told to interact with the robot at least once a day, recording food intake and exercise on its touch screen. The plan is to compare their experiences with those of two other groups of 15 dieters each. One group will interact with the same weight-loss coaching software through a touch screen only; the other will record daily food intake and exercise the old-fashioned way, with paper and pen. Kidd said that the study is too short-term to use weight loss as a measure of whether the robot is a useful dieting aid. But at this point, his research questions are more subjective anyway: Do participants feel more connected to the robot than they do to the touch screen? And do they think of that robot on the kitchen counter as an ally or a pest?
Breazeal’s second project is more ambitious. In collaboration with Rod Grupen, a roboticist at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, she is designing and building four toddler-size robots. Then she will put them into action at the Boston Science Museum for two weeks in June 2009. The robots, which will cost several hundred thousand dollars each, will roll around in what she calls “a kind of robot Romper Room” and interact with a stream of museum visitors. The goal is to see whether the social competencies programmed into these robots are enough to make humans comfortable interacting with them and whether people will be able to help the robots learn to do simple tasks like stacking blocks.
The bare bones of the toddler robots already exist, in the form of a robot designed in Grupen’s lab called uBot-5. A few of these uBots are now being developed for use in assisted-living centers in research designed to see how the robots interact with the frail elderly. Each uBot-5 is about three feet tall, with a big head, very long arms (long enough to touch the ground, should the arms be needed for balance) and two oversize wheels. It has big eyes, rubber balls at the ends of its arms and a video screen for a face. (Breazeal’s version will have sleek torsos, expressive faces and realistic hands.) In one slide that Grupen uses in his PowerPoint presentations, the uBot-5 robot is holding a stethoscope to the chest of a woman lying on the ground after a simulated fall. The uBot is designed to connect by video hookup to a health care practitioner, but still, the image of a robot providing even this level of emergency medical care is, to say the least, disconcerting.
Does It Know It’s a Robot?
More disconcerting still is the image of a robot looking at itself in the mirror and waving hello — a robot with a primitive version of self-awareness. A first step in this direction occurred in September 2004 with reports from Yale about Nico, a humanoid robot. Nico, its designers announced, was able to recognize itself in a mirror. One of its creators, Brian Scassellati, earned his doctorate in 2001 at M.I.T., where he worked on Cog and Kismet — to which Nico bears a family resemblance. Nico has visible workings, a head, arms and torso made of steel and a graceful tilt to its shoulders and neck. Like the M.I.T. robots, Nico has no legs, because Scassellati, now an associate professor of computer science at Yale, wanted to concentrate on what it could do with its upper body and, in particular, the cameras in its eyes.
Here is how Nico learned to recognize itself. The robot had a camera behind its eye, which was pointed toward a mirror. When a reflection came back, Nico was programmed to assign the image a score based on whether it was most likely to be “self,” “another” or “neither.” Nico was also programmed to move its arm, which sent back information to the computer about whether the arm was moving. If the arm was moving and the reflection in the mirror was also moving, the program assigned the image a high probability of being “self.” If the reflection moved but Nico’s arm was not moving, the image was assigned a high probability of being “another.” If the image did not move at all, it was given a high probability of being “neither.”
Nico spent some time moving its arm in front of the mirror, so it could learn when its motor sensors were detecting arm movement and what that looked like through its camera. It learned to give that combination a high score for “self.” Then Nico and Kevin Gold, a graduate student, stood near each other, looking into the mirror, as the robot and the human took turns moving their arms. In 20 runs of the experiment, Nico correctly identified its own moving arm as “self” and Gold’s purposeful flailing as “another.”
One way to interpret this might be to conclude that Nico has a kind of self-awareness, at least when in motion. But that would be quite a leap. Robot consciousness is a tricky thing, according to Daniel Dennett, a Tufts philosopher and author of “Consciousness Explained,” who was part of a team of experts that Rodney Brooks assembled in the early 1990s to consult on the Cog project. In a 1994 article in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Dennett posed questions about whether it would ever be possible to build a conscious robot. His conclusion: “Unlikely,” at least as long as we are talking about a robot that is “conscious in just the way we human beings are.” But Dennett was willing to credit Cog with one piece of consciousness: the ability to be aware of its own internal states. Indeed, Dennett believed that it was theoretically possible for Cog, or some other intelligent humanoid robot in the future, to be a better judge of its own internal states than the humans who built it. The robot, not the designer, might some day be “a source of knowledge about what it is doing and feeling and why.”
But maybe higher-order consciousness is not even the point for a robot, according to Sidney Perkowitz, a physicist at Emory. “For many applications,” he wrote in his 2004 book, “Digital People: From Bionic Humans to Androids,” “it is enough that the being seems alive or seems human, and irrelevant whether it feels so.”
In humans, Perkowitz wrote, an emotional event triggers the autonomic nervous system, which sparks involuntary physiological reactions like faster heartbeat, increased blood flow to the brain and the release of certain hormones. “Kismet’s complex programming includes something roughly equivalent,” he wrote, “a quantity that specifies its level of arousal, depending on the stimulus it has been receiving. If Kismet itself reads this arousal tag, the robot not only is aroused, it knows it is aroused, and it can use this information to plan its future behavior.” In this way, according to Perkowitz, a robot might exhibit the first glimmers of consciousness, “namely, the reflexive ability of a mind to examine itself over its own shoulder.”
Robot consciousness, it would seem, is related to two areas: robot learning (the ability to think, to reason, to create, to generalize, to improvise) and robot emotion (the ability to feel). Robot learning has already occurred, with baby steps, in robots like Cog and Leonardo, able to learn new skills that go beyond their initial capabilities. But what of emotion? Emotion is something we are inclined to think of as quintessentially human, something we only grudgingly admit might be taking place in nonhuman animals like dogs and dolphins. Some believe that emotion is at least theoretically possible for robots too. Rodney Brooks goes so far as to say that robot emotions may already have occurred — that Cog and Kismet not only displayed emotions but, in one way of looking at it, actually experienced them.
“We’re all machines,” he told me when we talked in his office at M.I.T. “Robots are made of different sorts of components than we are — we are made of biomaterials; they are silicon and steel — but in principle, even human emotions are mechanistic.” A robot’s level of a feeling like sadness could be set as a number in computer code, he said. But isn’t a human’s level of sadness basically a number, too, just a number of the amounts of various neurochemicals circulating in the brain? Why should a robot’s numbers be any less authentic than a human’s?
“If the mechanistic explanation is right, then one can in principle make a machine which is living,” he said with a grin. That explains one of his longtime ultimate goals: to create a robot that you feel bad about switching off.
The permeable boundary between humanoid robots and humans has especially captivated Kathleen Richardson, a graduate student in anthropology at Cambridge University in England. “I wanted to study what it means to be human, and robots are a great way to do that,” she said, explaining the 18 months she spent in Brooks’s Humanoid Robotics lab in 2003 and 2004, doing fieldwork for her doctorate. “Robots are kind of ambiguous, aren’t they? They’re kind of like us but not like us, and we’re always a bit uncertain about why.”
To her surprise, Richardson found herself just as fascinated by the roboticists at M.I.T. as she was by the robots. She observed a kinship between human and humanoid, an odd synchronization of abilities and disabilities. She tried not to make too much of it. “I kept thinking it was merely anecdotal,” she said, but the connection kept recurring. Just as a portrait might inadvertently give away the painter’s own weaknesses or preoccupations, humanoid robots seemed to reflect something unintended about their designers. A shy designer might make a robot that’s particularly bashful; a designer with physical ailments might focus on the function — touch, vision, speech, ambulation — that gives the robot builder the greatest trouble.
“A lot of the inspiration for the robots seems to come from some kind of deficiency in being human,” Richardson, back in England and finishing her dissertation, told me by telephone. “If we just looked at a machine and said we want the machine to help us understand about being human, I think this shows that the model of being human we carry with us is embedded in aspects of our own deficiencies and limitations.” It’s almost as if the scientists are building their robots as a way of completing themselves.
“I want to understand what it is that makes living things living,” Rodney Brooks told me. At their core, robots are not so very different from living things. “It’s all mechanistic,” Brooks said. “Humans are made up of biomolecules that interact according to the laws of physics and chemistry. We like to think we’re in control, but we’re not.” We are all, human and humanoid alike, whether made of flesh or of metal, basically just sociable machines.
Robin Marantz Henig is a contributing writer. Her last article for the magazine was about evolutionary theories of religion.
FYI - extensive photos and videoclips available:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/magazine/29robots-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=magazine&...
self love? LOL!
but -0- marks for the new 123? yeah, ya don't wanna be obvious or anything!
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.asp?Message_id=21168430
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OLD 123
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who's lying??
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/20/2007 3:25:05 PM
why are you lying about stopping by????
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/20/2007 10:13:46 AM
Not an insider, just tired of all your
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
5/22/2007 6:48:18 PM
10k was just filed
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
4/23/2007 4:32:13 PM
no, not affiliated with company, but do live
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
3/28/2007 4:02:09 PM
What else did this murphy tell you, he
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
3/28/2007 3:50:01 PM
Does he have information that he's willing to
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
3/28/2007 2:07:25 PM
When did you call and who did you
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
3/28/2007 12:56:34 PM
Who did you speak with at the company.
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
3/28/2007 12:48:41 PM
how do you figure his salary is 55%
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
3/6/2007 12:02:29 PM
NEW 123
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You is used in the sense of people
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/28/2007 1:52:30 AM
Permagon you are correct..I wish people on here
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/27/2007 6:00:39 PM
Eventually the cornell arrangement will cease...and we will
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/27/2007 11:37:45 AM
Yes and a great time to average down
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/27/2007 11:12:07 AM
I would agree with you there....somebody knows this
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/26/2007 8:43:28 PM
We should be posting more items like this
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/25/2007 5:40:33 PM
Who sells 100 shares at 6 cents....My spider
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/25/2007 3:44:35 PM
I have many of the same sentiments Permagon...Most
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/24/2007 7:49:14 PM
Things remained pretty well today considering the market
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/24/2007 4:57:00 PM
One thing I can add is that we
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/24/2007 2:41:26 PM
So what would you like to see Scott?
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/24/2007 10:52:18 AM
Can you please quote me where I said
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/24/2007 10:19:01 AM
I see the word Microsoft alot in that Release!!!
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/24/2007 8:55:39 AM
Wow...What a day yesterday...Its great to see though
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/24/2007 8:45:55 AM
So what? Is there a school to learn
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/23/2007 4:45:35 PM
yeah thats 30% better than the last close...And
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/23/2007 4:39:56 PM
Scott, How do you know the "rug is being
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/23/2007 4:32:12 PM
Spin, Why is that relevant anyways?...There you go again...
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/23/2007 4:28:13 PM
yeah I didnt sell my house to invest
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/23/2007 4:18:13 PM
Again, Nothing but negativity...You must be a someone tha
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/23/2007 4:06:25 PM
SPIN, I think intelligent investors will read what you
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/23/2007 3:52:50 PM
Fact that we saw the shareprice increase 3
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/23/2007 3:39:34 PM
Once again...Adding nothing to the purpose or value
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/23/2007 3:35:29 PM
Anonymous, I applaud you for coming on and giving
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/23/2007 3:27:02 PM
yeah my focus is on now and
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/23/2007 2:35:20 PM
Spin why dont you focus on the fact
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/23/2007 2:18:15 PM
Now thats the attitude I want to see
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/23/2007 1:45:59 PM
Harry, I already have my position. Ive been an
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/23/2007 10:52:19 AM
Scott im from Canada as well...Western Canada...3 years
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/23/2007 8:00:57 AM
The idea of Microsoft came from the Coroware
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/22/2007 7:49:19 PM
SPIN, First of all Im from another country. And
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/22/2007 2:41:45 PM
"Innova Robotics and Automation Inc., a Fort Myers-based
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/22/2007 12:39:19 PM
I think we all know whats happening to
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/21/2007 7:43:32 PM
Im new to this board and forum but
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/21/2007 4:42:30 PM
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/profile.asp?user=105887
according to "robotic stocks" his e-mail is "robotic stocks." heh, but what is more interesting is that where iHub asks for a location, both "robotic stocks" AND "Raynell1" stated:
"tampa florida" -- no commas, no caps, no abbreviations -- identical.
created just 6 days apart. a coincidence of course!
BOTH have only written posts in reply to the new 123, with one exception each, and BOTH have posted using the plural "we." "robotic stocks," that aptly abbreviated "RS," is also the one who claimed there were 60 employees. BOTH don't seem to like me very much.
"this company has over 60 employees, three wholly owned companies, making money, has orders and you sophisticated investors peek through windows and get news from receptionists?"
hmmmmmmm. somebody once called chunga, and all iHub posters, "a bunch of unsophisticated bashers." smells like that same contempt for ordinary shareholders. and didn't Raynell1 write something to _anonymous about how us supposedly dolt investors don't understand proxies and things like that?
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=21444978
then there was this curious statement by RS:
"I would say the survival of this company and the methods employed have been brilliant and now they reported profits and growth! The files also show Weisel signed personaly for $1,000,000 to go into the company to protect guarantee the loan from the SBA when the company could have easily gone under. The filings show he is still on the hook for that amount. How many CEO's believe that much in their company....How many? Most are going to jail for taking off with funds and false filings."
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=21475257
so, the question appears to be IMO are Raynell1 and robotic stocks the same person, claiming to be from "tampa florida," and if so, is that person actually the owner of the e-mail address wweisel498@aol.com ?!?
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Posts by Raynell1
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We have gathered some information from a firm
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/26/2007 11:42:48 PM
Our opinion in looking at the continual responses
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/23/2007 8:33:50 PM
You are so right. This stock suffers from
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/21/2007 6:16:41 PM
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/profile.asp?user=103745
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Posts by robotic stocks
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I think we are getting close to the
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/23/2007 1:28:18 PM
this company has over 60 employees, three wholly
Innova Robotics and Automation Inc (INRA)
7/21/2007 5:17:33 PM
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/profile.asp?user=104215
according to "Raynell1" using wweisel498@aol.com
"continual responses by SPIN alone is that he has cost all of us many opportunities to see a real rise in the share price."
so Raynell1, YOU assert that it's my fault the stock is at record lows, and that it went up when people read what YOUR court filings claimed about the damages YOU expected from ABB based on those court records. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=21623930
maybe YOU also believe that it's somehow my fault the stock hit an all-time low yesterday, split-adjusted to $0.004. YOUR buddy 123 failed to note that, and continues to point to the much less relevant ask price as if nobody will notice.
YOU are still using the aol e-mail address wweisel498@aol.com in your iHub profile, and if YOU are not weisel, YOU could be in big trouble for impersonating a penny CEO.
of course if YOU are weisel, then YOU might be in big trouble with regulators for some of the stuff YOU posted. the Whole Foods CEO is the target of an SEC investigation for posting under an alias on yahoo. YOU might have read about it?!? After it made headlines all over, YOU posted this 5 days ago:
"Seriously, stay silent for two weeks and then sell at .40 or more."
YOU know that the e-mail address wweisel498@aol.com has been used in at least one RWT press release, and YOU are using it in YOUR iHub profile.
YOU should explain all of this to shareholders particularly after YOU posted with such ridiculous self-righteousness. While YOU are at it, tell us all where the ABB money went.
SPIN
PS YOU wrote: "Now he is even against someone going to a church?" personally, i am against televangelists and generally do not consider them to operate legitimate "churches." there are many instances of televangelists who have used God to get people to part with their money. Tammy Faye Baker is just one of many examples. 100% JMO.
"Raynell1," why did you respond to a post by one of the 123s with this: "I'm with you RS,..."
did you think you were responding to the person using that brand new "Robotic Stocks" alias? who is that person? is it someone connected to the company?
dontcha think Pergamon's reasoning is a little weak and more like wishful thinking? personally i'm increasingly convinced that you thought the e-mail address was required to upgrade the iHub account and didn't realize it was going to be publicly viewable, and now you just don't know what to do about it. it doesn't really bother me too much that what i suspect is your prose smacks of some incredibly mediocre literacy, i'm far more troubled by what is suggested if you are the one who did posts these messages along with a bunch of other stuff, btw.
of course this stated viewpoint is strictly my personal opinion of the suspected conduct of a public persona. please come back soon and threaten me again with slander.
why do you have the CEO weisel's AOL e-mail address listed in your iHub profile as if it were yours?
you don't really live in Tampa, do you?
"Raynell1" also tried to somehow blame me for the stock's collapse?!? he, or maybe it is "they," wrote this:
while we were watching on the side lines with no posts we witnessed spin and others make their own estimates about what the lawsuit would be worth and drove the price up on their own.
however, when discussing the topic of the potential "worth" of the claim against ABB, what was repeatedly pointed to was the RWT / INRA statements from court filings -- their own words! this is an example that is consistent with the others from that time frame:
ABB’s profits for just this one rival product (IRC5) through May 2006 soared to $58 million and are projected to reach $78 million by March 2007. Under the law, if those profits were obtained through misappropriation, they must be forfeited or, at a minimum, a reasonable royalty paid to RWT for their use. Fla. Stat. § 688.004.
thanks chunga -- wish it wasn't necessary.
hey Raynell1, does this language sound familiar? "The music will shortly break your ear drums!"
if true, it is so wrong.
the SEC is investigating John Mackey for his yahoo posts, and these Raynell1 messages all happened after the Mackey = rahodeb scandal made news, and innova already received an SEC subpoena, some time in 2005 if memory serves. if it is an impersonator, then why hasn't the company issued a statement?
if "Raynell1" is weisel, it is incredibly shocking. plus, there are a number of things posted by this person that strongly suggest the release of insider info (that Lee County Hospital post, for example). wouldn't that call for a Reg FD-based 8K?
Raynell1 wrote this:
"trust us, your chat board is watched by more than you can imagine"
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=21598954
heh. Raynell1 doesn't seem to recognize the irony of his own words... however, trusting him/them? is not likely.
100% JMO.
additionally noteworthy is the fact that weisel's corporate e-mail address also uses "wweisel" -- wweisel@innovaroboticsautomation.com
2004 RWT PR using "wweisel498@aol.com"
Second Patent Awarded to Robotic Workspace Technologies, Inc. (RWT) For its Open-architecture Automation Equipment PC Control System
(Posted 04/13/2004)
New patent expands RWT’s PC control technology leadership beyond industrial robots
FT. MYERS, FL, -- Robotic Workspace Technologies, Inc., a leading provider of open-architecture PC control systems for robots and other articulated or multi-axis automated manufacturing equipment, announced today that it has received a second patent, 6675070, for its next generation real-time PC control system capable of controlling automation equipment of various electromechanical configurations from a common programmer/operator interface.
‘‘This patent extends the application of RWT’s breakthrough PC control technology from just industrial robots to virtually any automation equipment having actuator driven mechanical joints like machine tools, laboratory liquid-handling systems, computer media handling systems, therapeutic systems, surgical systems, and the like,’‘ explains Walter K. Weisel, CEO of RWT.
Patent number 6675070 is the result of continuing R&D in open-architecture PC control technology spearheaded by RWT. The company’s first patent, 6442451 was awarded in 2002 for RWT’s versatile robot PC control system suitable for controlling robots of various electromechanical configurations.
RWT’s innovative open PC control solutions feature commercially available, industry standard hardware and software components which are designed for multiple applications, rather than CPU-based electronics customized for a specific application (device control) for a specific piece of automated equipment (e.g., proprietary controls).
Unlike proprietary controls, RWT’s PC control systems easily integrate with PLC controls on the shop floor through embedded support for PLC communications via an I/O rack. No ‘‘black box’‘ or software translators are needed to achieve integration. Moreover, the RWT PC control system’s open programming language provides a single interface for programming, integration, and customization. RWT’s PC controls are capable of simultaneously controlling multiple automation devices such as robots, machine tools, parts magazines, vision systems, and more, all from a single operator interface.
The benefits of open PC control systems are well documented as manufacturing companies have for many years led a movement away from proprietary systems. Open PC control systems provide the ability for automated equipment of different types to communicate and share data over factory networks in a fashion that emulates production flow, as opposed to proprietary controls that promote ‘‘islands of automation’‘ that can create process bottlenecks which impede overall throughput and other competitive manufacturing strategies such as product variation (options) and reduced cost.
Further, open PC control systems enable manufacturers to integrate complimentary hardware and software for quality control, inventory management, and a wide range of other process and business management functions that result in significant economic advantages to the manufacturer and product enhancements for the consumer.
On the shop floor, open PC control systems greatly simplify operator training, programming, maintenance, spare parts inventories, and related tasks that in a complex proprietary control environment can significantly increase production lead-time and cost.
‘‘With this second patent we are saying to the automation equipment users who have for years demanded industry standards, ‘we hear you,’’‘ says Mr. Weisel. ‘‘With this open PC control platform, users now have a common programming language, user interface, communications protocols and operator conventions for virtually all automation equipment, not to mention a hardware architecture that is easy to service and maintain, spare parts, if needed, that are commercially available at competitive prices, and components that are simple to upgrade to keep pace with new processor technology as it emerges.’‘
RWT offers a licensing program for OEMs.
About Robotic Workspace Technologies, Inc.
Robotic Workspace Technologies was founded in 1994 to enhance the field of robotics with commercially available, standard products to improve robot performance, applicability, and productivity. In this spirit of innovation, RWT has been at the forefront of developing and offering technology-based solutions built upon an open architecture that harnesses the power and user-friendliness of the PC platform and the Windows operating system. As RWT marks its 10-year anniversary, its technology has been applied to robots and virtually all automated equipment performing a wide range of tasks in industries ranging from agriculture to automotive, to medical and R&D. Headquartered in Fort Myers, Florida, RWT is recognized internationally for its pioneering contributions to the robotics industry. Its founder and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Walter K. Weisel, is a recipient of the prestigious Joseph F. Engelberger Award, recognizing his contributions to the advancement of robotics and automation. The company is privately held.
For More Information Contact:
Walter K. Weisel
CEO
Robotic Workspace Technologies, Inc. (RWT)
16266 San Carlos Boulevard
Fort Myers, FL 33908
Phone: (239) 466-0488
Email: wweisel498@aol.com
Company URL: www.rwt.com
http://www.roboticsonline.com/public/articles/archivedetails.cfm?id=1456
who else uses wweisel498@aol.com? well, it seems that "Raynell1" on iHub does.
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/profile.asp?user=103745
"Raynell1" at wweisel498@aol.com says:
"there never was officially a coroware jaus test lab in pittsburg (sic). Only a couple of disgruntled employees that are now gone or reassigned"
(bolds and underline are mine)
well, if that is true "Raynell1," then this must be false:
CoroWare Test Labs, Inc. (“CTL”), a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Company, is headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was incorporated in the state of Pennsylvania and commenced operations in July 2005. CTL was formed to provide impartial, objective conformance testing to ensure inter-operability and communications standards compliance among intelligent, mobile service robotic platforms and applications, particularly the Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems as mandated by the United States of America (U.S.) military and other U.S. government agencies using unmanned mobile robotic vehicles.
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1156784/000114420406050988/v059435_sb2-a.htm
right?
before i would even begin to address any of your assertions, accusations, etc., including your repeated empty and less than veiled threats about "slander," please explain to everyone why this is the e-mail in your upgraded 2-week freebie iHub profile?!?
wweisel498@aol.com
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/profile.asp?user=103745
and who exactly is the "we" to which you repeatedly refer?