The June 2, 2009 Star Tribune featured the Scout robots developed by Nikos Papanikolopoulos at the University of Minnesota. Papanikolopoulos began research to develop the scout robot in the late 90s with the backing of several government agency grants.

The Scout is used by the military and police teams on reconnaissance missions. The Scout enters dangerous environments before officers and troops, it then transmits images of its surroundings. One of the special features of the Scout is its unique ability to remain undamaged when thrown. The Scout is now developed and sold by ReconRobotics.

CSE Professor Jaideep Srivastava's team of academic researchers was recently featured in an article on arstechnica.com. The story highlights Professor Srivastava's cooperation with Sony on the study of the complete server logs from Sony's Everquest 2.

Srivastava and his collaborative team of researchers recently presented their project in a Saturday morning session at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

See the full story at Science gleans 60TB of behavior data from Everquest 2 logs.

Kare 11 news recently featured CSE Assistant Professor Paul Schrater in a story about phantom cell phone vibrations. Schrater offers his theories on the phenomenon in the full story, available at the Kare 11 website.

Phantom cell phone vibrations? It could be all in your head

NewScientist recently featured the research of CSE Professor Nikos Papanikolopoulos. Papanikolopoulos was quoted on the needs of robots for exploration on the moon and on Mars. See the full story here: 

'Marsupial' robots could roam Mars and the Moon

The "scout" robot, a 7-inch robot that was developed at the Univeristy of Minnesota by CSE professor Nikos Papanikolopoulos was featured recently on kare11.com.

The article detailed the ways in which the wireless robot is helping the Plymouth Swat Team with reconnaissance work. The officers control with the robot with a joystick. The robot carries a camera the size of a teardtrop, and a stabilizing tail to make sure it always lands on its feet.

Police beef up ranks with barbell-sized robot

CSE professor David Du was interviewed on WCCO 4 News at 10, November 24th. Du was featured in an interview as part of the Good Question feature. The feature’s Good Question was about the cost of text messaging.

Text of the news segment can be found online at Good Question: Why Is Texting So Expensive? A video of the segment can be found in the WCCO Video Library.

CSE Associate Department Head Joe Konstan was interviewed on WCCO 4 News at 10, on Tuesday, October 21st. Konstan was featured in an interview as part of the Good Question feature. The feature’s Good Question was about text messaging.

Text of the news segment can be found online at Good Question: Why Do Some Text Rather Than Talk? A video of the segment can be found in the WCCO Video Library.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press profiled a department project, Cyclopath, in separate stories July 19. The project is led by Ph.D. student Reid Priedhorsky and supervised by Professor Loren Terveen.

Cyclopath is a geowiki designed for bicyclists. Cyclists can collaboratively add, remove, modify roads and other bike facilities block-by-block, in addition to editing points of interest and annotations on map items. Cyclopath also provides personalized routing advice based on up-to-the minute user editing. The site is intended as a research tool to study online communities.

A forthcoming paper on the project, "Computational Geowikis: What, Why, and How" was nominated for Best Paper at the 2008 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, to be held November 8-12.

Other students working on the project are Michael Ludwig, Andrew Sheppard, and Fernando Torre.  For more information, visit cyclopath.org, the Star Tribune article titled ‘Biking website pools cyclists' expertise,’ and the Pioneer Press article titled ‘MapQuest for the cycling set.’

A story in the Wall Street Journal featured CSE professor John Riedl as an expert in personalization technology, focusing in on his evaluation of the use of recommender systems used by Web sites such as Netflix and Amazon.

In the story, the benefits and perils of personalized computer recommender technology are debated. Riedl emphasized the need for people to rely on both computer recommendations and human wisdom to make judgments about things like what books to read or what movies to see. For more information about this, visit the story ‘Technology Gets Personal.’

MinnPost.com, a Twin Cities newspaper and online news source, posted the recent CSE newsletter story about CSE professor Dan Boley's work on an ethanol project with chemical engineering professor Friedrich Srienc. The story also highlights the efforts of CSE graduate student Dimitrije Jevremovic, whose work is supported by a Traineeship Program award through the University of Minnesota's Biomedical Informatics and Computational Biology program.

For more information about this story, visit Can a car run on E.Coli?