11 April 2014

We appreciate the interest of prospective students - no lab worth its name could run without good students! However, like many research labs, we get a significant number of interested persons contacting us from all over the globe. There is no way we could possibly accept or even answer all of them. You need to be aware that the University of Manitoba does not guarantee funding to graduate students, and that local funding opportunities for international graduate students are extremely limited. In general, we can make no promises for funding, and because we have limited funding that has to be justified to granting agencies, we generally do not have the ability to commit to funding any student until they are already here and can demonstrate their ability to work on the projects we do have funding for.

By way of advice when contacting any research institution, including this one, "spamming" many individuals with graduate student inquiries is generally frowned upon by all concerned. It does not leave a good impression when one reads an email from an potential student expressing a strong interest in one's research area and a great desire to study with that particular individual, only to find that many other faculty got the same piece of email. While we appreciate that it is not always easy to find entrance into a graduate program, please know that the obvious insincerity in doing this does nothing but harm your chances of finding a placement or funding.

11 April 2014

The Autonomous Agents Laboratory in the News

Over the years we have had a number of opportunities to appear in the media promoting both our work and robotics and artificial intelligence in general. A few representative features are below. If you are a member of the media interested in this work, please feel free to contact us.

Web/New Media

Any search engine will bring up a number of results linking to our work. Some of the lab's work was featured in the following:

• I Programmer did a report on our work for Robocup, in February 2014
• One of our publications on improving robotics competitions to encourage greater breadth and adaptivity in entries was discussed in an article published in the well-known German technology review Heise Online. A reasonable English Translation is available (via google language tools).
• June 15th, 2007 edition of New Scientist Magazine's Technology Blog.

Print

Our work has been covered by the Associated Press, the Toronto Star, the Winnipeg Free Press, and other Canadian and American newspapers.

• We did a press conference in Vienna for RoboCup-2009 that was picked up by the Associated Press and appeared in newspapers around the world, including the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, and many others. The Winnipeg Free Press published a large version of one of the pictures. (A pdf copy of this item is also available):
  
  
• The Winnipeg Free Press published a nice photograph of us demonstrating our work at the University of Manitoba's 2008 Homecoming Open House, without an accompanying article (A high resolution printable copy of this item is also available):
  
  
• An article from the Winnipeg Free Press, July, 2007, on our RoboCup Soccer with with the Citizen MicroRobots (A high resolution version of this item is also available for printing purposes):
  
  
• An Article from the Winnipeg Free Press, June, 2004, on our RoboCup soccer team (A high resolution version of this item is also available for printing purposes):
  

   

  

   

• An Article from the Winnipeg Free Press, August, 2004, on our RoboCup soccer team (2 pages):

   

  

   

• Our work was on the cover of the Bremen City Magazine during RoboCup-2006:

   

  

Radio/Television

We have appeared in radio and television interviews around the world. Links to some of these:

• NewsTalk 950/650 (Regina/Saskatoon) interview with John Anderson, August 4, 2007 (MP3 Audio, 20'15", 9.2 MB - recording is cut short)
• CJOB Radio (Winnipeg) interview with John Anderson, July 12, 2007 (MP3 Audio, 6'49", 6.8 MB)
• NBC TV coverage of our team at the 2007 robotic games in San Francisco - note the many different humanoid events, it's not just soccer anymore! [Download]
  
  {mgmediabot2}path=videos/MediaCoverage/robogames2007nbc.mov|width=300|height=300{/mgmediabot2}
• Canada-AM newsmagazine, June, 2006, live from Bremen (poor audio/video sync, 30MB [download]). We also have our own backstory of the CTV coverage. {mgmediabot2}path=videos/MediaCoverage/CanadaAM2006.asf|width=300|height=300{/mgmediabot2}
• Fox TV's soccer program FC Fox covered some of our work in a long segment on the RoboCup 2006 US Open (41.2 Mb [Download])

   

  {embedia media=http://aalab.cs.umanitoba.ca/videos/MediaCoverage/FCFoxAmOpen06.avi width=300 height=300 autostart=false}
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• An Austrian TV magazine coverage of FIRA-2003, including our entry (in German, 19.8Mb [Download]).

   

   

• Austrian television coverage of FIRA-2003, inluding our humanoid robot, Tao-pie-pie (in German, 16.8 Mb [Download]).

   

• Hugarian television coverage of FIRA-2003, inluding our humanoid work (in Magyar, 22.3 Mb [Download]).

   

   

• Vienna news coverage of FIRA-2003, inluding our humanoid robot (in German, 7.6 Mb [Download]).

   

   

11 April 2014

The following is a list of our sponsors, and other organizations who have contributed funding to us. We would like to thank them for helping us making our lab what it is today.

• • National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada
    
  • Canada Foundation for Innovation

  • E-Stage Capital

  • University of Manitoba
  • Faculty of Science at the University of Manitoba
  • Dept. of Computer Science at the University of Manitoba
  • RoboCup Federation
  • RobOlympics

We also wish to thank the following for contributing equipment to our lab

• • Intel Corp.
  • VIA Technologies Inc.

People in our community have also been very supportive of our lab

• • Fair Service Heating and Furnace Repair have supplied food for our students at lab events
  • JCA Electronics have supplied hardware compontents for use in our work
  • Superstore and local manager Rod Hill have several times donated food for lab events and for our students

We are always happy to talk to potential sponsors for equipment, research projects, and competitions. Please contact us if you are interested.