Matías Mattamala

Literally a publication for eight-year olds 40 years ago

Jan 1.
Jan 3.

ladies and gentlemen...we got him

Our paper OpenLex3D is accepted to NeurIPS!

tldr; a new benchmark for open-vocabulary scene understanding methods.

Page: openlex3d.github.io

Thanks to Sacha Morin, Martin Büchner
@mmattamala.bsky.social, @kumaraditya-gupta.bsky.social,
Abhinav Valada, Liam Paull & @mauricefallon.bsky.social

The new macOS is stupidly round

Open letter from UK university staff: Request for biometric deferral and safe evacuation of incoming Palestinian students and scholars from Gaza to UK Universities More than 40 students currently trapped in Gaza with full scholarships to UK Universities are asking for a safe route to come and study. We, the academic community hoping to welcome these scholars, ca...

Colleagues based at UK universities: please sign and share this letter to support Gazan students coming to study in the UK, in order to request Governmental deferral of the biometric data requirement and safe evacuation.

and a slide that explains illegal data torrenting by Meta, i also had to remove

In the end, it was either remove everything that names names (big tech particularly) and remove logos or cancel my talk.

2/

a couple of hours before my keynote, I went through an intense negotiation with the organisers (for over a hour) where we went through my slides and had to remove anything that mentions 'Palestine' 'Israel' and replace 'genocide' with 'war crimes'

1/

FAST COMPANY Article: While retirement typically occurs, after completing a career and saving and investing for it, a new trend is emerging among Gen Z career professionals called "micro-retirement." Micro- retirements involve taking a one to two- week break from work every 12 to 18 months. Gen Z is using micro-retirement to avoid burnout, find greater fulfillment in their work, and enhance their overall well-being. However, it's not just Gen-Z:

'Vacations.'

The word is 'vacations.'

The dangers of so-called AI experts believing their own hype Beware the tech leaders making grandiose statements about artificial intelligence. They have lost sight of reality, says Philip Ball

I got tired of the nonsense some AI leaders were coming out with, and so I wrote this for @newscientist.com
www.newscientist.com/article/mg26...

Photo of a hand holding a paperback copy of “Permutation City” by Greg Egan

Insane stuff

Signed copy of "Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us" by Rodney Brooks

Sorry for the offtopic comment, but I was there too! You gave such a great keynote, and signed my copies of your books.

(back then I was an undergrad working on vision, now I'm a postdoc and still trying to help them see :) )

China hosts first fully autonomous AI robot football match Footage of three-a-side game shows humanoids struggling to kick the ball or stay upright

1/2 Headline wrong: not "first". Robot Soccer has been an international competition for 30+ years. People newly aware of something often think it has just happened now and progress will be fast. See the ten+ year old photo in my second skeet. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Just finished reading this well-researched and well-written piece. From a cursory look at Peter Putnam's papers, it seems that he anticipated ideas like neural Darwinism, enactivism, and Robert Rosen's notion of emergence relative to a model by creation of new observables. www.peterputnam.org

Picture of the Edinburgh Castle in a sunny morning in Edinburgh

Photo of the main building of the Informatics Forum building, University of Edinburgh

Picture of a NAO humanoid robot, dressed up as a bagpipe player, next to a small Highland cow plushie

This week I started as a Research Associate (aka Postdoc) at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh @edinburgh-uni.bsky.social.

I'll be working with @sramamoorthy.bsky.social in the new Centre for AI for Assistive Autonomy.

Let me know if you are around :)

Awesome, thank you very much for sharing!

Reminder that the MSCA postdoctoral program exists. If you have a PhD and want to work in a European lab, you have until September to apply. Just contact them now.

ec.europa.eu/info/funding...

Awesomeeee, thanks!

Varela’s re-edited book is already out 😲?

I wrote an article for The Conversation analysing the robot horse presented by Kawasaki :)

This is very cool work, and reminds me of some of the objectives of the LAGR project.

It's also pretty impressive to see robot experiments with different baseline methods in closed loop!

Wholesome stuff

Crows recognize geometric regularity Crows spontaneously identify intruder quadrilaterals among arbitrary shapes, excelling with regular shapes over irregular ones.

Very cool paper showing that Crows can spot the odd shape out of a set where all other shapes are similar.
@scinews.bsky.social
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
🐦‍⬛ 🐦‍⬛ 🐦‍⬛ 🐦‍⬛

Here is how I have been comparing the two big hype phenomena in AI and robotics, in my recent talks. Spoiler alert: the hype is unfounded.

Don’t remember where I saw this library flyer a while back but it’s great

This is completely unrelated to this, right? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical...

(to be fair my brain can barely parse the first sentence, but I always remember the existence of this)

It's never too late to repost that the part 2 of the SLAM handbook is out!
There are really cool contributions from my colleagues (as well as the leg odometry chapter we wrote with Marco Camurri)

It’s always “We launched these tardigrades into space!” “We froze them to absolute zero!” “We threw them into an erupting volcano!”

Never “We took these tardigrades on a holiday. They’re getting tiny massages and sipping little umbrella drinks on the beach.”