Some weeks ago, I read several great articles about Deep Learning in Andrej Karpathy's blog. I was puzzled by the simplicity and nice layout of his blog. In other post he explains why he decided to move from Wordpress to Jekyll in detail.

So, I explored Jekyll and I was delighted by its integration with github pages. I developed some scripts to compile Jekyll in a multiplatform way.

However, I had started this blog recently and I wanted to move from my old Google Pages website to here. So, finally, I have changed and tuned the template you can see right now.

This week we have received the notification of acceptance of our article "Sparse GPU Voxelization of Yarn-Level Cloth" in Computer Graphics Forum journal (IF: 1'642). Reviewers' comments were quite useful.

As I promised, here you are the Word template for writing patent applications in Spanish.
The new format follows Spanish Patent and Trademark Office (OEPM) criteria.
It improves some aspects of the original template which is offered on the OEPM website, such as:

• Style of titles and text is according to the example format
• Document is organized in sections. They correspond to the ones that must be presented in different pages
• Figure section does not have line numbers in the margin
• Text has a uniform color
• Title and company fields are empty, as it should be expeted for a document that will be used to claim industrial property rights
• Author field is actualized by saving the changes in the file.

The previous week I got surprised by the "new" version of the Handbook for Patent Applicants in the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office website. Probably, I has been published long ago, but I read an old version as the only "one".




This book is clear and concise. 
I really enjoyed the 9th section: "How to write a patent application", with a detailed description of each part of the patent, and its preferred format.

However, I also got dissapointed with the proposed Word template for Spanish patents, that can be accesed throught a pair of links in the handbook. 

From the point of view of the sections to be filled, the example is immaculate and it shows small excerpts indicating what should fit in each section. It, even, includes some "unwritten rules", such as using Arial 11 everywhere.
But, from the point of view of the use of Word, it is a disaster.

Word styles are not used to differentiate titles and text  (in fact, if you write in the spots between titles, the font size changes to 12 points because Normal style is set as this).
Drawings section has line numbers activated, so a patent application, which were based in this template, would be inmediately mark as an invalid patent draft.
There are more signs of absentmindedness in this template, for example, author and company fields are already filled:

• Author: IGNACIO J. MARTÍNEZ ROBLEDO
• Title: SISTEMA DE ENFRIADORES Y MEDIOS PARA SU MONTAJE EN MOLDES DE COLADA
• Organization: PONS PATENTES Y MARCAS

In the next post I'll release an alternative Spanish patent template for Word and LibreOffice.

Yesterday, on CyberMonday, Amazon revealed its newest generation fulfillment center utilizing robotics to speed up order delivery times (and to reduce logistics costs) for customers. It was published as a video in BusinessWire website, with some beautiful photos of the new warehouse.




The story has had a significant impact in technology media (Wired, TechCrunch...). 
Amazon Spanish fulfillment center, in San Fernando de Henares (Madrid), probably is not equiped with so high-tech robots as the Robo-Stow, but I suppouse it is populated by hundreds of Kiva robots as the orange ones which carry shelves in this video.When I saw a video of Amazon fulfillment centers for the first time, some years ago, I was pleasantly surprised by the coordination among all the Kiva robots and the human personal in Amazon facilities. I think it is a demanding work for humans, who have to find and pick the right items in each of the fetched shelves with a very strict / limited time.Because of my research in the last months, I cannot help noticing the extensive use of codebars. 


They are everywhere:
- floor
- shelves' racks
- products 
- container boxes
- 'traveling' boxes
- packages
- ...

Beautiful and low-cost technology, that we are improving  :-)


By the way, Amazon is investing large efforts in automating the "picking" stage in their logistic pipeline. They are organizing thee first Amazon Picking Challenge at ICRA 2015. It is our goal to strengthen the ties between the industrial and academic robotic communities and promote shared and open solutions to some of the big problems in unstructured automation.

As stated in their website, this competition will challenge entrants to build their own robot hardware and software that can attempt simplified versions of the general task of picking items from shelves. The robots will be presented with a stationary lightly populated inventory shelf and be asked to pick a subset of the products and put them on a table. The challenge combines object recognition, pose recognition, grasp planning, compliant manipulation, motion planning, task planning, task execution, and error detection and recovery. There are nice prices (travel grants to ICRA) and participants have the possibility of being provided a robot to participate in the contest. 

Our latest article has just been added to Ken Sen Huang' ACM SIGGRAPH ASIA 2014 list.


Ken Sen Huang maintains one of the most useful internet resources for Computer Graphics researchers. His webpage contains a set of unofficial lists of published papers in top Computer Graphics conferences, with links to the author's draft paper versions and related material.

ACM has low fees, and most of its published science is more or less affordable for researchers.
But, I'm really happy for having a centralised website with no paywalls, where all valuable knowlegde is accesible to everyone for free.

Even more, you can find most of the paper before the conference is held, so we can study them in advance, and get the most out of this top conferences.