lego + java + jsapi == talking robots
After my last entry about talking robots , researcher Alexander Koller, from the department of computational linguist at Universitat des Saarlandes in Germany pointed me to this course: Talking Robots with LEGO MindStorms. In this course, students build robots using Lego Mindstorms, program them with Java (via Lejos) and control them via speech (using the Java Speech API).
Last years crowd favorite was Luigi, the shell game player.
There are more pictures of the final robots.
They've also written a paper describing their work and how Legos can be used by dialogue researchers to explore the robot-human interface.
I wish there had been courses like this when I was in school!