From: Colin Godfrey Subject: SIGGRAPH/Boston at Mass College of Art, Wed Oct 11 Date: Thursday, October 05, 2000 12:48 PM SIGGRAPH/Boston Meeting Announcement Engineering a Vision System to Win at Roulette Dr. Carey Bunks Senior Scientist BBN Technologies Wednesday, October 11, 2000, 7 pm Tower Building Mass. College of Art 621 Huntington Ave. Boston, MA Abstract -------- Can physics and signal processing be used to beat the house-advantage in roulette? In principle the deceleration of the roulette's spinning ball and wheel can be formulated as a simple trajectory tracking problem. If the ball and wheel dynamics are not too chaotic then useful predictions for roulette outcomes should be feasible. During the 1970's a group of physicists and mathematicians attempted to build a small computer which accepted manually-entered, in-situ roulette data for just such an endeavor. This effort apparently failed, at least in part, due to technological difficulties. In contrast to the technology available in the 1970's where special purpose computing hardware had to be hand-built, today, off-the-shelf computers are now common and inexpensive. Furthermore, sophisticated imaging technology is available and widely used for automated vision tasks. The first part of this talk reviews the objectives of a system designed to win at roulette. This is followed by the presentation of experimental data from a regulation size roulette. The data shows that given observations of the state (i.e., ball and wheel positions and velocities) the roulette system is predictable. Finally, results from a digital imaging system in conjunction with Kalman filter-like tracking show that good automated sensing of the roulette state is achievable. Carey Bunks ----------- Carey Bunks is a Senior Scientist at BBN Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he currently works on a variety of research projects. He received the PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987 and has since specialized in signal processing. Carey has worked on problems of seismic imaging, image artifact filtering, and motion estimation from image data. He has over twenty publications in scientific journals and holds several patents. In addition, Carey is an enthusiastic contributor to the open-source software movement. He is the author of Grokking the GIMP, published with New Riders in 2000, and released under an open-content license (see http://gimp-savvy.com). He is also a developer for Scilab and is co-author of the book Scientific and Engineering Computing with Scilab published with Birkhauser in 1999. Meeting Time: Wednesday, October 11, 2000. Networking time at 6:30 PM. Announcements and feature presentation at 7:00 PM. Directions to MassArt: (from http://www.massart.edu/campus/here/directions/directions.html) To the college by mbta >From the Park Street Subway station, take the Heath Street/Huntington Avenue (E) train on the Green Line (track 1 or 2) to the Longwood/Hospitals stop. You are directly in front of the college. >From the mass turnpike I-90 (from west) Upon approaching the city limits look for the Prudential Center/Copley Square exit (exit 21) on your right as you enter Prudential Center tunnel. Upon entering the exit ramp, stay in the left lane (Prudential Center) and follow the exit to Huntington Avenue. Follow Huntington Avenue past the Christian Science Center (take underpass), Northeastern University, and the Museum of Fine Arts. Massachusetts College of Art is two blocks after the Museum on the right-hand side of Huntington Avenue. >From route 9 (traveling from the west) Route 9 becomes Huntington Avenue at the Boston city limit (Brookline Village). Follow Huntington Avenue for approximately a mile. Massachusetts College of Art is located on your left at the intersection of Huntington Avenue and Longwood Avenue. >From storrow drive Take the Copley Square/Back Bay exit and turn right on Beacon Street. Follow Beacon Street to Exeter Street and take a left turn. Follow Exeter Street to Huntington Avenue and take a right Turn. Follow Huntington Avenue to the college. >From route 3 and I-93 Take Storrow Drive exit from route 93 and follow information to get to the college from Storrow Drive >From route 1 and I-95 (traveling from the north) Cross the Mystic/Tobin Bridge and follow signs to Storrow Drive. Follow information to get to the college from Storrow Drive. >From route 3/route 24/route128 (traveling from the south Take Southeast Expressway to Boston, to the Mass Avenue/Roxbury exit. At the end of the exit continue across Massachusetts Avenue, and along Melnea Cass Boulevard, until you arrive at Tremont Street. Turn left on Tremont Street and travel for one block to Ruggles Street. Turn right on Ruggles Street and travel until you arrive at Huntington Avenue. Turn left on Huntington Avenue and travel two blocks to the college. ************************************************************************ SIGGRAPH/Boston Contacts WWW: http://www.siggraph.org/chapters/boston SIGGRAPH/Boston maintains a mailing list for e-mail announcements of meetings. Send e-mail to siggraphdistrib-request@cs.umb.edu if you want be added or dropped from this list.