I've been wanting to talk about Make:Philly on Keystone Edge now for some time, so I figure I should take the opportunity now. Essentially, Make:Philly is a group of people that get together every month to make cool stuff, like rockets and robots, or invite scientists and inventors to speak about and share what they've done.

Last month, we did a video of Make:Philly's annual Art Buggy Derby, in which competitors are tasked to build  a hand-powered buggy that makes art as you push it along. Check out the video below.

This coming Sunday, Nov. 23, Make:Philly is hosting Professor Andy Hicks of Drexel University, who will talk about mirror design. Hicks, whose work with mirrors originated in vision-based control of robots, has designed a driver-side mirror with no distortion and no blind-spot, and will have several other prototypes on hand, including a mirror that does not reverse, a panoramic mirror, and a curved mirror in which things don't look curved.

Inspired by Make: magazine, Make:Philly is an integral part of of what's commonly called the "creative economy." The 400-odd members of Make:Philly comprise a community of innovators and tech-savvy artists that cities need to attract and retain great talent. Ultimately, what the kids at Make:Philly are making is a better economy and a better, stronger city.

The Art Buggy Derby:

There was a cool event held here in Philly yesterday called The Founder Factory, a day-long mega-conference that drew about 250 local entrepreneurs to World Cafe Live for a marathon of discussions, panels and Q&As, during which Philly's up-and-coming entrepreneurs picked the brains of local business leaders.

David Speers of Phillypreneurs live-blogged the event and made this short video of Founder Factory organizer Blake Janelle effusively recapping the 9-hour event.

What The Founder Factor says to me is that the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in Philadelphia, and the startup community here is teeming with ideas, energy. and industry. Bravo to everyone involved.

Hello, this week I'll be posting various items of interest I come across but don't have time or space to include in the regular issue of Keystone Edge. We begin with one of my favorite industries: robotics.

Robots, as is mentioned in my short intro to this blog, creep me out. But I'm also fascinated by them, and Pennsylvania is a great place to be if you like robots.

The robot scientists at CMU, for example, are among the most ingenious, innovative researchers anywhere in the Commonwealth. In fact, next month we're running a story on CMU's team competing in the Google Lunar X Prize Competition, a $30 million competition between privately funded teams to send a robot to the moon, travel 500 meters and transmit video, images and data back to the Earth. Pretty awesome.

But I digress. Today's posts is about Jules, the first 'humanoid' robot with eyes and hair and a rubbery, flesh-colored face that can mimic human expressions. Described by the Daily Mail as a, "disembodied androgynous robotic head," Jules has tiny motors that allow its "face" to grin, grimmace, pucker and furrow its brow. It can also speak, and mimic human behavior it observes through video camera "eyes":


The result, as you can see below, is exceedingly creepy:

Jules operates with 10 stock emotions (happy, sad, concerned, etc.) a team of engineers programmed into it. The project is called 'Human-Robot Interaction', devised at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory run by the University of the West of England and the University of Bristol.