The RoboCup 2007 competition is being held this week at the Georgia Tech campus in Atlanta.

What is RoboCup? From the main site:

RoboCup is an international joint project to promote AI, robotics, and related field. It is an attempt to foster AI and intelligent robotics research by providing a standard problem where wide range of technologies can be integrated and examined. RoboCup chose to use soccer game as a central topic of research, aiming at innovations to be applied for socially significant problems and industries. The ultimate goal of the RoboCup project is ‘By 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world champion team in soccer.’

Nearly 1700 students and faculty from 300 teams and 117 countries will be competing in events ranging from four-legged and humanoid robotic soccer games to search-and-rescue competitions. Here are some images from RoboCup 2006:

More pictures from RoboCup 2006 can be found here. There is a Flickr pool for pictures from RoboCup 2007 here.

Finals for the various competitions will be July 7th and 8th. Stop by if you are in the area.

Rutgers beat a very good Louisville team Thursday night, 28-25. The Rutgers D shut out the Cardinals explosive offense in the second half. Rutgers doesn’t have a realistic shot of making it to the national championship game since they haven’t played a tough schedule, but they have a chance to go to a big money bowl game if they end the season undefeated.

Rutgers has an interesting history. They played in the first collegiate football game. They haven’t beaten a ranked team since 1988 and have never beaten a team as highly ranked as Louisville.

And James Gandolfini is their most famous alum. What else do you need to know anyway?

There is a good chance that Rutgers and Georgia Tech, my alma mater, could meet in the Orange Bowl. Honestly, I’m not wild about that. Rutgers is the feel-good story of the year (deservedly) and everyone would be rooting for them against Tech. Not kosher.

Still, its hard not to be impressed by the Scarlet Knights players tonight.