As indicated by the articel mentioned earlier, has Journal of Machine Learning Research (JLMR) opened a separate track for open source licensed machine learning algorithm.

"The aim of this special section is to provide, in parallel to theoretical advances in machine learning, a venue for collection and dissemination of open source software. Furthermore, we believe that a resource of peer reviewed software accompanied by short articles would be highly valuable to the machine learning community in general, helping to build a common repository of machine learning software."

A new website for machine learning software has been launched at http://mloss.org. Paralled to the efforts of JLMR, it is focussing on open source contributions:

"Open source tools have recently reached a level of maturity which makes them suitable for building large-scale real-world systems. At the same time, the field of machine learning has developed a large body of powerful learning algorithms for a wide range of applications. Inspired by similar efforts in bioinformatics (BOSC) or statistics (useR), our aim is to build a forum for open source software in machine learning."

Toytota has developed a robot which can play a violin. The project is part of Toyotas ambition to make robots a part of core business by 2020. The robots plays the violin better than most humans, but far worse than the best humans.

See video here

An impressed danish blogger found some canadian movie showing a few buildings which had connected lights. Nice, I guess, but by no means impressing. Impressing is when someone takes some weeks off every year in December to make the house look completely crazy with lights and then every night a few hours is dancing in a Santa costume before one of the windows (true story from Washington state, US). This music-controlled christmas light is also pretty crazy