Al Jazeera Crew to Cover ‘BigBots’
By Mark Houser, The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Jul. 14–Al Jazeera is coming to Pittsburgh.
The Middle Eastern TV network plans to have a crew in Pittsburgh today and Tuesday shooting a piece on the large robotic sculptures that are part of Robot 250, a citywide exhibition.
“I think it’ll be cool,” said Ian Ingram, the local artist whose motorized, 12-foot foam “You’re No. 1″ hand adorns the roof of the Andy Warhol Museum.
Ingram said he will show the video crew around the city to see his and other so-called “BigBots” in the exhibition organized by Carnegie Mellon University.
The TV crew is with the Al Jazeera Children’s Channel, said CMU spokesman Byron Spice. They are reporting on a group of students from Qatar who are going to a robotics-in-education conference in Oklahoma after winning a regional robot soccer contest.
Al Jazeera is based in Qatar, where CMU has a branch campus.
While in Pittsburgh, the Arabic-language program will profile two CMU-Qatar students working on a robot at the Oakland campus this summer, Spice said.
The network’s flagship news channel is widely popular in the Middle East. It has been criticized by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others who claim it has an anti-American bias. Al Jazeera has an English-language global news network, which in the United States is broadcast on satellite TV and some small cable providers.
Robot 250′s main organizer, CMU Robotics Institute professor Illah Nourbakhsh, said he is eager to appear on the children’s program.
“We’re always trying to convey the idea that people shouldn’t feel isolated from their technology, but that they can have a voice, that they can make a difference in their world and they can use technology as a means of doing that,” said Nourbakhsh, whose family moved to America from Iran when he was a boy.
“That’s always my goal, and it doesn’t depend on who I’m talking to.”
—–
To see more of The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/.
Copyright (c) 2008, The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.