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Vincent Padois, head tutor at the Pierre and Marie Curie University who teaches robotics and is babysitting the Paris ICub, makes a demonstration with ICub robot, a ?hybrid embodied cognitive system for a humanoid robot" about 1 metre (3.2 feet) high, at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris September 4, 2009. Six versions of ICub exist in laboratories across Europe, where scientists are painstakingly tweaking its electronic brain to make it capable of learning, just like a human child and hoping it will learn how to adapt its behaviour to changing circumstances, offering new insights into the development of human consciousness. REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer

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    Google "My Location" to ease mobile map use

    SAN FRANCISCO
    Wed Nov 28, 2007 11:21am EST
    A man talks on a cell phone as he views a display of Google Maps in San Diego, California August 9, 2007. Google said on Wednesday it is introducing a novel mapping system that uses cell phone towers to let mobile phone users locate nearby services without typing in addresses. REUTERS/Mike Blake

    SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Internet search leader Google Inc said on Wednesday it is introducing a novel mapping system that uses cell phone towers to let mobile phone users locate nearby services without typing in addresses.

    Technology  |  Stocks

    Google's new My Location service is being offered in test mode to U.S. users and is designed to expand the percentage of cellphone users of location-aware services, whether or not their phones come equipped with satellite-locating chips.

    Google Maps for Mobile with My Location automatically informs mobile phone users where they are on a map. Users simply type the number "0" on their phone to move the map to their approximate location.

    Google is offering the service for free, direct to U.S. consumers, and is expected to eventually introduce local advertising that takes advantage of the location-aware service. The company has created the service independent of carriers.

    The service uses various algorithms to approximate a user's handset location relative to the cell towers nearest them. The service relies on a database of cell towers Google has constructed by using anonymous readings of mobile signals from previous Google Maps users to help locate My Location users.

    (Reporting by Eric Auchard in San Francisco, editing by Dave Zimmerman)
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