There's nothing quite like some free academic reading to generate new ideas. Springer has made one whole journal and two special issues free to download.

Springer has provided free access to three interesting journals. Two special issues are available until the 31st August and one journal is free to access till the end of the year..

The first is the International Journal of Social Robotics which you can read in its entirety (two volumes) until the end of the year (2010).

As you can guess this is all about the social aspects of robotics. It is mainly about investigations of how we can craft robots that humans will find acceptable. For example some of the papers in the early issues are all about the effect of robot appearance, and how interacting with an object changes your perception of it. It's an interesting mix of social psychology, hardware and software.

The second journal is  Evolutionary Intelligence which is all about "population based" searches for artificial intelligence which is a good way of encompassing any approach that is about evolving AI. The free access is to the latest special Issue on Simulated Evolution and Learning

There are five articles including an overview. My own pick of the bunch is, "The effects of time-varying rewards on the evolution of cooperation", which looks at they way cooperation can evolve in games, particularly the well-known prisoner's dilemma.

The third and final title, Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces, is about a wide collection of topics but the special issue that you have free access to until the end of the month focuses on engineering multimodal interaction. The papers range from how best to allow users to interact with virtual objects thru "Tilt and go: exploring multimodal mobile maps in the field". If you think that iPhone style gestural input is the end of the story - think again.

As the papers are all provided as PDFs you can download them to you mobile ebook reader and explore them away from your main machine.

<ASIN:0521108632>

<ASIN:354024509X>

<ASIN:1586037129>

<ASIN:1605663867>

<ASIN:184628838X>

<ASIN:3540751580>

<ASIN:0521108632>