I'm anything but a professional programmer or an IT specialist: I am a physician and a pharmacist.
But I like it to program as a hobby (particularly during bad weather of what we got quite a lot), and perhaps this explains my sometimes somewhat different perspective on programming issues and themes (AI, neural nets, pattern recognition, expert systems - and APIs).
Half a year ago I posted in this thread that I was going to start my first job (as PhD student, actually), and my institute finally has a Youtube-channel. So if you're interested in what we do, check it out: http://www.youtube.com/user/VEROSIMSimulations
A video of interest for robot navigation might be this one (maybe even for NXT robots one day?):
Edit: Fixed Youtube-Vid-ID
RWTH - Mindstorms NXT Toolbox for MATLAB
state of the art in nxt remote control programming http://www.mindstorms.rwth-aachen.de MotorControl now also in Python, .net, and Mathematica