Thursday, November 18, 2004

Electronic Eye Devised to Help Blind Cross Roads. LONDON (Reuters) - An "electronic eye" that can be fitted to a pair of glasses could help the blind cross roads more safely, scientists said on Friday. [Reuters: Science] 8:00:15 PM      Google It!.

Stem Cells Feed Brain Tumors. Researchers discover stem cells that initiate and maintain the growth of brain cancer tumors. The study could lead to new treatments for many types of cancer. By Kristen Philipkoski. [Wired News] 9:26:04 AM      Google It!.

Speech recognition circa 2004. If you've never tried dictation, you can get a sense of how it works by watching a video screencast I made shortly after I installed Version 8 of NaturallySpeaking. The out-of-the-box experience was dramatically better than before. It got even better when I fed the program all the articles and blog entries I've written during the past few years. ... What I find most interesting about this process is the way in which I train the computer to be an intelligent assistant. Because recognition accuracy is such a difficult problem, dictation software has to pay very close attention to me. It has to learn everything it can about my speech patterns, vocabulary, and writing style. And it must leverage all this information to the maximum degree possible. Perhaps because we imagine that other application domains are not as challenging, other programs pay strikingly little attention to what we do. Sure, the browser will remember the last thing that you typed into a field on a form, and your e-mail program will help you keep track of whom you've replied to. But by and large, our so-called productivity software does not monitor what we do, is not meaningfully trainable, and does not grow more valuable over time as our relationship with it deepens. We are creatures of habit, but we are ill-served by software that does not notice or respond to those habits. When I organize my e-mail or conduct research on the Web, I exhibit predictable patterns of behavior. We have long expected but rarely experienced personal productivity software that absorbs those patterns, automates repetitive chores, and can be taught to improve its performance. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] ... [Jon's Radio] 9:24:07 AM      Google It!.

Google Keyhole, Google Scholar [Slashdot:] keyhole is quite amazing and the Scholar service is a big step tward federated style searching research literature. -- BL 8:37:49 AM      Google It!.