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Tuesday, February 18, 2003 |
Brainwave Receivers Tune in, Turn on, More. In Switzerland, scientists at the Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence (IDIAP) have developed a new technology which can roughly tell what a person is thinking about. The hope is that this technology will be able to help quadriplegics activate robotic devices, offering them "unprecedented" new autonomy. [kuro5hin.org]
7:29:53 PM 
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World-Wide Walkie-talkie
"Fastmobile today announced that it has successfully conducted the first 'around the world' push-to-talk mobile phone conversation. Using standard Nokia 7650 and 3650 handsets, they talked to participants in Chicago, USA, Kent, UK and Henan Province, China, in a 'walkie-talkie' mode.
Push-to-Talk is suddenly hot.
Sprint and Verizon are on a race to be first with 'push to talk' (after Nextel). SprintPCS is trialing a push-to-talk solution by an Israeli company, Mobile Tornado. Their Push-To-Talk service uses 'IPRS' (IP Radio Service) which delivers two-way VoIP sessions conducted over any packet-based network such as GPRS, CDMA1x, CDPD, wireless LAN and satellite." [Daily Wireless]
What's more instant than cell phones? Walkie-talkie cellphones. [The Shifted Librarian]
7:29:24 PM
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The Mathematics of Recommendation?. Thomas Bayes, one of the leading mathematical lights in computing today, differs from most of his colleagues: He has argued that the existence of God can be derived from equations. His most important paper was published by someone else. And he's been dead for 241 years.
Yet the 18th-century clergyman's theories on probability have become a major part of the mathematical foundations of application development.
Search giant Google and Autonomy, a company that sells information retrieval tools, both employ Bayesian principles to provide likely (but technically never exact) results to data searches. Researchers are also using Bayesian models to determine correlations between specific symptoms and diseases, create personal robots, and develop artificially intelligent devices that "think" by doing what data and experience tell them to do.
Despite the esoteric symbols, the idea--roughly speaking--is simple: The likelihood that something will happen can be plausibly estimated by how often it occurred in the past. Researchers are applying the idea to everything from gene studies to filtering e-mail.
A detailed mathematical rundown can be found on the University of Minnesota's Web site. And a Bayes Rule Applet on Gametheory.net lets you answer questions such as "How worried should you be if you test positive for some disease?" One of the more vocal Bayesian advocates is Microsoft. The company is employing ideas based on probability--or "probabilistic" principles--in its Notification Platform. The technology will be embedded in future Microsoft software and is intended to let computers and cell phones automatically filter messages, schedule meetings without their owners' help and derive strategies for getting in touch with other people.
If successful, the technology will give rise to "context servers"--electronic butlers that will interpret people's daily habits and organize their lives under constantly shifting circumstances. [Smart Mobs]
7:17:10 PM
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MSFT unveils Groove-for-teens. MSFT has shipped a kiddee-Groove, a file-sharing/IM/collaboration tech aimed at teens, called Softie. The project sounds kind of neat, until you realize that it's got an assload of DRM built into it and, in the end, does less than Napster did.
Here's how the software works. You invite friends to form a posse of up to 10 participants. Representing the group on your desktop will be a colorful image, either one from a set provided by the software or something one of the group has produced. (It could even be a digital photo.) If you're online--and since threedegrees assumes you have broadband, you're probably online all the time--you give your friends a holler simply by sending the equivalent of an instant message. Everyone in the group will see it. If you want to send them a digital photo, you simply drag it over the icon and it shows up on everyone's computer. Then there are "winks": small animations that you trigger to run on everyone's screen. Some of the standards include big lips smacking a kiss or a heavyset cartoon character who drops trou and cuts the cheese. (Sending these to oldsters might cause a NetGen gap.)
The most ambitious feature is called musicmix, an online equivalent of a pajama party where people take turns playing deejay. Each group member contributes favorite tunes into a shared playlist, displayed on a dashboard with a customized "skin," and everyone listens together. A click from any participant can choose a new song. Then everyone chats about the tunes. Interestingly, men and women use this feature differently: guys will see it as a contest--who's brought the coolest tunes?--and do virtual chest-thumps introducing the hottest bands. Meanwhile, the girls use the music as background for their chats. Link Discuss (Thanks, Fred!) [Boing Boing Blog]
6:35:13 PM
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© Copyright 2003 Mark Oeltjenbruns.
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