Artificial Intelligence in a nutshell

Ever tried the voice recognition feature in your mobile or computer? Most of us have!! And I am sure most of you were amused to see how a machine could recognize the language we speak. All this is possible due to Artificial Intelligence and this is a small speck of the enormous potential AI and its application hold with in.

Artificial Intelligence is a branch of computer science that aims at making machines or software programs that exhibit intelligent behavior like human beings i.e. a machine can perceive their surroundings, analyze and react in the best possible way. The AI involves various other fields like Cognitive Science, Mathematical Logic, computational science to name a few.

The history of artificial intelligence can be traced to 1950 when Alan Turing proposed the Turing test as a measure of machine intelligence. The Turing test   Prof. John McCarthy coined the term Artificial Intelligence at the conference on the campus of Dartmouth College in summer of 1956.Over the time AI has been divided into:

Strong AI :  Strong AI (Very often called as ‘true AI’) refers to AI that inculcates intelligence in the machine that matches or exceeds human intelligence. This has still not come in to existence but finds a place in many of the sci-fi movies like Matrix, Terminator etc.

Weak AI : Weak AI refers to AI that enables machines to only mimic humans based on their programming. This kind of AI just simulates the human thoughts and actions that they are programmed to. AI. The true AI features like independent reasoning, to learn freely and adapt are absent. All current form of AI is weak.

There are many areas in which weak AI already inhabits today’s world and in many cases we don’t even realize that we use Artificial Intelligence. Lets see some of such applications:

• The self-parking technology in cars is based on AI.
• AI is used in monitoring frauds in Banks.
• The voice recognition in mobile phones was made possible using AI.
• The intelligent homes comprising of temperature, passive infrared, electricity and light sensors are AI based.
• Unmanned aerial vehicles, autonomous submersibles, unmanned surveillance in shallow water used in Military also involve AI.
• The Computer chess built on AI defeated the world Champion Garry Kasparov in a game.

The dream of making machines that are ‘Truly AI’ does not seem impossible. Companies like Google are aiming at making search engine fully artificially intelligent. In future we will have a search engine that will not be based on ‘just the words we type in without the search engine understanding the meaning’, instead it will exactly understand what we want.

Fascinating research projects presented at Microsoft’s TechFest 2010

When brains at Microsoft Research Labs are at work, we can  definitely expect some path breaking techno developments. Techfest 2010 at Redmond witnessed many such demos on various projects. Lets have a look at some of them:

1. The Translating phone and The Transcriptor: Transcriptor generates a live transcript of the coversation we have over a call on a PC based communicator. The scripts are merged in email as well for searching.

The Translator is a wonderful concept that takes away the about the difference of language we might have over an important client call or anything like that. The translator translates the speech of the person on the other side of the phone to the language you want at real time. This 2-way translator also generates a live translated transcript. Find out more about the project @ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/transcriptor/default.aspx

2. Project Gustav: Project Gustav is a creative endeavor of Microsoft to make digital painting a perfect realistic experience. It is a realistic painting system prototype that simulates natural, real-world painting environment.

For a better knowhow of the project visit the official page on Project Gustav.

3. Skinput: Skinput is a technology that favors the skin of our body to be used as an input device. Various signals like location of finger taps are collected by sensors worn as armbands. To know more about the Skinput check out http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/gustav/default.aspx

4. Mobile Surface: It aims at making any surface around you as a touch interface surface by linking together a mobile device, camera and a projector. It allows you to project an image on any surface and interact with it even without touching the image.

Click on http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/mobilesurface/default.aspx for more information.

An altogether new world of technologies. Exciting!! Isn’t it?? Lets wait and watch how these project finally turn out. Till then keep reading and commenting.

BumpTop: The desktop environment re-defined

Bored of the same stereotype ikons and their arrangement on your desktop? Here is a new 3D, intuitive, physics enabled desktop interface that gives you an experience that you haven’t had before.  BumpTop makes your desktop look and feel like a real desk where in you can pile up the files, flip through them like you do on your desk. It can be downloaded to Windows XP, Vista and Mac. It comes with wonderful multi-touch feature in Windows 7.

Out of many, few features are:

Instant Organization: You can toss the file on to printer to print them, to recycle bin to delete it or pile up the icons into a stack. Flip through them like a book or organize them into a grid. It is fun to see different icons bump into each other. It automatically filters the documents as we type the name and then piles them up. Much like your own room you can pin up, rotate the photographs. Multi-selection cannot get easier; you just need to make a circle around the files you need to select.

Social Networking: For all the social Networking lovers if you need to change your pic on the various sites like facebook, twitter, you just have to drop in your icon on the facebook and twitter icons on your desktop.

Check out the BumpTop site for more details on these features and download it to have fun with this desktop interferace.

50 Interesting Facts

1. Look at your zipper. See the initials YKK? It stands for Yoshida Kogyo Kabushibibaisha, the world’s largest zipper manufacturer.

2. A raisin dropped in a glass of freshchampagne will bounce up and down continuously from the bottom of the glass to the top.

3. A duck’s quack doesn’t echo. No one knows why.

4. 40 percent of McDonald’s profits come from the sales of Happy Meals.

5. 315 entries in Webster’s 1996 Dictionary were misspelled.

6. On the average, 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily.

7. Chocolate kills dogs! True, chocolate affects a dog’s heart and nervous system. A few ounces is enough to kill a small sized dog.

8. Most lipstick contains fish scales.

9. Ketchup was sold in the 1830′s as a medicine.

10. Leonardo da Vinci could write with one hand and draw with the other at the same time.

11. Because metal was scarce, the Oscars given out during World War II were made of wood.

12. There are no clocks in Las Vegas g@mbling casin0s.

13. Leonardo da Vinci invented scissors. Also, it took him 10 years to paint Mona Lisa’s lips.

14. Bruce Lee was so fast that they actually had to slow a film down so you could see his moves. That’s the opposite of the norm.

15. The original name for the butterfly was “flutterby”!

16. By raising your legs slowly and lying on your back, you can’t sink in quicksand.

17. Mosquito repellents don’t repel. They hide you. The spray blocks the mosquito’s sensors so they don’t know you’re there.

18. Dentists recommend that a toothbrush be kept at least six feet away from a toilet to avoid airborne particles resulting from the flush.

19. The first product to have a bar code was Wrigley’s gum.

20. The first owner of the Marlboro Company died of lung cancer.

21. Michael Jordan makes more money from Nike annually than the entire Nike factory workers in Malaysia combined.

22. Marilyn Monroe had six toes on one foot.

23. Adolf Hitler’s mother seriously considered having an abortion but was talked out of it by her doctor.

24. The three most valuable brand names on earth: Marlboro, Coca-Cola, and Budweiser, in that order.

25. “Stewardesses” is the longest word that can be typed with only the left hand.

26. To escape the grip of a crocodile’s jaws, prick your fingers into its eyeballs. It will let you go instantly.

27. A mathematical wonder: 111,111,111 multiplied by 111,111,111 gives the result 12, 345, 678, 987, 654, 321.

28. The most common name in the world is Mohammed.

29. The average person falls asleep in seven minutes.

30. The “pound” (#) key on your keyboard is called an octothorp.

31. The only domestic animal not mentioned in the Bible is the cat.

32. Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.

33. The average person’s left hand does 56% of the typing.

34. “Dreamt” is the only word in the English language that ends in “mt”.

35. It’s impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.

36. In Chinese, the KFC slogan “finger lickin’ good” comes out as “eat your fingers off”.

37. A cockroach can live for 10 days without a head.

39. We shed 40 pounds of skin a lifetime.

40. Yo-Yos were once used as weapons in the Philippines.

41. Coca-Cola can be used as car oil.

42. Mexico City sinks abut 10 inches a year.

43. Brains are more active sleeping than watching TV.

44. Blue is the favorite color of 80 percent of Americans.

45. When a person shakes their head from side to side, he is saying “yes” in Sri Lanka.

46. There are more chickens than people in the world.

47. It’s against the law in Iceland to have a dog.

48. The thumbnail grows the slowest, and the middle nail grows the fastest.

49. The only word in the English Language with all vowels in reverse order is “s ub c ont in ent al”.

50. There are more telephones than people in Washington, D.C.

Do you have such interesting Facts to share, here is the place ! Add on……….

The Consumer Electronics Association estimates that the US consumer electronics market is in a state of recovery and should exceed $166 Billion in 2010.

pic courtesy: Permuto

How amazingly we are moving with time and getting used to the innovations. Keep reading !

First, the question is ‘What is Augmented Reality’?

To explain, Augmented Reality is one of the newest innovations in the electronics industry. It superimposes graphics, audio and other sense enhancements from computer screens onto real time environments. Augmented reality goes far beyond the static graphics technology of television where the graphics imposed do not change with the perspective. Augmented Reality systems superimpose graphics for every perspective and adjust to every movement of the user’s head and eyes.

Development of the needed technology for augmented reality systems, however, is still underway within the laboratories of both universities and high tech companies. It is forecasted that by the end of this decade, the first mass-produced augmented reality systems will hit the market.

Now, slowly we will find products coming in this area. Vuzix is generating a lot of buzz over by their booth at this year’s CES with their new Wrap 920AR eyewear – the first augmented reality sunglasses on the market. Complete with a stereo camera pair, users can view the real-world environment and computer-generated imagery seamlessly mixed together; allowing video game characters to jump out of the TV and come to life in your living room, or magazines and books with animated links back to the web in real time.

The stereo camera pair delivers a single 1504 x 480 side-by-side image that can be viewed in 3D stereoscopic video, while the video eyewear provides an unprecedented 67-inch display as seen from 10 feet. The Wrap 920AR also includes a 6 Degree-of-Freedom Tracker, which allows for absolute accuracy of roll pitch and yaw and also X, Y and Z positioning in 3D space.

“The Wrap 920AR offers the world’s only sunglass styled Augmented Reality experience” said Vuzix CEO, Paul Travers. “This state-of-the-art video eyewear, offers consumers an AR solution only available in handheld devices to date, merging the real world with the digital in a pair of glasses makes for world changing experiences from industry to gaming,” adds Travers. “With the Wrap 920 AR, Vuzix brings exclusive new capabilities to the consumer.”

The Wrap 920AR’s stereo camera assembly and 6-DoF Tracker will also be available separately for upgrading existing Wrap video eyewear.

Vuzix Wrap 920AR Specifications:

• 1/3-inch wide VGA Digital Image Sensor
• Resolution: 752H x 480W
• Includes 6 Degree-of-Freedom Tracker
• Frame rate: 60 fps
• Dynamic range: >55dB linear; >80-100dB in HiDy mode
• Shutter efficiency: >99%
• ADC Resolution: 10-bit column parallel
• High-speed USB 2.0
• PC and Mac compatible
• System requirements: Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, Windows7, Mac OS X     10.4.9 or higher
• MSRP: $799.99

Would be interesting to watch, how more and more products come in this area. Keep reading …

Gist : Know better what you already know 

Gist is a web based tool that intelligently sums up the vast information a user has in and needs from his/her email, social networking sites, CRM tools and search engines. Gist Inc., a Seattle based company headed and founded by T.A. McCann has opened Gist for public beta since 15 Sept, 2009 after an approximate 1 year of private beta testing by around 10,000 testers. Gist amalgamates email with rest of the web to organize, prioritize and present to you the information that matters the most to you. Gist has collaborated with Outlook, Salesforce, g-mail, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Email/IMAP. You need to upload your profiles by adding these applications to your Gist account and the rest will be taken care by Gist.   

Whom is GIST going to benefit? 

This is looked upon as a Personal Relationship Manager which will make life easier for professionals who are overwhelmed with their flooded mail box and scattered information all over the web. Most of the time, business professionals need some information about an important contact and the events related to them.  For instance it’s a very frequent practice to have a look on the profile of people (May be a potential client) whom you are going to have a meeting or call with. It might become a tedious task to update you with information about such contacts by searching in Google, their Linkedin, Facebook profiles. Let’s see how Gist will solve this concern. 

What does Gist offer? 

• Depending upon the frequency and type of communication you have had Gist comes out with the most important profiles (both individual and company).
• It automatically generates a profile of various contacts by taking information from their profile in Linkedin, Facebook and also from the news and blogs associated with them on the web.
• It enables you to share news, blogs, contact details via Twitter, Facebook.
• Gist dashboard includes upcoming events, attachments involved in previous communications, list of important contacts and companies, events revolving, recently shared.
• Apart from the automatic organization of various information, you can have a customized organization by grouping your contacts, tagging them, increasing or decreasing the automatically set importance of a contact. The Gist generated profile can be viewed by clicking on the contact name.
• You can see contact’s blogs, news related to them and their public tweets that Gist pulls from twitter.
• There are various criterion on which a contact or information can be searched like search based on the updates on contact since 24 hrs, 48 hrs, 30 days and so on till 90 days. Search can also be performed on the basis of contacts added recently or depending on the person with whom the upcoming meeting is scheduled which is based on calendar info available.
• One of the most appreciated feature is you can use this tool as a plug-in with Outlook and Salesforce.com. If you see any contacts in your mails and want to get some info about him/her, you can get it there and then using Gist with the help of profile generated by it. You need not go out of the Outlook or Salesforce window.
• CSV can be uploaded as well. 

This is a much awaited step towards integration of social media and CRM and is available for free but there is an advanced version that is coming up which will be chargeable. 

Log on to http://www.gist.com/ to have a first hand experience of one of the most innovative mashups that we have seen off-late.