Kyt Dotson
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Microsoft Demos Advancements in NUI (Natural User Interfaces) and Kinect is in the Picture
Researchers at Microsoft show that they’re really thinking hard about how humans interact with computers and how the Kinect has provided a surge of innovation in this direction. Natural User Interfaces should be the next-big-thing and include a lot of things science fiction has brought into our zeitgeist like the Minority Report user interface (provided ...
Apple’s FaceTime for Mac Arrives in Mac App Store for $0.99 a Pop
It’s become official, Apple just released FaceTime for Mac in the Mac App Store today. Now Mac OS X users can chat with other Apple customers on their iPhone 4 and iPod Touch. With the video-chat feature entering into an already growing ecology of apps that do the same thing, some media writers are scratching ...
IBM’s Watson in Retrospect, Ken Jennings and Others Weigh In
Over the Valentine’s Day week, IBM’s expert-system Watson took on all-time Jeopardy! winners Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter and pretty much trounced them. This has generated a great deal of speculation and a lot of buzz for IBM. If nothing else, this has been a huge publicity for IBM and Watson and possibly even Jeopardy! ...
Microsoft’s Kinect SDK Could Open the Door for a PC App Store
The recent announcement by Microsoft that they intend to release a personal SDK for the Kinect that will enable the production of applications for Windows 7 has come with much fanfare. Commentary from Craig Mundie, the software giant’s chief strategy and research officer, has come out to enlighten us on Microsoft’s support of the developer ...
Generating Crowds: Astroturfing Propaganda Software and Social Media Collide
There’s a lot of research to be done on crowdsourcing—the method of turning minor human actions into large, complex activities or processes; but what about the opposite, certainly marketing could make use of the ability to generate the illusion of a crowd from a few people. Enter the power of social media and the Internet. ...
UberTwitter and twidroyd Restored by Twitter, Blackberry Natives Still Restless
From the looks of it two of the apps that Twitter gave the axe last week have gotten the keys to the API back and are once again back in the fray. UberTwitter, now known as UberSocial, and twidroyd have been returned to tweeting status as of yesterday afternoon after making multiple concessions to Twitter ...
What Does IBM’s Watson Tell Us About Potential Future Expert-Systems?
During the test-run of IBM’s Watson in a short series of Jeopardy! matches we saw the expert-system manage to answer a lot of questions quickly and correctly—but we also saw it make some extremely wacky mistakes. The lead researcher on IBM’s Watson project has been quoted saying that he doesn’t fully understand why Watson makes ...
Google Public Data Explorer Provides Extremely Cool Data Visualization
When it comes to dataset curation for public entities it’s generally up to them to purchase or learn software, run with it, and then publish their own results. Since public institutions generate a great deal of data, and generally run on statistics from economy to how to visualize population and government goals it’s extremely useful ...
Another Tech Hoax: Plan B’s Anonymous Author Bows Out with a Tweet
This is going to be the second time I’m going to say something to the ends of: Well, that didn’t last long. First, the Plan B website came out with its well written, eloquent, and argued manifesto citing the Shareholder Nine and their grievances with the current state of Nokia Corp. It took only 36 ...
Viewdle is Here to Mix Facial Recognition and Social Networking
Years ago, I watched an instructional video all about how to remember names. The video had been directed towards businessmen and salespeople who might have to recall the names of a host of people during their career, some people are talented at connecting faces to names—others, like me, do it poorly. Now, thanks to Viewdle, ...