Random Accesses

It's a good time to be communicating with computers. No longer are we constrained by the mouse and keyboard--touch screens and gesture-based controllers are becoming increasingly common.

Now, researchers at Microsoft, the University of Washington in Seattle, and the University of Toronto in Canada have come up with another way to interact with computers: a muscle-controlled interface that allows for hands-free, gestural interaction.

A band of electrodes attach to a person's forearm and read electrical activity from different arm muscles. These signals are then correlated to specific hand gestures, such as touching a finger and thumb together, or gripping an object tighter than normal. The researchers envision using the technology to change songs in an MP3 player while running or to play a game like Guitar Hero without the usual plastic controller.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23813/?a=f

According to Microsoft this week, "voice is the new touch." Never mind that we've been hearing the "voice recognition will change the world" mantra for more than a decade now; this time, it's the real deal! And the company might be right, thanks in part to the peculiar power of the cloud.

With the launch of Windows 7, Microsoft is again talking up its voice recognition efforts, which extend from operating systems to cars to mobile phones. The company has certainly been hammering away at the technology for quite some time; limited versions have been included in Office for years, and a full speech recognition package was built into Vista. Bill Gates has also been predicting the rise of voice communication for a decade.

But Microsoft does have something important: a crack speech-recognition team with access to cloud-based voice recognition servers. It acquired TellMe in 2007, and the Speech at Microsoft group now controls the TellMe voice platform, which manages more than six million calls per month.

Source: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/10/voice-recognition-gets-cloudy-will-soon-rival-humans.ars

Software vulnerabilities that take days or weeks to fix may one day be a thing of the past. A team of researchers have presented new software, called ClearView, that automatically patches errors in deployed software in a matter of minutes.

As Technology Review reports, ClearView works without assistance from humans and without access to a program’s underlying source code. Instead, it monitors the behavior of a binary: the form the program takes in order to execute instructions on a computer’s hardware.

A paper, Automatically Patching Errors in Deployed Software, published by the Association for Computing Machinery, explains how ClearView works as five sequential steps.

Source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=1879&tag=col1;post-1879

Technology-assisted mind-reading is inching closer to reality, with advances that could help those unable to communicate on their own. According to research presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference in Chicago this week, scientists can determine what vowel and consonants a person is thinking of by recording activity from the surface of the brain. The system, which has about a 50-to-70% accuracy rate, could one day be used as a neural prosthesis for people with severe paralysis, translating their thoughts into actions on a computer or prosthetic limb.

Gerwin Schalk and colleagues at the Wadsworth Center, in Albany, NY, used a technology called electrocorticography (ECoG), in which a sheet of electrodes is laid directly on the surface of a patient's brain. The procedure is currently used to locate the source of seizures in patients with severe epilepsy that is resistant to drugs. Neuroscientists take advantage of the unparalleled access to the human brain during the test--which can last for days--by asking these patients to participate in experiments.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/24279/

At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco recently, NVIDIA announced a GPU-powered 3D Web platform. Called the NVIDIA RealityServer, it consists of Tesla GPUs, rendering software and a Web service environment, all integrated into a platform designed to deliver photorealistic image streams via a cloud computing model. The new offering is yet another example of how the company intends to push its high-end GPUs into CPU territory.

The basic idea behind RealityServer is to do all the heavy computation lifting of image rendering on the server side, such that photorealistic 3D content can be delivered interactively across the Web. That means mass-market devices from smart phones to desktops and everything in between can be used to do high-end imaging.

Applications include architectural design, product design, manufacturing and apparel styling, as well as HPC visual applications in such areas as oil and gas, medical diagnostics, and scientific research. As a result, potential users span the entire population: consumers, artists, product designers, doctors, architects, engineers, and scientists.

Source: http://www.hpcwire.com/features/NVIDIA-Pitches-GPU-Computing-in-the-Cloud-65217572.html