Galileo in hell: a scientist's imaginary trip

Studio Azzurro and the Nurnberg Open Haus Ballet will make use of technologies developed within the CALLAS project to enhance their latest performance, "Galileo in hell", which will take place at the Arcimboldi Theatre of Milan on the 10th, 11th and 12th of July.

The CALLAS technology will be used to allow a digital scenography installation to react to the public's emotions, which will be assessed by analysing voices and sounds coming from the arena.

Studio Azzurro is directly involved in the CALLAS project, funded by the European Commission and led by Engineering Ingegneria Informatica.

Videos, Images and music: the search engine of the future is European

A team of European researchers is developing PHAROS, a new search engine with highly innovative features.

If you are at a shopping centre and you hear a piece of music you like, today you can only record it and then ask someone for the title. Within a few years, you will have the possibility to send the music you recorded to a search engine, and have the title and recommendation of other songs you may like in reply. A team of European researchers, led by Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, has no doubts about it and already gave a name to such an innovative search engine: PHAROS

The project, funded by the European Commission, involves some major industrial and academic players such as France Telecom, Fast and Politecnico di Milano. The objective, as they say at the Politecnico di Milano, is to “bring together the highest competencies of the old continent in the fields of search engines, multimedia data processing and user interfaces to create the search engine of the future”. A multimedia search engine, i.e. capable of not only performing searches on textual documents, but also on audio, video, and image files.

The researchers working on the project believe that PHAROS will indeed be revolutionary. “The technology” – the experts at Politecnico di Milano say – “will let internet users perform searches of new kinds, such as searching within newscasts for all cuts where a particular subject is being addressed. And not only. It will be possible to search within a video collection for all locations similar to the one represented in a picture taken with one’s own portable device”

The features will be manifold. PHAROS has being designed to be extremely open. According to the experts, it will be possible to “plug in any multimedia data analysis algorithm, such as an algorithm which recognises who’s speaking or which searches buildings within video files. This way the system will be capable of harnessing a vast amount of possibilities to perform searches that have never been attempted before”

PHAROS, the developers say, will have typical 2.0 features. “It combines the most strictly technological innovations with a social approach to searching: the ability, i.e., to personalise the responses to queries and the user interface on the basis of the users’ behaviour and more generally on the basis of the overall users community interactions”

Text translated from La Repubblica

Visual Search Engine Coming to iPhone in June

Breakthrough Visual Search Engine for Mobile Phones Takes Off Big in Japan

Pasadena, CA & Tokyo, Japan - April 17, 2008 - Evolution Robotics Inc., a leading robotics technology company, in partnership with Bandai Networks Co. Ltd, Japan's leading mobile content provider, announced today that KDDI Corporation is including the "ER Search" visual search engine on its new Spring 2008 "au™" line of camera phones, and has made it available for download for any KDDI customer with a prior "au" camera phone. This launch marks a dramatic expansion in the market for mobile visual search, which will enable millions of consumers in Japan alone to do online searches by taking pictures of everyday objects with their camera phone.



The deployment of this technology in the mass market also opens up an entirely new range of categories of services for mobile marketing, which is already projected to grow to $24 Billion worldwide by 2013. (Source: ABI Research)

ER Search is a mobile search engine operated by Bandai Networks and powered by Evolution Robotics' ViPR visual pattern recognition system. It works essentially like using a traditional search engine, but without having to type any text or go through complicated menus. Instead, users simply snap a picture of something they're interested in and immediately get back relevant content, all in the palm of the hands.

As an example, KDDI customers will be able to take a picture of a music CD that would return links relating to the artist, hear clips from the album and purchase songs to download on their phone. If they are shopping for wine in a store, they can take a picture of the wine label and get expert reviews and recommendations on the spot. Or, if they are browsing through a catalog and see an item they'd like to buy, they can order it immediately by snapping a picture of the item on the page.

"ER Search is an entirely new way for connecting consumers with content and companies," said Satoshi Oshita, CEO of Bandai Networks. "Because ER Search runs on mobile phones, searches happen when and where the customer is, as soon as they see something that they're interested in. Additionally, the fact that a customer simply has to click a picture of a product or advertisement, makes the search process far easier and immediate than anything that has been available before."

"We are very pleased to be working with Bandai Networks and are excited to see the momentum building in the Japanese market," said Paolo Pirjanian, President and CEO of Evolution Robotics. "Our mission is to take aerospace-grade technologies and make them affordable for mass market applications, and ER Search is a great example. We see this as just the start of a growing market for visual search in Asia and other parts of the globe and are actively working with our partners to expand the range of services that can benefit consumers and companies alike."

Bandai Networks had already deployed ER Search on over one million phones in Japan in 2007. With this deployment with KDDI, the number of users with access to ER Search will expand by millions more in a very short time, making it even more compelling for companies and advertisers to participate in the service.

About ViPR

The ViPR technology easily supports user-generated content so that users can take new pictures of objects, images, videos or even locations and tag them with links and content to expand the database. That content will then show up in the results returned to other users who take similar pictures, thus creating a robust world-wide visual database for communities to develop and access.

ER Search's versatility rests in Evolution Robotics' breakthrough ViPR visual recognition technology. ViPR is able to learn new objects and images on the fly (such as the cover art on a music CD), without the need for any special encoding such as barcodes or watermarks. Just as significant, ViPR performs well on low cost components such as the cameras used on most mobile phones today, even when lighting and other visual conditions are poor.

For the music search application alone, Bandai Networks has over 150,000 music CD covers already indexed in their database. Other mobile marketing and mobile commerce applications include providing content and links for print ads, book covers, DVDs, product packaging, movie posters, retail displays, business signs, etc. Even animation, streaming video or images from live TV can be supported.

Text pasted from gizmodo

Speechless Conversations

A new device translates your thoughts into speech so that you can have a cell-phone conversation without uttering a word.

Ambient Corporation, a company based in Champaign, IL, that develops communications technologies for people with speaking disabilities, is calling its latest system "voiceless communication" with good reason. The company has engineered a neckband that translates a wearer's thoughts into speech so that, without saying a word, he or she can have a cell-phone conversation or query search engines in public.


World's First, Live Voiceless Phone Call Made at TIDC 2008
Speaker: Michael Callahan, CEO and Co-Founder, Ambient Corporation Ambient Corporation demonstrates silent phone communication using TI's ultra-low power MSP430 microcontroller technology.

Don't fret: the device, called Audeo, can't read minds, so it won't capture your secret thoughts. It picks up the neurological signals from the brain that are being sent to the vocal cords--a person must specifically think about voicing words--and then wirelessly transmits them to a computer, which translates them into synthesized speech. At the moment, the device has a limited vocabulary: 150 words and phrases.

The video below shows Michael Callahan, a cofounder of Ambient and a developer of the device, demonstrating the technology at the Texas Instruments Developers Conference, which was held in Dallas from March 3 through 5. In his speech, he says that by the end of the year, the device will be ready for use by people with Lou Gehrig's disease, a progressive neurodegenerative disease that can cause sufferers to become completely paralyzed. He also says that in the future, if a person is walking down the street thinking about where a bus station is located, the device will automatically wirelessly query a search engine to find one.

[Text pasted from MIT's Technology Review]

Will a YouTube Platform Matter?

The video site will let people do more with their clips, like watch them on TiVo.

Bloggers and other website managers have long been able to embed videos hosted by the online video site YouTube in their own pages. But on Wednesday, YouTube announced that it would give computer programmers access to some of the technology that underlies its site. The company's goal was to involve itself in other methods of distributing Web video--not just YouTube.com, but websites and services that include TiVo, video games, and Webcam software.

"For users, the exciting news is that they will be able to actively participate in the YouTube community from just about anywhere," says Jim Patterson, YouTube product manager, "including the online destinations and Web communities they already love and visit regularly."

In other words, YouTube--which Google bought last year for $1.6 billion--won't be just a website that lets people view, rate, and comment on videos. It will be a platform upon which software developers can build their own video-player interfaces, customized video, and search tools. Ultimately, users will be able to upload video from sites built on the YouTube platform, instead of having to go to YouTube.com. Later this year, the company will offer another service that will let viewers log into YouTube and watch videos via their TiVo set-top boxes. The service will be available to people who have broadband connections and a Tivo Series 3 system or an high-definition set-top box. (This isn't the first time YouTube has found its way to the television: Apple TV started offering built-in YouTube access last year.)

But there are key differences between YouTube video and the content typically viewed on a television. "What YouTube has shown is that online video represents a new medium that's much more about bite-sized morsels and things that are conducive to the small screen and short attention spans," says Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst of Leichtman Research Group. Because YouTube's low-resolution clips might not look good when expanded to fill a TV screen, says Tara Maitra, vice president and general manager for content services at TiVo, the TiVo service might restrict them to just a small part of the screen.

Certainly, some people will be excited to learn that they will no longer need to gather their friends around their computer monitors to watch their favorite YouTube clips. But Leichtman says YouTube on TiVo will really affect only a small number of people. "We have to keep this in perspective," says Leichtman. The YouTube-ready TiVo boxes are "representative of less than 1 percent of all households. It really adds no breadth."

YouTube applications developed by other companies, such as game developer Electronic Arts (EA) or online-slide-show maker Animoto, might have more traction. EA plans to release a YouTube feature in its game Spore, in which players build their own creatures. "When a ... user finishes creating their creature, they have the option to record a short video of their creature in action," says Brandon Barber, director of entertainment development and programming at EA. "This can be uploaded to that user's YouTube account in a few clicks." Since sharing parts of games is something that gamers already do, the combination of EA and YouTube is natural. Animoto has integrated a single-click option that lets a user quickly share a photo slide show on YouTube, also a natural combination of services.


Exactly how YouTube will make money from its platform remains unclear, however. YouTube has said that there is no revenue-sharing model built into its open platform, but in that respect, it's not alone. The social-networking websites Facebook and Twitter, which supply platforms for developers to use, have no clear profit model either. YouTube contends that as more software and services are built on its platform, more users will sign up for them. Ultimately, that large audience could translate into revenue through advertising. At this point, however, none of these companies has implemented a reliable method for making money from its audience.

"I think, at its core, with all the success of YouTube from a viewer standpoint, one still has to ask, 'Where's the money?'" says Leichtman. "The knee-jerk way is advertising," he says. But as Google expands the YouTube service, it has to look for new ways to make money, he says. "YouTube is a phenomenon," Leichtman says, "but it's not a revenue phenomenon."

[Text pasted from MIT's Technology Review]

Numbrosia - Merit Based News

There’s some chatter today on Hacker News and Profy about a new site called Numbrosia. Unlike Digg, stories are not ranked via user voting.

Instead, users solve math puzzles that get progressively harder. The higher their score, the higher their submitted news items appear. The exact number of points for an item is the recent score divided by the number of submitted links, so it makes sense for users to submit just a single story.

There’s no business here, and we’ll likely never touch on Numbrosia again. But I like the creativity, and sometimes seeing something like this creates the seed of a new idea in others. Plus, puzzle addicts will likely waste an afternoon on the site.

Perhaps intelligent testing could help other sites reduce spam or otherwise improve their service.

[Text pasted from TechCrunch]

Paramount to release thousands of film clips on Facebook

Paramount Pictures will become the first major studio to make thousands of movie clips available for use on the internet, launching its VooZoo application Monday on Facebook.

"The short clips for a movie that you've already seen before helps you relive the moment," said Derek Broes, Paramount's senior vice-president of entertainment.

Users of the popular social networking site will have access to footage from thousands of movies, including Forrest Gump and The Ten Commandments.

Facebook users can send the video clips to others users on the site.

The scenes last from a few seconds to a few minutes, covering everything from Audrey Hepburn's monologue about her "no-name slob" of a cat in Breakfast at Tiffany's, to Eddie Murphy's signature chuckle from Beverly Hills Cop.

DVDs of the movies will be offered for sale through a button that appears after each clip is played. Eventually, the studio will be using the same method to market upcoming films.

VooZoo is expected to attract a few hundred thousand users within its first two months.

"My benchmark for success is that people are joining and sending," Broes said.

The task of selecting clips was time consuming. Paramount staffers worked for more than a year to archive and tag the clips being offered.

Paramount officials say they're not sure how much they may reap through the experiment, and have no "revenue goals" attached to the project.

[Text pasted from CBCNews]

Human-Computer Interaction Redefines Science

University of Maryland's Ben Shneiderman, one of the world's leading researchers and innovators in human-computer interaction, says it's time for the laboratory research that has defined science for the last 400 years to make room for a revolutionary new method of scientific discovery.

He calls it Science 2.0., and it combines the hypothesis based inquiry of laboratory science with the methods of social science research to understand and improve the use of new human networks made possible by today's digital connectivity. Through Science 2.0, the societal potential of such networks can be realized for applications ranging from homeland security to medical care to the environment.

Shneiderman points to the effect that the World Wide Web and cell phones have had on building human collaborations and influencing society. "eBay, Amazon, Netflix have already reshaped consumer markets. Web-based political participation and citizen journalism are beginning to change civil society. Online patient-centered medical information has improved health care. MySpace and Facebook encourage casual social networks, but they may soon play more serious roles in emergency disaster response, for instance.

"It's time for researchers in science to take network collaboration like this to the next phase and reap the potential intellectual and societal payoffs. We need to understand the principles that are at work in these systems," said Shneiderman.


A "Google TechTalk" about HCI by Allison Druin, Director of the Human Computer Interaction Lab @ University of Maryland

Francis Bacon vs. Science 2.0

Four hundred years ago, Francis Bacon promoted the research strategy that has ruled scientific quests ever since, what Shneiderman calls Science 1.0. As Shneiderman describes it, Science 1.0 is "reductionist thinking closely linked to controlled experiments," a method that, while successful in explaining natural phenomena "sometimes diverges from solving practical problems and only occasionally advancing broader goals."

"Science 2.0 is about studying design of rapidly changing socio-technical systems. These studies are not replicable in a lab," said Shneiderman. "You have to study social interactions in the real world. Traditional social scientists have tried to understand these systems by data collection, but more effective Science 2.0 research involves design interventions to rapidly improve e-commerce, online communities, healthcare delivery, and disaster response.

"Science 1.0 remains vital, but this ambitious vision of Science 2.0 will require a shift in priorities to combine computer science with social science sensitivity. It will affect research funding, educational practices and evaluation of research outcomes," Shneiderman says.

911.gov

Shneiderman and a number of colleagues at the University of Maryland are already on the frontier of applying Science 2.0 methods to the computer-based human networks that Shneiderman calls socio-technical systems. Here are a few new intriguing lines of research.

• Disaster and emergency response -- Shneiderman, Jennifer Preece and several other colleagues are developing 911.gov Community Response Grid, an emergency response system that would rely on the Internet and mobile communication devices to allow citizens to receive and submit information about significant homeland security community problems.

• Why do we trust MySpace? - Jennifer Golbeck is using Science 2.0 methods to understand how people come to trust technical communication networks, something that can't be studied in a laboratory, Shneiderman says. Her results can be applied to many applications of social networking including medical care, voting and homeland security.

• Why We Respond - Philip Wu looks at motivation for participating in community response through information and communication technologies, and studying average citizens' information needs and behavior when they prepare for, respond to, and recover from large-scale emergencies and disasters.
  

Text pasted from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080306170924.htm

The Revolution of Mobile Search

This is a nice presentation from Yahoo! about search applications for mobiles I found on slideshare.

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Connecting Your Brain to the Game

Using an EEG cap, a startup hopes to change the way people interact with video games.

Emotiv Systems, an electronic-game company from San Francisco, wants people to play with the power of the mind. Starting tomorrow, video-game makers will be able to buy Emotiv's electro-encephalograph (EEG) caps and software developer's tool kits so that they can build games that use the electrical signals from a player's brain to control the on-screen action.

Emotiv's system has three different applications. One is designed to sense facial expressions such as winks, grimaces, and smiles and transfer them, in real time, to an avatar. This could be useful in virtual-world games, such as Second Life, in which it takes a fair amount of training to learn how to express emotions and actions through a keyboard. Another application detects two emotional states, such as excitement and calm. Emotiv's chief product officer, Randy Breen, says that these unconscious cues could be used to modify a game's soundtrack or to affect the way that virtual characters interact with a player. The third set of software can detect a handful of conscious intentions that can be used to push, pull, rotate, and lift objects in a virtual world.


A demonstration with Randy Breen, CPO @ Emotiv Systems

The notion of using brain activity to interact with computers isn't new. A number of schools--such as the University of Minnesota; University of California, San Diego; and Purdue--have research labs devoted to decoding thoughts from the brain and manipulating cursors on a screen, which is especially useful for disabled people. In addition, companies have cropped up in the past couple of years claiming to offer an effective brain-computer interface for video games or for biofeedback purposes. For instance, S.M.A.R.T. BrainGames, a company based in San Marcos, CA, sells games and EEG caps designed to treat people with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

To use Emotiv's system, a person puts on the EEG cap and adjusts it to her head, making sure that most of the sensors touch the scalp. The system automatically picks up blinks and emotional states. However, in order to move virtual objects, such as a box on a computer screen, a person must go through a series of training sessions in which she concentrates for about 10 seconds on mentally moving the box. Tan Le, one of Emotiv's cofounders, says that there is a large amount of machine learning built into the software, so the more a person concentrates on a specific task, the more precisely the system follows the mental instructions.

Since Emotiv's technology is currently patent pending, the company will not disclose the details of its system. However, Le claims that the company's heads of research--optics expert Allan Snyder and former Bell Labs chip engineer Neil Weste--have made a number of scientific discoveries that are worthy of academic research papers. But so far, none have been published, and no game manufacturer has publicly committed to using the technology.

[text pasted from MIT's Technology Review]

EconSM: economics of social media

The second Economics of Social Media (EconSM) full-day conference will be held on April 29th at the Skirball Center in Los Angeles. This year the conversation which began at EconSm ‘07 by investigating the evolving economics of social media, looking at the survivors and up-and-comers, and at how deals and business models are being affected by enabling technologies and the creative process will be advanced.

The preliminary program draft is posted here. Some of the speakers confirmed include:

» Jeff Weiner, EVP, Yahoo
» Frank Cooper, VP-Marketing, Pepsi-Cola North America
» Jeff Price, President, SI Digital
» Geoff Yang, Founding Partner, Redpoint Ventures
» Michael Hirshland, General Partner, Polaris Venture Partners
» Betsy Morgan, CEO, The Huffington Post
» Keith Richman, CEO, Break.com
» Gordon Paddison, EVP Marketing, New Line Cinema


[text extracted from the event's website]

Ubiquitous broadband, more than optical illusion

Better access to ultra-fast broadband networks in Europe is driving development of a host of new web services, promising everything from video conferencing to internet protocol (IP) television. But “ultra-broadband” like this needs a new champion, and European researchers think they have found it: optical networks.

A champion technology needs a noble cause. In this case, the cause is better access for all Europeans to the benefits that ‘always-on’ fast internet can bring. Researchers in the European NOBEL project know this better than anyone.

Building on research in its predecessor, the NOBEL2 consortium’s ambitious goal is to provide this next-generation optical broadband network. It is paving the way to this by reducing the upfront costs and simplifying network architecture and management to cut operational costs as well.

The idea is to give every European household fast access to all that the internet has to offer, including browsing, e-commerce and e-government, services for health, and developing services such as IPTV.

“It is a big step in network evolution to supply mainly IP services more efficiently. And it must be done at an affordable cost if all Europeans are to benefit,” says Marco Schiano, NOBEL’s coordinator.

The EU-funded project has focused on the development and evolution of long-haul, high-capacity backbone networks connecting European cities and countries. Although, as Schiano points out, its findings are equally important to the evolution of national and metropolitan networks.

“We have concentrated on pan-European networks but, while we realise different countries have different needs, the basic technologies dealing with network costs, ease of operations, flexibility, and the ability to supply [easily managed] present and future services are common to all,” Schiano says.

[Text pasted frome the EC website]

iBar: from research to chill out

iBar is a system for the interactive design of bar-counters.


The iBar

Integrated video-projectors can project any content on the milky bar-surface. The intelligent tracking system of iBar detects all objects touching the surface. This input is used to let the projected content interact dynamically with the movements on the counter. Objects can be illuminated at their position or virtual objects can be "touched" with the fingers.

Every glass, cup, cellphone, car key, businesscard or even fingers will be recognized.

Transactions are made faster, and people might have one more reason to go drinking...

The iBar is manufactred by the London based Mindstorm Ltd.

Nokia Launches Global Mobile Ad Network

Nokia’s transformation from mere handset manufacturer continues. It announced the launch today of its global mobile advertising network, Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Media Network, which includes over 70 top tier publishers and operators as well as all of the handset manufacturers media properties. Nokia has signed on AccuWeather, Discovery, Hearst, Reuters (NSDQ: RTRSY), and Sprint (NYSE: S) among others and claims that its network—which has a potential consumer reach of some 100 million customers, is already yielding click-through rates averaging 10 percent in certain channels. It also provides a “turn-key service” for advertisers to create mobile campaigns, and has already done so for Paramount and BMW.

Nokia acquired mobile ad firm Enpocket in October 2007. It uses the firm’s analytics technology to optimize campaigns, fine tune conversions and measure the effectiveness of campaigns across the network. The Finnish handset giant has expanded its account management and media sales teams to include 17 offices worldwide, including Beijing, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, Munich, New York, Paris, Singapore and Shanghai (release).

[Text pasted from http://www.moconews.net]

Mobile Marketing

This is a nice presentation on mobile marketing and the possibilities of interaction that unveil in public spaces. Ever thought you could make Jesus talk by sending a SMS?

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Music site Last.fm bought by CBS

Social music site Last.fm has been bought by US media giant CBS Corporation for $280m (£140m), the largest-ever UK Web 2.0 acquisition.

The online network was founded in the UK five years ago and it now has more than 15 million active users.

It allows users to connect with other listeners with similar music tastes, to custom-build their own radio stations and to watch music video-clips.


A visit to Last.fm headquarters in Brunswick place, London.

Last.fm founding member Martin Stiksel said it was an "exciting opportunity".

As part of the deal, Last.fm's managing team will remain in place and the site will maintain its own separate identity.

Mr Stiksel said: "This move will really support us to get every track ever recorded and every music video ever made onto Last.fm.

"With a strong partner like CBS, this is now within our reach."

Dot.com boom

CBS Corporation has business interests in TV, web and radio.

CBS radio is the largest radio group in the United States, with 179 stations in the top 50 markets covering news, rock, country and urban music.

The firm's president and CEO Leslie Moonves said: "Last.fm is one of the fastest growing online communities out there."

He said Last.fm's strength in building communities around music and syndicating content was "central to CBS".

He added: "Their demographics also play perfectly to CBS's goal to attract younger viewers and listeners across our businesses."

CBS is not the first major player to purchase up-and-coming websites for millions or even billions of dollars, prompting what some have called the second dot.com boom.

In 2005 Rupert Murdoch's News Corp snapped up social networking site MySpace for $580m (£290m). And last year, search engine Google paid $1.65bn (£883m) for video site YouTube.

Mr Stiksel said Last.fm would retain an independent identity.

He said CBS was buying "great technology and a very vibrant, active community".

"They want to move from a content company to an audience company giving the audiences control and learning from this and that's why Last.fm was their choice," he added.

Mr Stiksel said he did not think that users would feel disappointed that a mainstream media firm had bought the site.

"When we said revolution we mean that - we put the users in charge. CBS gets this.

"They understand that consuming media is changing, the patterns are changing."

Online network

As part of the acquisition, the Last.fm management team, including founders Felix Miller, Martin Stiksel and Richard Jones, will continue to independently run the online network

Mr Stiksel said the deal proved that Web 2.0 companies did not have to be in the United States to succeed.

"Being in London has helped us; it's the best place to do things with music full stop. It's the place that leads the world."

The three founders will now be among the most successful - and potentially wealthy - Web 2.0 pioneers in the world.

Mr Stiksel said: "The success of the site is the most important thing. With a strong partner we can add the features we always dreamed about."

[Text pasted from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6701863.stm]