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]