Searching for New Ideas

Technology Review (09/22/11) Tom Simonite

In an interview, Google director of research Alfred Spector, who is leading a team that is focused on the most challenging areas of computer science with the goal of shaping the company's future technology, discusses its work in artificial intelligence (AI). Spector says the group is working on areas such as natural language processing, machine learning, speech recognition, translation, and image recognition. The research has resulted in better translation tools that now use parsing, and Fusion Tables, which enable users to create a database that is shared with others and to visualize and publish the data. Spector says that Google's general approach to AI is actually a hybrid AI, which means that the company learns from its user community. He says that AI also could contribute to social network communications technology by recommending content or communicating across languages. Beyond AI, the researchers are working on security issues, specifically if it is possible to constrain the most-used programs to run with minimal amounts of information.
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Gambas - Gambas Almost Means Basic

Vous êtes habitué a Visual Basic vous souhaitez passer a Linux? Il y a Gambas - Gambas Almost Means

A Subversion client

• About TortoiseSVN

  TortoiseSVN is an easy-to-use SCM / source control software for Microsoft Windows and possibly the best standalone Apache™ Subversion® client there is. It is implemented as a Windows shell extension, which makes it integrate seamlessly into the Windows explorer. Since it's not an integration for a specific IDE you can use it with whatever development tools you like.
  

  The current version is 1.6.16

  For detailed info on what's new, read the changelog and the release notes.
  The current version 1.6.16 is linked against the Subversion library 1.6.17.
  Please make sure that you choose the right installer for your PC, otherwise the setup will fail.
  
  
  

'IPad Deconstructed' Forum Makes Case for Federal Research

Computerworld (09/22/11) Patrick Thibodeau

Federally supported research sparks game-changing innovation, according to a U.S. Capitol forum on the future of federal research moderated by Carnegie Mellon University professor Luis von Ahn. He says in an interview that the forum used the iPad as an example, as most of its components came from federally supported research. Von Ahn argues against a Senate proposal to cut the budget of science research funding, saying that a reduction could hurt the sustainability of U.S. technological leadership. He notes that private tech companies cannot do research on their own, as they have a priority to deliver commercial products in the short term. However, federal research projects take a long-term view and are borne out of the pursuit of basic questions. "If you look at lot of the game-changers [new technologies] over the last few years, it's not because someone was trying to solve a specific problem, it was just because somebody was trying to understand something better," von Ahn says.
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