Data-Visualization: Pi played on the piano

As it will be Pi-Day (14-March) this week we would like to remind you to “Felix Jung’s” great visualization and sonification of the number pi…

continue reading…

Joseph Weizenbaum is dead

Joseph Weizenbaum died yesterday in Berlin as a result of a stroke at the age of 85.

Throughout his life he has provided many outstanding contributions to computer science and AI. After he created the first banking computer in the world while working for General Electric he took up a position at the MIT as professor for applied and political science. In 1966 he published “ELIZA” - his best know work - and the first computer program demonstrating natural language processing. His academic contributions include the creation of the SLIP (symmetric List Processor) programming language and research on pointers, list structures and garbage collection schemes.

Over the years he also became one of the strongest critics of computer science and a society that blindly believes into technology. His influential book “Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation” displayed his grown ambivalence towards computer technology. Many concepts from this book have by now become common understandings like, for example, how programmers are seen by society or his critics of the promises by AI.

In one of his last mails “Joseph Weizenbaum” wrote: (translated from German)

“…our death is the last service we can provide to the world: Would we not go out of the way the following generations would not need to re-create human culture. Culture would become fixed, unchangeable and die. And with the death of culture humanity would also perish…“

continue reading…

Games / Multi-touch screens: The Fentix Cube

We came across the name Andrew Fentem a few times when we did research on multi-touch screens the last years. The Fentix Cube one of his most recent work is the first cubic multi-touchscreen games platform. In the video clip below the Fentix Cube has been programmed to emulate a Rubik’s cube puzzle…

continue reading…

Video: Morpho Towers

A interesting video showing the beauty of science within an installation with ferrofluids and magnetic fields…

continue reading…

Science: Nanotechnology barcodes to identify biological weapons

You might still remember the scene from the movie “Blade Runner” when Harrison Ford with the help of a chemist and the serial number on microscopic scale finds out what type of material he is looking at. It seems we got just one step closer to be able to do something similar today. Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) recently developed a novel bio-sensing platform that uses engineered nanowires for biochemical tests…

Continue reading…

Advertising: Career in Computer Science

Besides the “cool” skateboarder meeting girl and having a good time plot this video is full of great and potentially not so far away gadgets. MS Research is using the short film to get young people interested in a career in Computer Science. We really liked the flying personal robot but what is awesome and most likely to happen very soon is the data transfer visualization on the virtual computer table in the cafe…

Continue reading…

BBC: Horizon - most of our universe is missing

Another great documentary from the “BBC science series”. This 50 minutes movie is explaining the fundamentals of gravity, astrophysics, galaxies, dark matter, and dark energy. It is also the story of a controversy in science based on observation supporting a theory that has yet to be experimentally or conclusively proven…

Continue reading…

Europe: European Innovation Scoreboard 2006 published

The European Innovation Scoreboard measures the innovation performance of a country’s economy based on a wide range of 25 indicators, from education to expenditure in Information and Communication Technologies, investment in R&D or number of patents. Countries with a more homogeneous behavior in all aspects of innovation tend to achieve higher overall scores.

“…For the fourth consecutive year, the innovation gap between the US and the EU has decreased. The Nordic countries and Switzerland continue to be the innovation leaders worldwide, while many of the new Member States are steadily catching up with the EU average. These are some of the main findings of the European Innovation Scoreboard 2006, published today. The report presents a comparative analysis of the innovation performance of European countries, the US and Japan…

Continue reading…

2006 Turing award: ACM for the first time laureates female engineer

After more than 40 years of existence the Turing Award aka the “Nobel Prize in Computing” for the first time today was awarded to a female engineer. Frances E. Allen, received the USD 100,000 price for “…pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of optimizing compiler techniques that laid the foundation for modern optimizing compilers and automatic parallel execution…” . Frances E. Allen has been working in the field of computing and Information Technology since the days of punch cards and is currently with…

Continue reading…

Research: Unveiling the Quantum Computer

There were quite some stories going around the last days regarding Canadian company D-Wave and their presentation in the Silicon Valley yesterday.
If you want to learn more about it:

ABC News has a two page story about it.
Rose.blog (D-Wave) also has more detailed info and links.
There is a Press Release at the [...]