Way back at AU 2009, Zebra Imaging’s holographic prints blew us (and you, judging by the hit counts) away. Here in 2012 they’re using Autodesk’s 123D Catch to capture footage for their jaw-dropping technology, like the nutty 3D family portrait you’ll see in this video: (more…)
Originally posted here:
Autodesk University 2012: Zebra Imaging Demos Holographic Prints Via 123D Catch
New submitter Nemo the Magnificent writes “Develop in the Cloud has news about what might be a breakthrough out of Microsoft Research. A team there wrote a paper (PDF), now accepted for publication at OOPSLA, that describes how to teach a compiler to auto-thread a program that was written single-threaded in a conventional language like C#. This is the holy grail to take advantage of multiple cores — to get Moore’s Law improvements back on track, after they essentially ran aground in the last decade. (Functional programming, the other great white hope, just isn’t happening.) About 2004 was when Intel et al. ran into a wall and started packing multiple cores into chips instead of cranking the clock speed. The Microsoft team modified a C# compiler to use the new technique, and claim a ‘large project at Microsoft’ have written ‘several million lines of code’ testing out the resulting ‘safe parallelism.'” The paper is a good read if you’re into compilers and functional programming. The key to operation is adding permissions to reference types allowing you to declare normal references, read-only references to mutable objects, references to globally immutable objects, and references to isolated clusters of objects. With that information, the compiler is able to prove that chunks of code can safely be run in parallel. Unlike many other approaches, it doesn’t require that your program be purely functional either. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read More:
Auto-threading Compiler Could Restore Moore’s Law Gains
cervesaebraciator writes “Saturday an article was featured on Slashdot which expressed some hope, if just a fool’s hope, that a recent Republican Study Committee Brief could be a sign of broader national discussion about the value of current copyright law. When one sees such progress, credit is deservedly given. Unfortunately, others in Washington did not perhaps see this as worthy of praise. The committee’s executive director, Paul Teller, sent a memo today disavowing the earlier pro-copyright reform brief. From the memo: ‘Yesterday you received a Policy Brief or [sic] copyright law that was published without adequate review within the RSC and failed to meet that standard. Copyright reform would have far-reaching impacts, so it is incredibly important that it be approached with all facts and viewpoints in hand.’ People who live in districts such as Ohio’s 4th would do well to send letters of support to those who crafted the original brief. I cannot imagine party leadership will be happy with so radical a suggestion as granting copyright protection for the limited times needed to promote the progress of science and useful arts.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
View original post here:
GOP Study Committee Director Disowns Brief Attacking Current IP Law
As you might have noticed, we’ve had quite a bit of Asian design coverage lately (with a few more stories to come): between the second annual Beijing Design Week , a trip to Shanghai for Interior Lifestyle China and last week’s design events in Tokyo , we’re hoping to bring you the best of design from the Eastern Hemisphere this fall. Of course, I’ll be the first to admit that our coverage hasn’t been quite as quick as we’d like, largely due to the speed bump of the language barrier. At least two of your friendly Core77 Editors speak passable Mandarin, but when it comes to parsing large amounts of technical information, the process becomes significantly more labor-intensive than your average blogpost… which is precisely why I was interested to learn that Microsoft Research is on the case. In a recent talk in Tianjin, China, Chief Research Officer Rick Rashid (no relation to Karim) presented their latest breakthrough in speech recognition technology, a significant improvement from the 20–25% error of current software. Working with a team from the University of Toronto, Microsoft Research has “reduced the word error rate for speech by over 30% compared to previous methods. This means that rather than having one word in 4 or 5 incorrect, now the error rate is one word in 7 or 8.” An abridged transcript of the talk is available on the Microsoft Next blog if you want to follow along: In the late 1970s a group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University made a significant breakthrough in speech recognition using a technique called hidden Markov modeling which allowed them to use training data from many speakers to build statistical speech models that were much more robust. As a result, over the last 30 years speech systems have gotten better and better. In the last 10 years the combination of better methods, faster computers and the ability to process dramatically more data has led to many practical uses. Just over two years ago, researchers at Microsoft Research and the University of Toronto made another breakthrough. By using a technique called Deep Neural Networks, which is patterned after human brain behavior, researchers were able to train more discriminative and better speech recognizers than previous methods. Once Rashid has gotten the audience up to speed, he starts discussing how current technology is implemented in extant translation services (5:03). “It happens in two steps,” he explains. “The first takes my words and finds the Chinese equivalents, and while non-trivial, this is the easy part. The second reorders the words to be appropriate for Chinese, an important step for correct translation between languages.” Short though it may be, the talk is a slow build of relatively dry subject matter until Rashid gets to the topic at hand at 6:45: “Now the last step that I want to take is to be able to speak to you in Chinese.” But listening to him talk for those first seven-and-a-half minutes is exactly the point : the software has extrapolated Rashid’s voice from an hour-long speech sample, and it modulates the translated audio based on his English speech patterns . Thus, I recommend watching (or at least listening) to the video from the beginning to get a sense for Rashid’s inflection and timbre… but here’s the payoff: (more…)
More here:
Must-See Video: Real-Time English-to-Mandarin Speech Translation via Microsoft Research
Romans may have used 20-Sided die almost two millennia before D&D , but people in ancient Egypt were casting icosahedra even earlier. Pictured above is a twenty-faced die dating from somewhere between 304 and 30 B.C., a timespan also known as Egypt’s Ptolemaic Period . More »