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Tag: InterfacesPages, news, and videos PagesAITopics/Interfaces News Natural Language Processing Takes Center Stage In EHRs All of these companies are applying voice recognition coupled with NLP to their ambulatory-care EHRs, and Allscripts is doing the same with its Sunrise acute-care products, including Sunrise Mobile MD II. ) The company has already integrated M*Modal's NLP software into its Sunrise EHR, and the two companies are developing the application on the ambulatory care side. Vern Davenport, chairman and CEO of M*Modal, told InformationWeek Healthcare that his company's product can convert voice to text and do "context enablement" to create discrete data elements that go into EHR templates. (Because of the limitations of iPad keyboards, NLP will be needed to aid this process. (more) Smartphone training helps people with memory impairment regain independence Baycrest neuropsychologists have found that asmartphone training program, theory-driven and specifically designed for individuals with memory impairment, can result in robust improvements in day-to-day functioning, and boost independence and confidence levels. Two decades ago, Baycrest pioneered a theory-driven training program that tapped into preserved implicit memory systems in people with amnesia to teach them to use assistive memory devices. Implicit or procedural memory is a type of memory that supports learning but does not require conscious executive control. The Baycrest study involved 10 outpatients, 18 to 55 years of age, who had moderate-to-severe memory impairment, the result of non-neurodegenerative conditions including ruptured aneurysm, stroke, tumor, epilepsy, closed-head injury, or anoxia (insufficient oxygen to the brain) after a heart attack. (more) QTranslate, Versatile Desktop Translator For Windows Often your only option to make sense of the text is to use a machine translation service like Google Translate or Microsoft Translate. QTranslate registers several global hotkeys that let you translate text from any open program window. The two most important hotkeys are Ctrl-q, which displays a translation of the highlighted text in a popup window, or Ctrl-Ctrl which sends the highlighted text to the program window where it is then translated. The keyboard shortcut Ctrl-e furthermore uses text to speech synthesis to read the text out loud. (more) Software Translates Your Voice into Another Language Researchers at Microsoft have made software that can learn the sound of your voice, and then use it to speak a language that you don't. In a demonstration at Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, campus on Tuesday, Microsoft research scientist Frank Soong showed how his software could read out text in Spanish using the voice of his boss, Rick Rashid, who leads Microsoft's research efforts. Hear Rick Rashid's voice in his native language and then translated into several other languages: In English, a synthetic version of Mundie's voice welcomed the audience to an open day held by Microsoft Research, concluding, "With the help of this system, now I can speak Mandarin. " Individual sounds used by the first model to build up words using a person's voice in his or her own language are carefully tweaked to give the new text-to-speech model a full ability to sound out phrases in the second language. (more) Lifebrowser: Data mining gets (really) personal at Microsoft Lifebrowser: Data mining gets (really) personal at Microsoft (PhysOrg.com) -- Microsoft Research is doing research on software that could bring you your own personal data mining center with a touch of Proust for returns. The software uses machine learning to help a user place life events, which may span months or years, to be expanded or contracted selectively, in better context. Lifebrowser's timeline shows items that the user can associate with "landmark" events with the use of artificial intelligence algorithms. By associating an email with a relevant calendar date with a relevant document and photos, significance is gleaned from personal life events. (more) It's Time to Start 3D Scanning the World When Microsoft was developing its Kinect 3D sensor, a critical task was to calibrate its algorithms to rapidly and accurately recognize parts of the human body, especially hands, to make sure the device would work in any home, with any age group, any clothing, and any kind of background object. Using a computer-based approach to do the calibration had limitations, because computers would sometimes fail to identify a human hand in a Kinect-generated image, or would see a hand where none existed. Imagine if a robot could promptly recognize any object in a home or office or factory: Anything that the robot sees or picks up it would instantly know what it is. This type of data collection presents a chicken-and-egg problem: If you have a data set with objects properly tagged, you can start to build applications that rely on the knowledge stored in that set, and these applications in turn can generate more data and you can refine the knowledge further. (more) Ask Ziggy for Windows Phone to Rival Apple's Siri Ask Ziggy for Windows Phone to Rival Apples Siri An independent Windows Phone developer has created an app for Microsofts mobile platform that will attempt to outmatch Apples intelligent voice-controlled assistant Siri. Ask Ziggy uses Speech Recognition to translate human speech into transcribed text, which is displayed in a speech bubble. The Nuance-based voice recognition part of the software allows Ask Ziggy to translate speech to text and just like Apples Siri, the Windows Phone app can accept queries, solve math problems, perform other tasks, and talk back to the user. Ask Ziggy is still under development as Leib plans to add multilingual support, language translations and expand speech grammar before submitting the app to the Windows Marketplace. (more) We need to talk about speech recognition Look under the skin of the Siri software and you will find that the speech recognition is provided by industry stalwart Nuance Communications. I've just tried it on my Windows 7 machine and it was quite fun, except for having to spell out and correct Nuance and Google spelling, then sorting out capitalisation, and now I've given up already, back to typing! Controlling some functions of your 2012 Ford Explorer by voice I think Siri has shown us that the voice-recognition technology isn't the most important thing here but the application software layer that the users go through to use the speech recognition. But the application built to use the Nuance speech recognition isn't programmed to interpret all the ways you might say, for example, "No, thank you". (more) Future of voice recognition: Assistants that learn from you Voice-activated assistants are playing an increasingly prominent role in the technology world, with Apple's introduction of Siri for the iPhone 4S and Google's ( rumored ) work on a Siri competitor for Android phones. Siri is taking steps toward providing a natural, conversation-like experience with voice-activated assistants, as Jacqui Cheng noted in the Ars iPhone 4S review. "When given direct and clear tasks, Siri performs well, and it's nice not having to memorize a strict list of commands," Cheng wrote. "The best part about Siri is the fact that you can (or should be able to, anyway) speak to it like you would speak to a person without having to conform to a special speaking syntaxthe number one turn-off for 'regular' people using voice control features. (more) It's Only A Matter Of Time Before Siri Passes The Turing Test So as this database grows by orders of magnitude and the logic is refined accordingly, if a Turing Test is fashioned to distinguish a computer from a person in the day-to-day tasks of working with a personal assistant in one room is hidden an iPhone, in another room a person, you interact with them as you would an executive assistant over the course of the day, and then at the end of the day you choose which one you think is the person it is only a matter of time before the iPhone becomes indistinguishable from the human. There already is an annual Turing Test underway, the Loebner competition, where a set of judges spend a few minutes conversing (via keyboard) with computers and with people, and then have to decide which is which. A more reasonable Turing Test would be to invite a computer into a round of dinner conversations where the human subjects are not made aware that this is occurring. (more) LifeNews.com -> http://www.lifenews.com/2011/08/29/the-transhumanism-trap-using-technology-to-perfect-the-human-race/? The Transhumanism Trap: Using Technology to Perfect the Human Race The Transhumanism Trap is out there. Transhumanists hunger for technology that will take an otherwise healthy individual and enhance him or her beyond normal human ability. Anyone who has seen any science fiction film like Surrogates, Limitless,or Splice has seen transhumanism in action. In a post by Joseph Farrah on the dangers of transhumanism at World Net Daily , a commenter wrote the following: So does Farah now believe that former VP Cheney should have the implanted defibrillator (thats been keeping him alive for the last decade) removed? (more) Thought-Controlled Robot Avatars: Boon for Disabled Robot avatars will provide a new level of freedom and interaction for the disabled, elderly, or bed-ridden that they do not currently enjoy -- some even controlled by a user's thoughts, say scientists, inventors and enthusiasts. These avatars will "fill in" for those who are not able to physically attend -- communicating for them, said science fiction author Robert Sawyer. NEWS: Humanoid Robot Learns Like a Child "This is liberating for the person [who is disabled]," Sawyer told FoxNews.com. Wilford used a "telepresence" project called NetHead to connect with the world from home, a free-standing terminal that serves as a robotic avatar. (more) Getting your mobile to listen to you: trends in voice recognition Indeed, most people have gotten used to these tools operating on mobile devices, helping people to control smartphones and navigation systems. Modern programmes like Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5 are designed for users who occasionally have to draft a document or want to quickly throw a note up on Facebook. " It continued its work into the 1980s and 90s with ViaVoice, making it one of the pioneers of voice recognition programmes, focusing on commercial applications like call centres. Along with its Windows-based Dragon NaturallySpeaking programmes, Nuance has also started releasing systems for Apple Dragon Dictate 2.5. (more) Dragon Express 1.0: An inexpensive way to discover speech recognition Dragon Express 1.0 Dragon Express is an easy and fun speech recognition utility that introduces OS X Lion customers to voice recognition for the Mac. Its fast and easy to place your text wherever you need it: transfer icons within the Dragon Express window include the active application (such as Microsoft Word or Text Edit) as well as popular applications such as Mail, Facebook and Twitter. Dragon Express includes the ability to select and delete text by voice as well as the convenient scratch that command that can be used when you change your mind. Dragon Express Knows When to Listen Dragon Express can be used with the internal microphone of your Mac, but a USB headset is recommended. (more) Have We Met? Tracing Face Blindness to Its Roots Those with prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, can see perfectly well, but their brains are unable to piece together the information needed to understand that a collection of features represents an individuals face. One of the keys to understanding face recognition, it seems, is understanding how the brain comes to recognize voices. But by testing for these two conditions simultaneously, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany recently found evidence that face and voice recognition may be linked in a novel person-recognition system. The researchers found that regions of the brain already associated with facial recognition, like the fusiform face area in the occipital lobe, are directly linked to regions responsible for voice recognition, mostly in the temporal lobe. (more) Siri, a voice-recognition iPhone application, introduces a new way to interact ... There's something about Siri - the new, smart-talking celebrity of the virtual world - that could be changing the way we interact with computers forever. Siri is a speech-recognition application installed on the new iPhone 4S that answers questions with a human-like voice and a seemingly human emotional intelligence and sense of humor. In short, Siri is changing everyday computer usage into a relationship most people can enjoy, said Chris Harrison, a doctoral student at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and editor-in-chief of "XRDS," a student magazine for an educational and scientific computing society called ACM. Not only is it a useful, everyday application, but Siri also has a manner and a way about it that people can relate to. (more) Yes folks, it's artificial artificial artificial intelligence Yes folks, its artificial artificial artificial intelligence This is about using what The Economist calls artificial artificial intelligence (like Mechanical Turk, which uses people as artificial computers) to enhance (artificially intelligent) machine vision The idea is that the disabled can finally turn the tables on disability. Bigham of Rochester University called: Real-Time Crowd Support for People with Disabilities It was given at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, co-sponsored by the Computer ScienceColloquiumand the the Institute for Security, Technology, and Society on November the 15th, 2011 Heres an introduction to the talk: The past few decades have seen the development of wonderful new intelligent technology that serves as sensors and agents onto an inaccessible world for people with disabilities, but it remains both too prone to errors and too limited in the scope to reliably address many problems faced by people with disabilities in their everyday lives. (more) Virtual robot links body to numbers just like humans Read more: "Squishybots: Soft, bendy and smarter than ever" ONE of the many curious habits of the human brain is that we tend to associate small numbers with the left side of our body and large numbers with our right. The so-called SNARC (spatial-numerical association of response codes) effect is well established: people respond faster to a number (by pressing a button, say) with their left hand when the number is small and with their right hand when the number is large. Similarly, people who have brain damage that causes them to ignore the left side of their body show a bias towards larger numbers when asked to report the middle of a numerical interval. This way of learning sets up links between small numbers and the part of the brain that controls our left side, and vice versa, that persists into adulthood. (more) HRP-4C female robot has a new walk (w/ video) HRP-4C female robot has a new walk (w/ video) (PhysOrg.com) -- Japan's entertaining robot that sings and looks like a beautiful young female is finally learning how to walk just like a beautiful girlwell, almost. Robotics developers at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) have released a video of their HRP-4C Miim robot to show how it can walk better than before. The robot is based on User Centered Robot Open Architecture utilizing fundamental robotic technologies including real-time Linux, RT middleware, robot simulator openHRP3, and speech recognition. AIST researchers, like other scientific groups dedicated to robotics, have been working hard to create the perfect walking robot and to design walking technologies that can make their robots most closely resemble the way humans walk. (more) Researchers Develop World's First Robot System to Dress Elderly and Physically ... The Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), a national corporation university in Japan, has developed the worlds first robotic system that can learn to dress the physically challenged as well as aged persons. According to Associate Professor, Tomohiro Shibata from the Mathematical Informatics Laboratory who also headed the research, Barrett's robots are incomparable because they are able to respond to even the slightest physical interactions, implementing the algorithms to learn to clothe people. The group led by Associate Professor Tomohiro Shibata, in response to the key technical problem has created a dual-arm robotic system, which can learn clothing-assistance motions after just a few trials. (more) Watch This Robot Control a Person's Arm Using Electrodes Tweet When this robot needs a hand, it borrows yours. In an experiment that opens a new chapter in human-machine interaction, a French research team has demonstrated how a robot can control both its own arm and a person s arm to manipulate objects in a collaborative manner. From a medical point of view, you might want to encourage the person to move more, and that s when the robot can help, by moving the person s arm to reach and hold the glass. The audience at the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), where the researchers presented their results in September, let out a nervous gasp upon seeing the video of the experiment: In the study, Adorno and his colleagues, Ant nio Padilha Lanari B and Philippe Fraisse, attached four electrodes to the arms of five healthy volunteers test subjects, who were also blindfolded, to avoid visual feedback. (more) Stanford joins BrainGate team developing brain-computer interface to aid people with paralysis Stanford University researchers are enrolling participants in a pioneering study investigating the feasibility of allowing people with paralysis to use a technology that interfaces directly with the brain to control computer cursors, robotic arms and other assistive devices. BrainGate is based on research and technology developed in the laboratory of John Donoghue, PhD, the Henry Merritt Wriston Professor of Neuroscience and Engineering at Brown University, director of the Brown Institute for Brain Science and a senior research career scientist with the Providence VA Medical Center. In 2006, Donoghue and Hochberg led the publication of a landmark paper in Nature demonstrating that trial participants could control a computer cursor and other devices directly by neural activity. Earlier this year, the BrainGate2 research team published another paper in the Journal of Neural Engineering showing that the system allowed a patient to accurately control a computer cursor more than 1,000 days after it was implanted...... (more) Videos A Look into the Labs with IBM, Intel, and Microsoft. Keynote Panel: Gartner ITxpo 2007. April 26, 2007. (more) A panel discussion about Artificial Intelligence. The Charlie Rose Show television broadcast: A panel discussion about the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence with Rodney Brooks of MIT, Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research and Ron Brachman of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. December 21, 2004. (more) Alex (Sandy) Pentland, director of the Human Dynamics Group at MIT, describes Reality Mining. "Alex (Sandy) Pentland, director of the Human Dynamics Group at MIT, describes a future in which cell phones log data about their owners' behavior. He reasons that this data can be used to strengthen social networks, generate recommendations, help track diseases, and monitor personal health." 2008?. (more) Beyond the hype of FlickTwitFaceSpace: Elizabeth Chuchill ...there is much we do not understand about how the Internet fits into everyday lives.... I will talk about the research issues and challenges we face in moving from awareness of others online (saying hi, 'friending', sending 'pings' and issuing 'pokes') to deep collaboration, co-planning and the co-production of shared experiences online. Finally, I will discuss how a scientifically grounded, mixed methods approach to human-centered evaluation, grounded ideation and socio-technical innovation both brings value to business and contributes to fundamental research. August, 2009. (more) CSE Colloquia 2001 - Machines with Emotional Intelligence. Speaker: Rosalind Picard, Media Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Over 70 studies on human-machine interaction in the last decade have pointed to an intriguing phenomenon: People interact with machines in a way that is basically social, even when the interaction was not designed to be that way. This program will describe how we're giving computers some social skills, specifically the ability to recognize and respond appropriately to human emotion. Examples are shown on keyboard-mouse-monitor systems that try to assess user frustration for usability feedback, and wearable systems that classify affective state based on skin-surface measurements." Questions from the audience follow the talk. October 18, 2001. (more) Computer Chronicles: Artificial Intelligence (1986). What is Artificial Intelligence? Does AI even exist? These are just two of the questions addressed in this episode. Topics covered include expert systems, machine vision, decision support software, natural languageprocessing, and speech recognition systems. Hosted by Stuart Cheifet and Gary Kildall, with commentary from George Morrow. Guests: Hubert Dreyfus, UC Berkeley; Gary Hendrix, Symantec; S. Jerrold Kaplan, Lotus Development; Harry Tennant, Texas Instruments; and Terry Winograd, Stanford University. January 2, 1986. (more) Do you have anything to say to your computer? A television commercial that first aired in 1999 starring the Lookout handsfree mixed-initiative interaction system for scheduling. The commercial was shown nationally and internationally as part of a Microsoft advertising campaign on the future of computing. January 1999. (more) MSR Adaptive Systems & Interaction Projects Overview. An overview of thematic projects on the use of decision-theoretic methods for notification, assistance, and mixed-initiative interaction at Microsoft Research. February 2001. (more) NLS Demo. On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public presentation was a session in the of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco. This site links to 35 segments,reformatted as RealVideo streaming video clips, with descriptions of each clip. December 9, 1968. (more) Nova scienceNOW Profile: Cynthia Breazeal. Nova scienceNOW broadcast segment about "a daring engineer designs robots to communicate and interact the way people do." "Thinking outside the box of traditional engineering, Breazeal designs these robots with theories of child development and parent-child interactions in mind, equipping her creations with an ability to learn and giving them expressive, human-like features. And if, as Breazeal hopes, robots are to become our partners, they need to develop the same social skills as people, including emotions. NOVA scienceNOW joins Breazeal in her lab and introduces viewers to some of her seminal inventions: the famous toddler- like robotic head named Kismet; Leonardo, a million-dollar joint project with Stan Winston, legendary in Hollywood for The Terminator robots; and a touch-sensitive teddy bear called the Huggable, which may someday comfort patients and assist caregivers in hospital pediatric wards." November 21, 2006. (more) Robots Become Human Microsoft may have found a breakthrough in artificial intelligence with the creation of a robot that can sense humans and their movements, a Virtual Admin. Science Channel Video. Interview with Eric Horvitz. July 24, 2009. (more) Scientific American Frontiers with Alan Alda: Cars That Think. 3 segments: Part 1 - Watch the Road. Alan rides in a vehicle that recognizes road signs and hazards – and warns the driver to slow down. Part 2 - Hold the Phone! Alan 'drives' the Ford VIRTTEX simulator that researchers use to investigate how distractions like cell phone calls or drowsiness affect driver safety. Part 3 - Smart Passenger. A virtual smart passenger named Sally listens in to the driver's speech at all times and responds appropriately. January 26, 2005. (more) Tele-Immersive Dance: A Human/Computer Creative Environment. Tele-immersive Dance (TED) is a computer science and dance collaboration focused on building a computational model for human creativity. Within the 3D virtual room of TED, a dancer from Illinois is able to interact, fully immersed with a dancer from California using multiple points of view. These cross-continental collaborations reveal the potential of TED as a creativity tool for human/computer interaction. The next phase of research involves building a computational model of human creativity that will translate visual data signals into symbols that can then generate a computer response for the user. July 14, 2008. (more) The Role of Semantic Web in Web 2.0: Partner or Follower?. Web 2.0 encompasses some of today's most exciting web-based applications: mashups, blogs/wikis/feeds, interface remixes, and social networking/tagging systems. Although most Web 2.0 applications rely on an implicit, lightweight, shared semantics in order to deliver user value, Web 2.0 technologies are significantly outdistancing semweb technologies in both implementation and mindshare. Panel discussion at Intl. Semantic Web Conference, ISWC-2006, Athens, GA with Benjamin Grosof, Tom Gruber, Tim Berners Lee. 2006. (more) The prototype. Short video of Microsoft Research work on gesture-based interface. Shown by Eric Horvitz at keynote panel at Gartner ITxpo 2007. April 26, 2007. (more) UK Future TV: Future Technology episode with Austin Tate. "Austin Tate of the University of Edinburgh talks about artificial intelligence techniques and their use in emergency response centres." March 10, 2007. (more) Washburn Lecture Series at the Museum of Science, Boston: "2001: A Space Odyssey. Are we there yet?" Lecture one (of three) - Human/Computer Conversation: HAL and Beyond, with Justine Cassell, Ph.D.. Justine Cassell's lecture, "Human/Computer Conversation: HAL and Beyond," was the first in the three speaker lecture series: "2001: A Space Odyssey. Are we there yet?" November 6, 2001. (more) Where the Social Web Meets the Semantic Web. Tom Gruber invited lecture at Intl.Semantic Web Conference ISWC-2006, Athens, GA. "The Semantic Web is an ecosystem of interaction among computer systems. The social web is an ecosystem of conversation among people. Both are enabled by conventions for layered services and data exchange. Both are driven by human-generated content and made scalable by machine-readable data. ... the Semantic Web [is] a substrate for collective intelligence. The best shot we have of collective intelligence in our lifetimes is large, distributed human-computer systems. The best way to get there is to harness the "people power" of the Web with the techniques of the Semantic Web." 2006. (more) Wired Science: Face Reader. "Ziya Tong meets children with Asperger’s Syndrome testing a new MIT Media Lab device that reads facial expressions." In the course of the report she discusses the project with several individuals including Rana el Kaliouby Ph.D. (Mindreader Software Developer, MIT)); Alea Teeters (MIT Affective Computing Group), and Rosalind Picard, Ph.D. (Director, MIT Affective Computing Group). October 3, 2007. (more) |
