Brain Gain

Margaret Talbot wrote a long article called "Brain Gain" in the The New Yorker recently about the underground world of "neuroenhancing" drugs.

25 Microchips That Shook the World

IEEE Spectrum Online has a Special Report called 25 Microchips That Shook the World. An article of the same name by Brian R. Santo discusses some of the all time favorites in the silicon world. Additional suggestions are provided in the comments, by luminaries in the technology world, and in a talkback section.

AVIOS Student Speech Application Contest

On May 6, 2009 the Applied Voice Input/Output Society (AVIOS) announced their fourth annual student speech application contest sponsored by AT&T, Cepstral, I6Net, Loquendo, Microsoft, Opera, and Voxeo. Applications must involve speech input and/or output, but may be pure speech or multimodal. Cash and/or equipment prizes valued at over $1000 will be awarded to teams of student programmers who design and create applications judged to be robust, useful, creative, innovative, and user friendly.

The contest encourages students to develop applications using speech technologies such as automatic speech recognition and text to speech synthesis and to combine them with other modalities. This year, students may use any of a variety of platforms including AT&T Speech Mashups, Cepstral VoiceForge TTS service, CMU's RavenClaw/Olympus, Google Android, I6net VXI*, Loquendo VoxNauta Platform, LumenVox Speech Engine Standard License, Microsoft Windows and Tellme VoiceXML Platform Opera, Voxeo Prophecy, and Voxeo Tropo.

Students anywhere in the world can submit their creative and innovative applications to be judged by speech application experts. The contest also provides a forum for students to show what they can do with the power of speech applications For more information and the contest entry form, go to http://www.avios.org/.

Thanks to Patti Price for letting us know about this contest.

Synthetic Mickey Mouse

An acquaintance who works for Nuance Communications (owners of Dragon Naturally Speaking and the Omnipage OCR software) claims their software synthesizes all the original vocals for the House of Mouse show on the Disney Channel. He says they found working with actors to get the lines right is just too hard... compared to editing the emotion tags in the synthesizer input strings.

On the other hand, this piece includes a list of the cast.

Clic pic for flic. Show starts about 35 sec. in.

Feelies

IEEE Spectrum Online has a fascinating article called "Jacket Lets You Feel the Movies" by Willie Jones that reports on the work of Philips Research senior scientist Paul Lemmens. This research uses a motor-studded haptics jacket to study the effect of touch and vibration on movie viewers' emotional responses. This project will be featured at the 2009 World Haptics Conference in Salt Lake City.

Cut Copy Paste

It's about time. iPhone 3.0 will be here some time this summer, along with "Cut Copy Paste" and a lot of other new OS features. Lots of coverage in the media. Here are some examples: LA Times Business, Blog; Engadget live from the preview event; MacRumors.com highlights of OS 3.0 Preview; MacWorld Live Update; New York Times Bits Blog; Apple iPhone 3.0 Preview. Thanks to Mark for the image.

The Big Picture: Robots

The March 4, 2009 edition of boston.com's The Big Picture features some wonderful robot photos. Check them out. Thanks and a hat tip to Alice Faber for sending the URL!