Archive for: July, 2007

Human computation

Jul 29 2007 Published by Vincenzo Carabillo' under Computers, Digital Imaging, Google, Mind, Psychology, Websites

This is a very interesting video in which you will find many of the new aspects of Web2.0. The point is that a cooperative effort of humans can solve some of the greatest problems of Artificial Intelligence. Think about captcha: these are small problems created by computers, that the computer itself is not able to solve, but relatively easy for an average human.

Speaking to "think out of boxes", the video reported below can give some insights and interesting point of views about the new cooperative way to rewrite the web.

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Brainman

Jul 16 2007 Published by Vincenzo Carabillo' under Brain, Genius, Mind, Psychology

How charming is genius! Daniel Tammet is capable of incredible calculations and memory. Why is our brain so under-used?

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Speech synthesizer

Jul 08 2007 Published by Vincenzo Carabillo' under Websites

Since I was a child, I have been amazed by speech synthesizers. The first one which I could use was SAM, in the eighties, which was a program running on the Commodore 64. That kind of voices war very cold and robotic, but already understandable. The C64 audio chip (called SID) was very different form what you can find in toda’s hardware: it was an analog circuit with three "voices", or tracks.
Since then, hardware and speech synthesis algorithms have got better and better. The new "text-to-speech" programs use now big databases of professional speakers samples; the most used words and phrases are recorded, as well as all the phonemes which many languages use.

I have just found the following web site which hosts one of the most advanced and accurate speech synthesis so far:

http://www.ivosoftware.com/ivonaonline.php

You can let the voice speak in several languages. Excellent.

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MapJack

Jul 08 2007 Published by Vincenzo Carabillo' under Google, Maps, Websites

I have just found a web site which makes it much easier to use the new "Street View" feature of Google Maps. Even if Street View is a marvelous add-on to Google Maps, I found the interface and controls it a bit too unintuitive. MapJack makes the thing much easier. A nice add on is that it seems to pre-fetch the images, so you the experience to run around the city is much more enjoyable.  The only supported city at the moment is San Francisco. Have fun!

http://www.mapjack.com/

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