Sony revealed an egg-shaped digital music player named Rolly (picture below) at the end of 2007, but I haven’t had the chance to see it until last weekend. It plays MP3 and AAC music files and supports direct music streaming over a Bluetooth connection. And it is able to dance. The Rolly is more than …
Monthly Archive: June 2008
Jun
30
Visiting Microsoft Research
This summer I have a great opportunity to have an internship with Microsoft Research. The purpose of my work will be to perform experiments about the navigation devices used in vehicles. The most valuable thing about having an internship at Microsoft is a hand-on experience with things that may actually be used commercially, since all …
Jun
28
TouchKit fabrication prototype picture on Flickr
TouchKit fabrication prototype (check!), originally uploaded by stfnix. Apparently the folks at Nortd are getting closer to shipping some TouchKits. The picture above was just posted on June 27. This looks like a good size screen! Andrew Kun
Jun
27
Automotive discussions at YRRSDS'08
This year’s Young Researchers’ Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems was a great place to share ideas with fellow speech research enthusiasts. Lots of attention was devoted to the design of spoken dialog systems in general (as the name of the event might suggest), but also to more specific areas, as automotive speech user interfaces. Besides …
Jun
26
Visualizing sorting algorithms
Check out this link for a great visualization of sorting algorithms by David Martin of Boston College. Andrew Kun
Jun
24
Experience with DELL's spoken dialog system
Hello ecebloggers, A week ago I bought a laptop on DELL’s web site. After some difficulties I had experienced with their sales department I decided to call them and see what’s happening. Of course I ended up on their dialog system. I was asked to choose between “Home, Home office and business”. I said business …
Jun
23
Writing about science (and technology)
Check out this article from Cognitive Daily on how to report on scientific research to a general audience. Note that many of the suggestions are equally valid when they’re applied to documents aimed at scientific or technical audiences (e.g. “Explaining your figures is crucial…”). Andrew Kun
Jun
22
Reporting from YRRSDS08
My colleague, Zeljko Medenica and I are participating at this year’s Young Researchers’ Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems in Columbus, Ohio. This is a very interesting event with lots of young speech researchers from all over the world. There are also representatives from different research and development companies interested in spoken dialog systems like: Microsoft …
Jun
22
YouTube long-form
Check out Robert Scoble’s post on longer videos coming to YouTube. He also has a link to a Mark Cuban post in which Mark argues that YouTube’s business model is flawed and that Hulu‘s is better. However, Hulu only has content generated by NBC and Universal (such as full-length movies), and no user-generated content (such …
Jun
18
Tap input for mobile phones
I recently came across an interesting paper from Tangible and Embedded Interaction 2007, describing work at Nokia on gesture-based input for mobile phones. One interesting aspect of the paper is the description of the first phase of the research in which the authors relied on videos presented to subjects online, to explore which gestures are …