Month: December 2006

The Seoul of a New Machine

Rity is the ghost in the machine: an autonomous agent that can transfer itself into desktop computers, PDAs, servers and robotic avatars, and adapt and evolve like a genetic organism. As researchers go from place to place, they are captured and recognized by a network of cameras in the building, allowing Rity to follow them from computer to computer.The “sobot” can upload itself into a mobile robot — a simpler cousin of HanSaRam called MyBot — and follow Kuppuswamy from room to room on its servo-controlled wheels, fetching objects for the researcher with its mechanical arms. If it sees Kuppuswamy sit in front of his office PC, Rity can abandon MyBot like a husk and slip into the desktop machine, to better put itself at its human master’s disposal.

when i was in school, ai was all about embodiment. now we have a more fluid, body-snatching approach. an agent following you around, without being limited to one manifestation, is both very scifi and very interesting

Perfect Memory Man

an update on the mylifebits project. when are they productizing?

Gordon Bell will never forget what I look like. He’ll never forget what I sound like, either. Actually, he’ll never forget a single detail about me.

That’s because when I first met the 72-year-old computer scientist, he was recording my every move. He had a tiny bug-eyed camera around his neck, and a small audio recorder at his elbow. As we chatted about various topics — Australian jazz musicians, his futuristic cell phone, the Seattle area’s gorgeous weather — Bell’s gear quietly logged my every gesture and all my blathering small talk, snapping a picture every 60 seconds. Back at his office, his computer had carefully archived every document related to me: all the email I’d sent him, copies of my articles he’d read, pages he’d surfed on my blog.

Stalking Shoes

fashion is the strongest driver of cyborgization

A friend of mine just gave me a pair of those way-kewl Nike shoes that include sensors which broadcast your footsteps to your iPod. As Apple and Nike proudly proclaim, their shoes are a revolution in fitness — because they allow an iPod to track precise information about how far you run and how many calories you burn. “Your shoes talk,” as Apple boasts. “Your iPod nano listens.”

flOw A game of zen

Mr. Chen’s concept hinges on users unknowingly setting their own difficulty level. “Not with an option box that says easy, medium and hard. I want the player to control it subconsciously, based on what they’re doing.” In the face of a frustrating enemy, players are free to avoid the fight and search for more food, evolving into a more potent form. (The first squid-like enemy, encountered at level 5, was made excessively difficult on purpose to see if players would instinctually flee from an unfair fight.)

flow: the exhilarating sense of engagement we get when we’re wrapped up in a task that is perfectly matched to our skills. If it’s too easy, we get bored; too hard, we get frustrated. But hitting the precise mid-point puts us in “the zone” of flow.

Data Web

The notion of a Web of Data seems compelling to the point of inevitability right now, but that might change. When it comes to the W3C “leading the Web,” at least as far as the Semantic Web initiative is concerned, it might be like leading a horse to water and having to wait for it to get thirsty. But what does seem fairly certain is that those paths that build on the Web’s successful features (in particular, decentralization and interface uniformity) will probably be the easiest in the long run.

danny remarks on some of the ‘data web’ trends i’m noticing too. i read somewhere that ie8 will have microformats support, too.
2006-12-07:

This is an environment in which the data is distributed, discoverable, described and linked just as the text data of documents is now. One would have a data browser and a service like Swivel would be more of an aggregator/search engine rather than a data repository. Rather than data tools exposed through current browsing technology, there would be a data browser.