A new release out of Indiana University reports, “Two researchers at Indiana University Bloomington’s School of Informatics and Computing have each been awarded the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious award in support of early career development. Assistant professors Apu Kapadia and David Crandall have each received NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development Program award designed to assist early stage scientists in building a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education. In receiving NSF’s CAREER Award, the two researcher-teachers are recognized for their work to ‘most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of Indiana University’.” Read more

Want to participate in building a world of intelligent personal assistants? The opportunity awaits at SparkingTogether, where researchers, programmers, and companies can contribute features, behavior and knowledge to an online platform, dubbed FIONA, for creating next-gen virtual avatars. FIONA stands for Framework for Interactive Services Over Natural-conversational Agents.   

“People sparking together” is how Patricia Lopez, marketing manager at Adele Robots, the robotics startup behind the platform, describes the system. Contributors create code or design that gets wrapped in the FIONA API so that it can be converted into a Spark – which is an application that can become part of the avatar, whether that be its voice, language or a function (NLP, text-to-speech, computer vision, or 3D design, for instance). The company will host a Sparkstore where developers can sell, or freely share, their Sparks with the world, and those interested in using avatars can then combine different Sparks together in the Sparklink environment. Sparkrender is a capability it’s developed for users to post their avatars – which run on Adele Robots’ servers in the cloud – on their websites or mobile apps.

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