Esther Schindler of IT World recently discussed a number of new technologies that have a definite cool factor in addition to plenty of real world applications. She focuses on facial recognition technology: “The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology used clever geek bait to attract me to its booth: video clips from The Big Bang Theory. Formally, the project ‘focuses on the exploration of new methods in computer vision to enable detection and analysis of faces and people in both images and video’… For instance, touching the screen can bring up the actor’s record on imdb.com (destroying any argument with your spouse that begins, ‘Really, that’s the same actor who was in an episode of Firefly!’), or enabling better video search results (such as, ‘Show me all the scenes with both Sheldon and Penny’).” 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.

Read more