Mastering Voice Recognition On Your iPhone, Android, or Desktop

Nobody talks on the phone anymore, but people are talking at their phones. On any platform, check your settings and helper guides to get an understanding of what your app or phone can actually do, as completely misunderstood responses from a speech app can be pretty infuriating. Android phones with Google's Voice Search installed, for example, can make a phone call, compose email, send a text message, get directions, and pull up musical artists-but can't launch applications from vocal commands. This isn't so much an issue on iPhones, but Androids and other phones can have pinhole-style microphones that can get gummed up or partially covered by awkward cases. Intermediate: Stop Slowing Down, But Think Before Speaking You need not talk like a robot to be understood by one, says Vlad Sejnoha, chief technical officer at Nuance, maker of the Dragon speech-to-text software for Windows, Macs, iPhones and iPads.

Dragon's software learns speech styles and tics over time, and you want to aim for a natural speaking flow. Digging around Android forums and elsewhere, I found a good number of tesimonies from speech-to-text enthusiasts who saw better results from simply speaking at a normal clip. Google representative Nadja Blagojevic offered much the same advice for the search giant's voice product in both Android and its Chrome browser: Speak naturally and clearly, but don't strain to enunciate too much or speak slowly. Advanced Dictation: Punctuation and Personalization Another embarrassing thing you can stop doing is holding your phone or desktop microphone directly in front of your mouth. In your Mac's System Preferences, there's a whole range of Speech options, sure; but check in the Input section of the Sound options, and you'll find a check box to Use ambient noise reduction, which Google's Blagojevic recommends for using the Chrome browser's speech function.

The best noise cancellation tools put in cars and hearing aids use multiple microphones to pinpoint the speaker and amplify their Input, but your phone isn't quite as refined an audio tool. Punctuation is no different than words, as Dragon, Google, and most good voice recognition software will train itself to how you say "period," "comma," or even "smiley." Just be sure to actually go back and fix bad Punctuation, as that's often how the software learns. Finally, if you're using an Android phone, be sure that you've enabled Personalized Voice Recognition. It benefits your speech-to-text on Android, in your browser, and, ultimately, your self-driving car.

Japanese Supercomputer Unseats Chinese Supercomputer, Is Now the World's Fastest

A Japanese supercomputer is now the world’s fastest, unseating the previous record-holder by nearly a factor of four. The K Computer, based at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, can perform 8 petaflops — that’s 8 quadrillion calculations per second.



The next-best computer is China’s Tianhe-1A , which set a record at 2.6 petaflops last fall. The U.S.-based Jaguar computer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is now in third place with 1.75 petaflops.

K Computer topped the newest TOP500 List of the world’s fastest supercomputers, announced Monday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg.

K Computer, built by Fujitsu and entirely made in Japan, has 672 racks equipped with a current total of 68,544 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs, each with eight cores. It will eventually have 800 racks and will be capable of performing 10 petaflops, according to a news release from RIKEN. RIKEN and Fujitsu plan to have the computer fully operational by November 2012.

At least two American 10-petaflop machines are set to come online next year — IBM is building Mira, based at Argonne National Laboratory, and Blue Waters, based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is getting a 20-petaflop IBM model called Sequoia.

K computer will be used for global climate research, meteorology, disaster prevention, and medicine, according to RIKEN.

Source: Popsci via Engadget

First Graphene-Based Integrated Circuit Smaller than a Grain of Salt

IBM researchers have built the first integrated circuit based on graphene, a breakthrough the company says could herald a future based on graphene wafers instead of silicon. The circuit, a 10 gigahertz frequency mixer, could give wireless devices greater range. At higher frequencies, the technology could someday allow law enforcement and medical personnel to see inside objects or people without the harmful effects of X-rays, according to IBM.



It's yet another advancement in the use of graphene—which, in case you forgot, is that fantastic, ultra-thin "wonder material" that won two scientists the Nobel prize for physics. Graphene is only one layer of (carbon) atoms thick—but despite its ultra-lightness, it's still nearly indestructible. Like, 200x stronger than steel and the strongest substance in the known universe kind of indestructible. But it's also flexible and its conductivity is 100x greater than silicon. So it's badass.


The circuit is a broadband radio-frequency mixer, which, as IEEE Spectrum explains, is a crucial component of radios. It creates new radio signals by finding the sum and difference between two input frequencies. IBM’s circuit performed frequency mixing up to 10 GHz, and worked well up to 257 degrees F. The research team believes it can get even faster — if so, chips like these could improve cell phone and transceiver signals, possibly allowing phones to work in spots where they currently can’t receive service, the company says.


Several teams have been working on graphene transistors and receivers, but it has been difficult to marry the single-carbon-atom sheets to the metals and alloys used on chips. This circuit also uses aluminum, gold and palladium, for instance, which do not adhere well to graphene. What’s more, graphene can be easily damaged in the etching process, as Yu-Ming Lin and colleagues at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center explain in a paper about the new circuit.


The team figured out a new process that clears those hurdles by growing graphene on the silicon face of the silicon-carbide wafer. Then they coated the graphene in a polymer, conducted the necessary etching, and removed the polymer using some acetone. The transistor gates are only 550 nanometers long, and the entire wafer is the size of a grain of salt, IBM says.


Pretty soon, we could be seeing applications of graphene in high-bandwidth communication and low-cost smart phone and TV displays. 


Compared to silicon, the graphene transistor could be less expensive, use less energy and significantly free up room in portable electronics and smart phones.

The research is reported in today’s issue of the journal Science.


Source: Popsci Via Gizmodo

World record 26 terabits per second data transmission achieved

With video content consuming ever more bandwidth, the need for faster data transmission rates has never been greater. Now a team of scientists at Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) are claiming a world record in data transmission with the successful encoding of data at a rate of 26 terabits per second on a single laser beam and transmitting it over a distance of 50 km (31 miles). The scientists claim this is the largest data volume ever transported on a laser beam and enables the transmission of 700 DVD's worth of content in just one second.

With no electronic processing methods available for a data rate of 26 terabits per second, the team developed a new opto-electric data decoding process. This process relies on purely optical calculations to break down the initial high data rate into smaller bit rates that can then be processed electrically. The record-breaking data encoding also employed the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing(OFDM) scheme based on Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT) mathematical routines that is commonly used in mobile communications networks including digital TV and audio broadcasts.

Because energy is required for the laser and a few process steps only, the team says the new method is not only extremely fast, but also very energy efficient.

"Our result shows that physical limits are not yet exceeded even at extremely high data rates," says Professor Jürg Leuthold, who led the KIT experiment. "A few years ago, data rates of 26 terabits per second were deemed utopian even for systems with many lasers and there would not have been any applications. With 26 terabits per second, it would have been possible to transmit up to 400 million telephone calls at the same time. Nobody needed this at that time. Today, the situation is different."

The latest breakthrough follows on from the previous high-speed data transmission record set by the KIT scientists in 2010, when they successfully exceeded the data rate of 10 terabits (or 10,000 billion bits) per second.

The KIT experiment involved companies and scientists from all over Europe, including members of the staff of Agilent and Micram Deutschland, Time-Bandwidth Switzerland, Finisar Israel, and the University of Southampton in Great Britain. The experiment is detailed in the journal Nature Photonics.

Source: Gizmag

DNA-Based Computing Could Replace Silicon !

 

DNA is the future of computing,” Jian-Jun Shu tells PhysOrg. And why not? Silicon is slow by comparison, computes in a binary system, creates waste heat, and is not particularly easy on the environment. DNA-based computing can perform better than silicon in several respects, Shu says, and he and a few of his students at Nanyang Technical University in Singapore have set out to prove it.

The general idea: the human body performs computations all of the time, and does so far faster than even the fastest silicon-based supercomputer. Moreover, it does so in a parallel fashion, working with more breadth, speed, and agility than the ones and zeros of silicon computation. For massive parallel problems, artificial intelligence problems, and combinatorial problems, DNA-based computing could be far more efficient.

How does it work? Shu and company are just starting to scratch the surface of what DNA computing could do, he admits, but in the lab he and his students have manipulated strands of DNA to do all kinds of things. They have fused strands together, broken them apart, snipped them, and otherwise affected them to a certain goal or end like storing information in DNA molecules that can be later retrieved for computational purposes.

The operations right now are simple: addition or subtraction mainly, nothing as complex as what silicon computers can do on their worst days. The potential for that equation to be flipped is there, but first there are several obstacles that need to be overcome. For one, there is no real interface for DNA-based computing through which humans can interact with and display data. There also exists no equivalent to the CPU--something that can facilitate these complex operations without human interference.

But that will change, Shu says, with increases in technology and more time in the lab. Just don’t expect to be computing with nucleotides anytime in the near term.

Source: PopSci Via PhysOrg

Thin-film flexible 'Paperphone' created

Researchers from the Human Media Lab at Canada's Queen's University have created a fully-functioning floppy E-Ink smartphone, which they also refer to as a paper computer. Like its thicker, rigid-bodied counterparts, the Paperphone can do things like making and receiving calls, storing e-books, and playing music. Unlike them, however, it conforms to the shape of its user's pocket or purse, and can even be operated through bending actions.

"This computer looks, feels and operates like a small sheet of interactive paper," said its creator, Roel Vertegaal, who is also the director of the Human Media Lab. "You interact with it by bending it into a cell phone, flipping the corner to turn pages, or writing on it with a pen."

The device has a 9.5-cm (3.74-inch) thin film flexible E-Ink display, underneath which is a flexible printed circuit incorporating resistive bend sensors. Those sensors allow it to be programmed to recognize different types of bending gestures, which will subsequently result in it doing things such as navigating menus, making calls, selecting songs, or any other function. A built-in Wacom tablet also allows users to draw on its screen – making it even more paper-like.

When not actually being operated, the Paperphone consumes no electricity. Vertegaal's team have also created a similar device, the Snaplet, which can be worn like a wristband. It operates as a watch when in a convex state, becomes a PDA when flat, and can be used as a phone when turned concave.

The technology is the result of a collaboration between Queen's University and Arizona State University, and will be officially presented on May 10th at the CHI 2011 conference in Vancouver.

"This is the future," said Vertegaal. "Everything is going to look and feel like this within five years."

Source: Gizmag

Few Things About ThunderBolt Technology

Thunderbolt is a revolutionary I/O technology that supports high-resolution displays andhigh-performance data devices through a single, compact port. It sets new standards for speed, flexibility, and simplicity. And it’s on the new MacBook Pro and the new iMac.

Thunderbolt in dot points

• Built from the ground up for audio and video professionals
• Two bi-directional channels of up to 10Gbps (that's 1.25 gigabytes per second)
• 10Gbps of usable bandwidth, not a theoretical maximum or burst speed
• Intel aims to increase this to 100Gbps within a decade
• Up to seven devices can be daisy chained to a single Thunderbolt port
• Low latency, time synchronized (to within eight nanoseconds) transfers down the entire seven-device chain
• Connected peripherals appear as PCI Express or DisplayPort devices to the operating system, avoiding potential driver issues
• Uses copper cables with a maximum length of 3 metres, with a switch to backwards-compatible optical technology on the horizon
• 10 watts of power per port available to connected peripherals (versus USB's 5 watts)
• Powered devices in the daisy chain can pass another 10 watts down the chain
• Uses the Mini DisplayPort connector
• Compatible with existing DisplayPort monitors and adapters (HDMI, DVI and VGA)
• Compatible with USB, FireWire, eSATA and other existing PCI Express-based protocols via adapters
• No licensing fees for peripherals (unlike FireWire)

Why this is important

There's already a choir of commentators saying there's no use cases for this technology and how hardly anyone is going to use it. They seem to have forgotten that we're talking about a MacBook Pro here, and not a MacBook.

Peter Kirn at Create Digital Music's choice of headline for his article about this hardware refresh says it all: "FireWire800, ExpressCard Survive MacBook Pro Revision, So You Can Relax" (emphasis mine).

There are many professional users of Apple products who rely on expensive external peripherals to do their jobs, and since 2008, they've all been watching Apple slowly remove the ports they need to connect those peripherals. The fastest I/O available on a 2010 MacBook Pro 15" was an eight-year-old FireWire 800 port, while PC users enjoyed ExpressCard/34, eSATA and USB 3.0 - each several times faster than FireWire 800. People developed genuine concerns that Apple was drunk on the massive profits of its iOS business and would let its professional business (including its Final Cut and Logic software packages) die a slow death while it chased the mass market dollar.

Thunderbolt is the antidote. It's a sign that that pros still matter, it's superior in every conceivable way, and it's compatible with all that existing gear. There's no existing use case that can completely saturate that 10Gbps link and that is exactly the point. An I/O interface shouldn't be the bottleneck in your system.

And it's not just for professionals. In an era of 10+ megapixel point-and-shoot cameras, 1080p camcorders and multi-terabyte collections of pirated media, I think you'd be crazy to suggest that only A/V professionals will benefit from blazingly fast I/O.

Thunderbolt devices are already being announced, such as LaCie's Little Big Disk with Thunderbolt, and several high-profile A/V and storage companies have voiced support for the new interface including Aja, Apogee, Avid, Blackmagic, LaCie, Promise, Universal Audio and Western Digital.
Source: Gizmag Via Apple