Writing

AI Fundamentally Changes the Startup Funding Game

What took $1M+ to build three years ago now takes two people a few weeks. The constraint has shifted from building to distribution.

The Future Isn't About Letting AI Use Software

Today's AI agents simulate a human at a screen — mouse clicks, pixel-reading, typing into UI fields. That's a crude stop-gap. The future is software built for AI, not AI pretending to be human.

The Air Canada Chatbot Problem

Air Canada's chatbot gave a customer incorrect bereavement fare pricing. A court held the airline liable. It's an early preview of the reliability problem at the heart of AI.

Unique identifiers’ cheat sheet

For context, see previous posts:

You want to start a company. But why?

Having been through the startup process several times (DataMarket was my fourth as a founder), I have come to the conclusion that the most important part of starting a company is for the founder or founders to think about and agree upon why they want to build the company in the first place, and w...

“Brutal transparency” on the DataMarket blog

I just posted a new entry on the DataMarket blog: Iceland: Restoring trust through open data and “brutal transparency”

Iceland & Energy – presentation w. John Perkins

Just finished my previously mentioned presentation on Icelandic energy data. Some 250-300 people showed up – mostly to listen to John Perkins obviously. Interesting audience to say the least, but a lot of fun! My DataMarket piece went well – and putting it together at least helped me put some thi...

Iceland & Energy: Upcoming presentation

I have been invited – on behalf of DataMarket – to give a presentation at the University of Iceland on April 6th. The occasion is a small conference due to the visit of “Economic Hit Man” John Perkins to Iceland. Perkins is here to attend the premiere of “Dreamland“, a documentary on the effects ...

DataMarket at Money:Tech 2009

My company – DataMarket – will be doing a presentation at O’Reilly’s Money:Tech conference in New York in February. I attended the first Money:Tech conference earlier this year, and I must say it’s one of my favorite conferences ever, so I’m greatly honored to be speaking there. The topic of my p...

Hans Rosling strikes again

I’m a big fan of Hans Rosling. He’s really the guy that opened up the eyes of the world to the importance of availability of and open access to data. His latest presentation, from Google’s Zeitgeist08 conference, is now available on YouTube. It is not as stunning as his original TED eye-opener, b...

DataMarket launched

I’m pleased to announce the launch of DataMarket’s new website. As the name implies, DataMarket is about creating a marketplace for data – structured data to be more specific. This means all sorts of statistics and tabular data, including but not limited to: market research, exchange rates, vario...

To: Gordon Brown – From: An Icelander

Dear Mr. Brown, (cc: The international press) Here in Iceland, we are busy dealing with a series of mistakes in government, regulation and banking operations. As a result of a total collapse of our banking system, customers in the UK have feared for their deposits in Icelandic banks, just like ev...

The Case for Open Access to Public Sector Data

This article will be published tomorrow in The Reykjavík Grapevine. Government institutions and other public organizations gather a lot of data. Some of them – like the Statistics Office – have it as their main purpose, others as a part of their function, and yet others almost as a by-product of ...

Enter the cloud – but how deep?

The new company is officially founded and has got a name: DataMarket. You’ll have to stay tuned to hear about what we actually do, but the name provides a hint 😉 In the last couple of weeks I’ve spent quite some time, thinking about the big picture in terms of DataMarket’s technical setup, and it...

iPhone, 3G and battery life

The rumours are getting ever louder. The new version of iPhone is coming out and it has 3G capabilities. Many have expressed their concerns that this will seriously affect the iPhone’s already relatively short battery life time. 3G chipsets certainly drain the batteries faster than 2 or 2.5G (i.e...

Adventures in copyright: Open access, data and wikis

I’ve just had a very interesting experience that sheds light on some important issues regarding copyright, online data and crowdsourced media such as wikis. I thought I’d share the story to spark a debate on these issues. For a couple of years I’ve worked on and off on a simple web based system f...

Firehose aimed at a teacup

Dogbert to Dilbert: Information is gushing toward your brain like a firehose aimed at a teacup. Every company, organization and individual is continuously gathering and creating all kinds of data. Most of this data collection is happening in separated silos, with very limited connections between ...

Dear Apple – may we pay?

Update (Feb 7): Updated the estimated number of iPhones in Iceland in light of more reliable data. As stated before: I live in a small country, nobody wants my money. In the couple of years since I wrote that post, I’ve been watching in awe as my fellow Icelanders – and in fact a lot […]

The inevitable business model for music

There is a lot of turmoil in the music industry. The big publishers (usually dubbed “the majors”) are finally waking up to the fact that a decade of neglecting to come up with suitable business models for the web has bred a generation of consumers that have never paid for music. For them, music i...

The Government API

A couple of weeks ago I attended a conference where there was a lot of talk about Business Process Automation (BPA) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Disclaimer: Yes, I do lead a very exciting life, even if attending such a conference may indicate otherwise. You’re probably familiar with t...

Google, gPhone and the disruptive business model

Rumors about Google’s upcoming mobile phone – dubbed gPhone – are becoming ever louder. If you thought Apple’s iPhone business model was disruptive for the wireless industry (demanding 10% of the operator’s revenues from iPhone users – voice and data) – just you wait for Google entering the scene...

Statistics With a Vengeance

Statistics superhero Prof. Hans Rosling is back with a new, entertaining talk about the importance of statistics and access to information as means to make our world a better place.

How far is it?

I’ve always been fascinated with those center-of-the-world type sign posts that tell you how far it is from where you are to various distant places. I just made a fun little tool so that anybody can do the calculations needed to create one. It’s fairly straight forward to use. The input fields ac...

Be right back…

Books are too long

I love books, but I never have enough time to read. Most of my book reading is non-fictional except during the Christmas and New Year when I try to swallow the cream of the crop of the years’ fiction. A lot of the best non-fiction books are really communicating only one or two core ideas. […]

White male seeks single search engine

As I store more and more data in different online applications, the need for a search engine that can search across them all becomes apparent. I have photos on Flickr, blog posts here on my blog, bookmarks in Spurl.net, contribute to several project Wikis, have written articles for a number of di...

The next Amazon web services

Jeff Bezos took the stage here at Web 2.0 Expo yesterday, followed by a conversation with Tim O’Reilly. Bezos was talking about the current state and future vision for Amazon Web Services. He said that basically Amazon wants to give web applications developers of the world the tools they need to ...

The world needs more people like him

This is a video of a presentation by Hans Rosling of Gapminder, the Swedish data visualisation organization that Google recently bought. Rosling has a great vision: To make the world a better place by improving access to and presentation of data about the world, such as statistics about poor coun...

Who will kill Google?

Paul Graham wrote an interesting piece a few days ago about the “death of Microsoft”. Not death in the sense that Nietzsche proclaimed to God, but in the sense Microsoft “killed” IBM. IBM remained (and remains) a strong company through the Microsoft era, but they were no longer ruling the IT indu...

Trends that shape the future Internet

I’m working on a document as a part of a study by Eurescom on the Future Internet – the Operator’s vision. Our part is on the applications of the future internet and as a starting point we’re identifying several trends that are likely to shape this future. We’re looking 10-15 years ahead in the s...

The tipping point of long tail services

I couldn’t resist the title… Just a quick observation that I haven’t seen in the book or any of the online literature on the subject of The Long Tail. The moment that changed the way I use YouTube was the moment I started to assume that any video I might be looking for would be […]

Racing’s next technology marvel: Fuel efficiency?

I’m calling for a new rule in Formula 1 racing: A maximum on how much gasoline each car is allowed to use per race. The result will be accelerated innovation in fuel efficiency. A lot of automobile technologies, now found in passenger cars, have been invented and /or improved for racing purposes....

Fleiri myndir frá Afríku / More photos from Africa

Magga er búin að setja upp annað myndasafn. Í fyrra safininu var það sem við völdum sem bestu myndirnar úr ferðinni, en í nýja safninu eru myndir sem segja ferðasöguna. Þessvegna eru líka smá textabútar hér og þar sem útskýra það sem um er að vera. Nýja myndasafnið er hér. P.S. Tabblo er snilld. ...

Displaying your Spurl.net bookmarks on your own page

I was playing with this new blog’s template. I had actually forgotten how incredibly easy it is to include your own bookmarks in your own page, complete with folders and everything. The following assumes that you are a Spurl.net user and make note that it will only show the links that you’ve chos...

Massively Multiplayer game as a work place

More than two years ago, I wrote a post titled When People are Cheaper than Technology. The basic premise there was that the cheapest and best solution to many problems we are trying to solve by building software systems could be to make people part of those systems – basicly what Amazon is now t...

New blog

I’ve started a new blog directly under hjalli.com It will be a bit more general and there will be posts in both English and Icelandic as suits each subject. It’s still very fresh and immature, but I hope to post some interesting thoughts there on Spurl.net, web search and the internet as well as ...

Spurl launches an Icelandic search engine

Originally posted on the Spurl.net forums on November 1st 2005 Spurl.net just launched an Icelandic search engine with the leading local portal / news site mbl.is. Although Iceland is small, mbl.is is a nice, mid-size portal with some 210,000 unique visitors per week – so this has significant exp...

Nýr hjalli.com kominn í loftið

Velkomin á nýja bloggið mitt. Smá upplýsingar um það hér. Svo er bara að bíða eftir að mér detti eitthvað í hug. Welcome to my new blog. Here is a short intro.

Using AJAX to track user behavior

Here’s a thought. With the rise of AJAX applications this is bound to happen, and may very well have been implemented somewhere, even though a quick search didn’t reveal a lot. So here goes: By adding a few clever Javascript events to a web page, it is possible to track user behavior on web pages...

Google and user driven search indexes

Needless to say, I am a firm believer that the next big steps in web search will come from involving the users more in the ranking and indexing process. The best search engines on the web have always been built around human information. In the early days, Yahoo! was the king, first based on Jerry...

Coming to terms with tags: folksonomies, tagging systems and human information

Over the past few years we’ve seen a big movement from hierarchical categories to flat search. Web navigation and email offer prime examples: Yahoo’s Directories gave way for Google’s search, Outlook’s folders are giving way for the search based Gmail. It’s far more efficient to come up with and ...

Is search the “next spam”?

I was a panelist at a local conference on Internet marketing here in Iceland last Friday. As you can imagine, a lot of the time was spent on talking about marketing using search engines. Both how to use paid for placement (i.e. ads) and how to optimize pages to rank better in the natural search […]

The Origins of Our Ideas

“Tell me what you read and I shall tell you what you are” is an anonymous play on a famous proverb. Every day we take in a lot of information from a variety of sources. This information shapes our ideas, opinions and to some extent our personality. But where is it coming from? Most of […]

Discussions moved to Spurl.net user forums

With the upgrade last week, user forums were added to Spurl.net‘s help section. From now on, discussions on Spurl.net development, support requests, bug reports and announcements will be there, as that format serves the purpose much better. Please join in the discussions there. In any case, goodb...

Related spurls per category

The database is finally reaching significant size so I decided to start playing with some of the things that I’ve been planning to do when a critical mass of spurls were reached. The new addition is very small on the surface, but I suspect it may become a favorite feature for a lot of Spurl […]

Setting the Scenario

This is a chapter from a book that I thought I was going to write, called The Brain Revolution It is an odd scenario. In a room that looks like a cozy TV-room, three people are sitting in chairs back to back in a rather tight circle. On the floor in the middle of the […]

The Brain Revolution

Once I was going to write a book. As a matter of fact I started writing a book. The subject was brain technologies from technical, philosophical, historical and futuristic standpoints. As all of my time now is devoted to developing Spurl.net further, I realized that this book is not going to be f...

The latest batch of updates + policies

A few updates in the last couple of days worth noticing. Moving multiple spurls: I finally got around doing this. Should have been done ages ago. There is now a checkbox in front of every entry in the lists on the My Spurls page. Check the appropriate boxes, select the category these entries shou...

Spurl.net grows fast

After a quite positive article about Spurl.net in Lockergnome – Windows Fanatics newsletter, Spurl.net saw a lot of new faces last week. Traffic has grown significantly and a lot of uploaded bookmarks should be making the recommendations and other Spurl features that use aggregated data from the ...

Multiple categories and other updates

The last few days have been spent on some good rearrangements. Most of them will not really show on the surface, but here are some of the changes you might have noticed: It is now possible to put a spurled page in more than one category at once (press the “multiple” link in the Advanced […]

Introducing: The Spurl bar

Spurl steps aside… I just completed wrapping the core functionality of Spurl.net into a neat toolbar that sits on the side of your browser. At the top of the bar is a search field, for searching your spurls (spurls are essentially “Bookmarks on steroids” for those of you that need a tagline). Bel...

Right click to Spurl!

Internet Explorer users can now add a Spurl! link to their right-click context menus. This has several traits: It allows users to spurl pages that appear in frames. It saves space on the desktop for those users that don’t use the Links bar for anything else. It bypasses pop-up blockers To install...

Private spurls and various minor updates

I may have been quiet for the last few days, but busy none the less. You may notice a new checkbox in the “Advanced” spurling window, labeled “Private”. This allows you to spurl pages that you don’t want to go through the public listings on Spurl.net. If a page is marked “Private”, the only place...

Successfully implemented CD purchase protection

My girlfriend bought me a CD yesterday. It was one I really wanted so it was a well appreciated gift. Now, we have our entire 5-600 CD collection ripped and stored on a server in our home. There is no stereo in our living room, only iTunes. So obviously the first thing to do with […]

Spurl link for Safari users

Several users have pointed out that the default Spurl link does not work on Safari browsers. Thanks to Trigger (in Icelandic), this problem is now fixed and Safari users can now enjoy Spurl.net every bit as much as everyone else. The Safari link can be found here. As I welcome you Safarians, I mu...

Workaround for problem with “Spurl this entry”

Vanz at Maestrini per Caso pointed out to me that if a title of a blog entry holds certain special characters such as quotes, the “Spurl this entry”-javascript doesn’t work. This is correct and can not be fixed in a simple manner. I posted a non-optimal workaround as an update to the original ent...

My spurls update

Some of you may have noticed an upgrade of the My spurls page. The main addition is that you can now rename, move and delete categories. Just go to the category in question and you see these features in the category header. It is no also possible to sort the spurls based on date, title […]

Spurl.net – Del.icio.us integration / Spurl.net API

In response to requests for further interoperability, I’ve made a couple of minor upgrades to Spurl.net: Del.icio.us integration: Current users of del.icio.us can now fill in their del.icio.us user information at Spurl’s My profile page (if you’re redirected to the homepage you need to log in) to...

Most visited spurls and export

I’ve made two improvements on “My spurls”. Both improve the usefulness of the My spurls page quite a lot and are the first steps in a major upgrade I’m doing to that ppart of Spurl.net in general (including the search functionality). Most visited Spurls: Spurl now counts every time you click a li...

Spurl: TiVo for the Internet!

Found this quote in an Icelandic discussion on Spurl.net: “TiVo for the Internet!” It can easily be scrutinized, but it sounds kind’a nice. 😉

The Spurl.net philosophy

Even though I’ve moved discussions about Spurl.net to another blog, I thought this belonged here as well… – – – “Tell me what you read and I shall tell you what you are.” is an anonymous proverb. While I have no intentions to use Spurl.net to tell you who you are, the proverb highlights how […]

The Spurl.net philosophy

“Tell me what you read and I shall tell you what you are.” is an anonymous proverb. While I have no intentions to use Spurl.net to tell you who you are, the proverb highlights how important the information we consume is. Every day we take in a lot of information from a variety of sources. […]

Storing pages and searching full text

Spurl.net now allows users to store a copy of spurled pages. Use the “Advanced” tab of the spurl! window, and choose “Store / Yes”. When a page is stored, Spurl.net also indexes the entire text of the spurled page and thereby allows users to later search for any piece of text on pages that they […]

I’m waiting for the Trillian of Social Networking

This morning, the inevitable happened. I got an invitation from people that are starting to use Orkut, the latest fad in the Social Networking world. I joined, like I have to some 5 or 6 other such systems: Friendster Tribe.net LinkedIn Ryze The deceased Six degrees But this time I’d had enough. ...

Scientific American Mind

Scientific American’s latest special issue is Scientific American Mind. It is a collection of very informative and interesting articles on the latest in brain science, philosophy of mind and brain technologies. There is a brilliant article on “idiot savants” – people that have autism or received ...

Server outage

This looks bad. Second outage in 4 days. This time it is my hosting company that is not doing their job. I just spoke with support and the problem is being taken care of, although they couldn’t say when it would be up and running again. I am looking at different hosting options that will […]

Spurl innovation from Italy

As you have probably noticed, there has been an upsurge of usage from Italy over the past 3-4 days. Welcome! A lot of Italian bloggers have put the Click to Spurl button on their pages, and others are syndicating the lists either using the Javascript method or the RSS feed. Spurl lists of the Ita...

Service out due to DNS upgrade

Due to a neccessary DNS upgrade Spurl.net has been unreachable for more than an hour. I’m sorry for any inconveniece this may have caused, but I did not know on beforehand that this upgrade would cause any downtime. In any case, the upgrade is a step in improving the service, so please bare with ...

Your spurl beam

I added a little pet feature this morning. I call it a “spurl beam”. It is basically a timeline showing the pages that you have spurled. It may not have a lot of practical value, but it is kind of cool. It shows what is floating through one’s head at the time. To make your […]

RSS feeds for related pages and search results

I added two features today that are natural extensions of the “search” and “related pages” functionality, namely to syndicate these results as RSS feeds. Simply go to the search or related pages, perform the search you want to do or click the related icon () next to any webpage in the spurl lists...

Comments from blocked text and upload bookmarks

Two notable upgrades in the last couple of days: If you block a part of the text on a webpage before clicking the spurl! button, that text will be automatically used as the text for the comment for that page (see the “Advanced” tab in the spurl! window). This improves the usability of the comment...

Search functionality

Just added a search function to search for entries in the entire Spurl.net database. This first version is very simple. It simply searches: the spurl title the url all user comments and the description …for a search string match. The search is not limited to whole words, so searching e.g. for “in...

Nasty Google Rank Trick

I came across this site this morning: Search Subjects on AllofIceland.com – The Best Icelander Directory. The page is obviously designed to fool search engine robots to index links to “advertisers'” web sites. It’s quite easy to see that the page is automatically generated, but still some serious...

Massively Multiplayer Robot Game (virtual reality without the “virtual”)

Here’s an idea that has been cooking in my head for years: Making the most real computer game still to be seen anywhere. How? By actually making it happen in reality. I’m not thinking about games that blur the boundaries to real life and make yourself a character in the plot (Alternate Reality Ga...

Add a “Click to spurl” button to your page

You can now put a “Click to spurl” button on your webpages or blogs. It’s a single line of Javascript that you put in the code of any page where you want the button to be displayed. The button looks like this: The grey area will show the number of users that have spurled the […]

Spurl from RSS feeds and a new list

Two minor updates today. Those of you that are using RSS readers of some sort (I for one use NewzCrawler) – you can now spurl a link directly from the feed, so it saves you one trip to the browser if you know the page or site already. You can also open a Related search […]

Javascript lists improved

Improved on yesterday’s syndication list builder and made the Javascript list a lot more flexible. You can now include the date the page was spurled and your comments or the description for the page either as a text in the list or on a mouseover. See the builder for details (requires login). You ...

Syndication list builder added

Added a listbuilder (login required) for the RSS and Javascript syndication lists today. The builder makes it easy to customize the lists and helps the not-too-savvy users to use the syndication features as well. Plus, it decreases the odds of errors in the syndication tags. I will add some forma...

Wetware Trendwatch replaced with Wetware Spurls

I have come up with a better solution for the quick links here in the Trendwatch. It is now a spurl.net list (yes, I made spurl.net, but it is still better). For those of you that want to continue following the links I picked out for the Trendwatch, the new RSS feed is here. And […]

“I like!” becomes spurl.net

As you might have noticed, I like! just got a new home. Spurl.net is the address and I believe I managed exactly 0 minutes of downtime during the switch, so you shouldn’t have experienced any trouble in the meantime. There are two main reasons for the switch: The old URL wasn’t all too easy to […]

I like! becomes spurl.net

As you might have noticed, I like! just got a new home. Spurl.net is the address and I believe I managed exactly 0 minutes of downtime during the switch, so you shouldn’t have experienced any trouble in the meantime. There are two main reasons for the switch: The old URL wasn’t all too easy to […]

I like! Starts Off (Too) Well

Thanks to all of you that have tested I like! in the past few days. By the time I post this, it will be almost exactly a week since I introduced the service and I would not have believed the amount of traffic the site has got since. As a result, the server is sometimes […]

I like! at Library Stuff weblog

User comments are starting to come in for my I like! service. – Library Stuff

Monkey Talk

This article discusses where monkeys’ language abilities end and the realm of humans begins. Puzzled monkeys reveal key language step – New Scientist

Transforming Thoughts Into Deeds

An article on Brain-Computer Interfaces – Transforming Thoughts Into Deeds Wired News

Introducing: I like! – Collaborative Approach to the Web

I’ve been doing some coding, hence not much written on Wetware in the meantime. The hack is called “I like!” and is a very simple, yet powerful service that allows you to mark web pages you like, by a single click of a button. In return you get several things: First of all it recommends […]

Mind Wide Open: A Book to Read

Steven Johnson‘s new book: Mind Wide Open, is finally in stock at Amazon so it should be on its way over here very soon. Johnson is the author of one of my favorite books – Emergence – and in the new book he takes a look at the human brain and what brain science can […]

Software or Agriculture the Ways to Fight Epidemics Are the Same

This article discusses how security experts are learning to deal with software epidemics from the ways used to fight the more traditional epidemics of agriculture (thanks Toti) – Seeds of destruction News.com

The Status of Brain-Machine Interfaces

I mentioned in the Trendwatch the other day that Popular Science has a cover article in January about Brain-Machine Interfaces. Well, the article is now online, and it is a brilliant one. Wetware has mentioned much of the research discussed in the article before (see the Brain technologies catego...

Do-It-Yourself Dream Machine

Takara co., the same company as brought us the “bowlingual” and “meowlingual” (respectively translating dog and cat “talk” to human language), now claim they have made a “dream machine” allowing you to control your own dreams. I wonder if the science is as solid as that for the other two devices....

Self-healing Software at MIT

MIT researchers are working on self-healing software. The article gives only hints of how this is done, I am at least not convinced this can work reliably. – Software repairs itself on the go Technology Research News

CAD System for Modeling Animals

This article talks about a CAD system called Vertebrate Analyzer that is being created at the University of Buffalo. The Vertebrate Analyzer is supposed to be able to simulate the functions of vertebrates’ skeletons and muscles. Casting light upon questions such as: – Why Did Sabertooth Tigers Ne...

LandGeist: The World According to the Web

Douwe Osinga’s LandGeist project measures the frequency of certain words appearing on web pages together with country names. This is an attempt to see which countries are associated with different words. The generated maps tell their tale. – Land Geist

Play 20 Questions Against a Computer

This AI implementation of 20 Questions is incredibly good. It can pretty reliably guess what you thought of by asking 20 questions about it. And it is based on the same thinking as my Norm: Let the users have fun while adding value to an AI knowledge base. Most cool! – 20 Questions – Directly […]

SETI@home Interview: Tapping the Grid

Here is a most interesting interview with David Anderson, Project Leader for the SETI@home distributed computing program. Among the interesting facts: SETI@home now involves 0.1% of the world’s total computing capacity 4.7 million volunteers in 226 countries are chipping in with computing power S...

MIT’s Picower Center: Brain Sciences with Broad Backgrounds

MIT is opening the Picower Center for Learning and Memory in 2005. It “focuses the talents of a diverse array of brain scientists on a single mission: unraveling the mechanisms that drive the quintessentially human capacity to remember and to learn, as well as related functions like perception, a...

Personal Blogs are the Public Life Bits

A few months ago I wrote about “Memories for Life“, a proposal for a Grand Challenge in computer science. The aim of that Grand Challenge was to find ways to store, index and secure our digital memories, i.e. the digital trail that we’re constantly building in the form of digital photos, email co...

Breakthrough in Brain-Computer Interfaces

Researchers have developed a promising new way to control computers by thought alone – Computers that read your mind – (The Economist)

Professor Lives Life As a Cyborg

An article from AP News on Steve Mann – Professor Lives Life As a Cyborg (AP News)

Squid inspires nanolights

This overview provides a nice insight into reports about optical nanotechnology tools that are based on how an Hawaiian squid that uses reflective plates to confuse predators. – Squid’s Flashlight May Lead to New Nanolights (Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends)

Games With A Cause

Some time ago I wrote about various attempts to gather common sense, the lack of which is believed to be one of the main hurdles to creating successful AI systems capable of human-like interaction. A few weeks later I wrote about people as parts of computer systems to make them cheaper or more in...

More on Artificial Actors

I wrote a little piece on Wetware the other day about artificial actors in Lord of the Rings. The latest issue of Wired has a very interesting article on rendered artificial stunt men. One question though: Do they get paid extra for the more dangerous stunts? – Attack of the Stuntbots – Wired

Retina implant aims to help blind see

MIT and Harvard Medical School collaborators are producing a sophisticated engineering tool that electrically stimulates the retina to provide vision of a sort for people who are totally blind. – Retina implant aims to help blind see – MIT News

Drawings by an Artist on LSD

Series of drawings, done by an artist under the influence of LSD as a part of a test conducted by the US government in the late 1950’s. Most curious. – Acid trip 1

Legged Robots, Mechanical Insects and a Robotrunk!

Wired article on how DARPA and the US Navy are looking at animals as models for building the next generation of war machines and spying gadgets. – Wired News: Mobile Robots Take Baby Steps

Where’s the Spam?

I have only received one spam email today. By this time of the day I’ve on average over the last months received about 10-15 spam emails on my 3 web-exposed email addresses, sometimes more. I checked with some of my friends, and many of them have the same story. I’ve jokingly commented before tha...

Fish Save Energy By Swimming In Schools

New research explains how schools of fish use the turbulance from each other to minimize the energy needed for them to move around. – ScienceDaily News Release: Scientists Pinpoint How Fish Save Energy By Swimming In Schools

Beyond Google: Narrow the Search

Wired is noticing search engines’ urge to evolve into something better. This article mentions several interesting products to effectively narrow searches including: Vivisimo, Grokker and TouchGraph. – Beyond Google: Narrow the Search

The AI of the Mars Rovers

As the world watches the Mars rover Spirit at work on Mars, it’s interesting to get a glimpse of the artificial intelligence systems that control its behavior. These two articles from the NASA website scratch the surface of the subject. – NASA – People Are Robots, Too. Almost –

Popular Science Cover Article on Mind-Machine Interfaces

The January 2004 issue of Popular Science has a cover article named “Linking Mind To Machine: Soon The Human Brain Will Control Robots – Just By Thinking“. I haven’t read it yet (issue has not arrived to Iceland), but it’s one of my favorite Wetware subjects so it should be interesting. – Popular...

Software Bots Will Take Over the Internet

We’ve had email spam, we’ve had blog comment spam, we’ve had lousy tricks to improve search engine rankings. Douwe Osinga has an interesting but not so pretty sight of what might be a next step in making our online lives harder: Software bots that combine a variety of methods to make a living. – ...

The Top Ten Nanotech Products Of 2003

Forbes cuts through the nanotechnology hype and lists the best real nanotech products already on the market. – The Top Ten Nanotech Products Of 2003 (via Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends)

WebFountain: A Smart Search Engine from IBM

IBM is developing a pretty clever search engine named WebFountain. The engine indexes the web in a similar way as typical search engines do, but additionally uses automatic annotation modules that “makes sense” of the meaning of the indexed documents. Sadly for us nerds, they don’t plan to make t...

New Year, New Features

Happy new year everybody! To celebrate the new year I made some minor changes to the Wetware site. Most notable is the Trendwatch section. Instead of posting the news links I find once a week, I will be sending them directly to the Trendwatch as I come across them. There should be a couple of […]

Scientists Have Found That Scientists Are Often Wrong

I tend to be very skeptical about news articles where the headline reads: “Scientists have found that…”. Too often the scientist or researchers involved aren’t even named and there is no way of digging in further to see if it was indeed professional scientific work that led to the conclusion. Thi...

Teaching Kids Media Literacy

A thought provoking article from Technology Review about teaching kids to understand and deal with the media that is involved in their lives on all levels. – Media Literacy Goes to School (subscription required)

Colors Used to Speed Neural Networks

Researchers from the University of Tokyo are using light with different wavelength to encode information to speed up information transfer in neural networks. – Colors expand neural net

Robots and Humans Play Soccer Together

A research team from Carnegie Mellon University is exploring man-robot interaction by programming robots to play a special kind of soccer on teams with both human and robot players playing together. – Bots, humans play together

Vibrating Gel Mimicks Animal Locomotion

A strip of gel on a vibrating plate can be made to mimic three types of animal style locomotion. – Gels Gain Life-Like Motion

AI Actors in Lord of the Rings

As “The Return of the King” is taking the world by storm I think it is suiting to point to this entertaining and informative article from Popular Science last November (after the release of “The Two Towers“). The article explains the AI system that is used to control the characters in the massive...

How the Brain Predicts Other People’s Actions

An article in Nature suggests that the brain actually simulates another person’s brain processes when trying to predict their actions. – A system in the human brain for predicting the actions of others

NASA Helps Biologists in Chameleon Research

NASA teams with biologists to predict the geographic distribution of 11 known chameleon species in Madagascar. The model also helped lead to discovery of 7 previously unknown chameleon species. – NASA Helps Forecast Reptile Distributions In Madagascar

Robot Does Forest Research

A solar-powered robot helps scientists monitoring environmental changes in forests. – ‘Robot Tarzan’ helps forest work

Wetware Trendwatch: Week of December 15, 2003

This week’s Wetware related stuff in the media, including: Robots from the Victorian era Buildings get nerve systems AI helicopters BOINC for distributed computing Running robots …and more. – – – Bridges and other constructions are increasingly being built with a “nerve system” of their own. Engi...

Exams: We Have Changed, They Haven’t

I just had a period of exams. Don’t get me wrong, I think I did ok on most of them so this entry is not to blame “it” on something, but I started thinking about the nature of exams, what they are for and how they are performed. To my best knowledge, exams today are […]

Merging Social Networks

Social Software is the in thing these days. Among the sites mapping the social networks of Internet are Friendster, Tribe.net and LinkedIn. Following their success we have less known services such as Ryze, Everyone’s Connected, MeetUp and tons of others. It even seems they are running out of catc...

Wetware Trendwatch: Week of December 8, 2003

This week’s Wetware related stuff in the media, including: Mind controlled video games Self-assembling chips from IBM Social insects inspire algorithms for robot teamwork Google becoming a command line interface to the Internet Game theory helps to work out peace treaties …and more. – – – Magneti...

BioBloc: Do-It-Yourself Animals

BioBloc is an extremely cool website. The site allows you to build your own three dimensional animals from blocks and then use genetic algorithms to evolve them to learn to walk, jump, run, roll, etc. The application – made as a java applet – is very easy to use and it has a pretty good […]

Interesting Content Indicator

Every day I read a lot of news, articles and other information online. Most of it I read through a news aggregator (have tried a few, currently evaluating NewzCrawler), but I also visit a few websites regularly (that don’t have RSS feeds) and people send me interesting links via Instant Messaging...

Wetware Trendwatch: Week of December 1, 2003

This week’s Wetware related stuff in the media, including: Programming like a human or breeding your software? Walking wheelchairs (is it still a “wheel”-chair?) Animals that know their cognitive limits Memory makes Sims more fun Paraphrasing software …and more. – – – Walking is the nature’s most...

A Collaborative Approach to the Turing Test

Despite that its importance may be debated, the Turing Test at least poses a very hard and interesting computer science problem: How to build a program that can engage in a text conversation with a human being so that the human cannot tell if it is a computer or another human it is talking to? […]

The Turing Test and Extrasensory Perception

Having been interested in Artificial Intelligence for a long time, I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t read Alan Turing’s famous article: “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” until today. This is the article where the Imitation Game – later known as the Turing Test – is put forward. A...

Wetware Trendwatch: Week of November 24, 2003

This week’s Wetware related stuff in the media, including: Software that predicts customer behavior The flaws of an ever-changing web Robot receptionists The latest maps of the Internet A lobster-inspired robot …and more. – – – Yahoo! News on a test of lobster-inspired robot at Brooklyn College, ...

The Lowest Integer Number not Found on the Web

A long time ago I heard about a funny paradox. The paradox was about the lowest integer number that was not special in any way. “Special numbers” were defined by certain rules. Even numbers were special, so were prime numbers, any multiple of 5, 2 in any power and any number with two digits alike...

Wetware Trendwatch: Week of November 17, 2003

Sorry about the lack of posts this week, I’ve been pretty busy with the conference coming up. In any case, here’s this week’s Wetware related stuff in the media, including: Man vs. Machine: It’s a tie Genetic Algorithms and compiler optimizations Finally: A PDA that controls your brain Glowing fi...

More Monkey Math

The Famous Brett Watson has written a detailed and intelligent response to my entry “Breeding Shakespeare, Not Typing“. In my entry I discussed that while a thousand monkeys typing randomly might not reproduce so much as a single quote from the works of Shakespeare – ever, a thousand monkeys with...

Wetware Trendwatch: Week of November 10, 2003

This week’s Wetware related stuff in the media, including: Vatican approving genetically modified food? Robot Hall of Fame Dirty details of machine learning Swarm robots Kasparov and Fritz tied with only one game to go …and more. Slashdot discussed Carnegie Mellon’s unveiling of the Robot Hall of...

Breeding Shakespeare, Not Typing

“A thousand monkeys, typing on a thousand typewriters will eventually type the entire works of William Shakespeare.” This quote is often attributed to Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s most faithful followers in the debate that followed the publication of “Origin of Species” in 1859. Other versions of the ...

Money Flows: Bill Phillips’ Financephalograph

A couple of years ago I visited the Science Museum in London. Of all the wonderful sights there, one item keeps coming to mind: Bill Phillips’ Financephalograph; a “computer” that simulated a nation’s economics using flowing water. The Financephalograph was built in 1949 by Bill Phillips, an engi...

The Needs and Rights of Humans and Robots

In the Wetware post last week on “A New Way to Fight Blog Comment Spam” I proposed methods that would prevent robots from posting comments. Kalsey commented that there are clear indications that many spam comments are actually posted manually, rather than by robots, rendering my proposed function...

Wetware Trendwatch: Week of November 3, 2003

This week’s Wetware related stuff in the media, including: Drowning in data Call for deep-sea exploration Digital Biology meeting in Maryland Japan and Chine connected with automatic translation Google connected to your brain …and more. BBC News told us about the gigantic amount of information fl...

A New Way to Fight Blog Comment Spam

Spam in blog comments has become a problem in the blogosphere lately. Bloggers have been busy manually deleting entries, blocking IP addresses and some people have come up with comment spam filters that use keywords and such in a similar way as spam filters do. Now here’s a thought: Comments are ...

Discoveries of the Camera

I went to see a presentation by Sir David Attenborough yesterday. He’s in Iceland for a couple of days as a translation of his latest book The Life of Mammals is being published, following the success of the TV documentary series with the same title. There’s only one word for Sir David – brillian...

Evolutionary Banners

Earlier this week I stumbled upon a highly interesting research by Richard Gatarski, now assistant professor at School of Business, Stockholm University. The research, actually over 5 years old is about evolutionary banner design. That is, using genetic algorithms to design advertisement banners ...

Design with Nature as Role Model

This entry is adapted from a presentation I did at the University of Iceland today, hence all the decorations. Using nature as a role model in design is one of my biggest interests. By this notion I’m talking about how we can study nature and use its solutions, designs and methods when making our...

Wetware Trendwatch: Week of October 27, 2003

This week’s Wetware related stuff in the media, including: Computer reconstructions of butterfly wing patterns CIA’s equivalent of James Bond’s Q reveals old tests Donald Trump and Perry Barlow want brain implants This years Loebner prize awarded Using your head as speakers …and more. Nature has ...

When People are Cheaper than Technology

Technologically minded people tend to look for technological solutions to the problems they face. Naturally so, but every technological solution can be improved. There is always another solution, simpler and better than the current one. Most inventors will admit that they know a lot of ways to im...

Wetware Trendwatch: Week of October 20, 2003

As I promised, I’m starting a weekly Wetware Trendwatch, linking to Wetware related news gathered during the week. This is by no means intended to be a complete list, just a glimpse at the week in passing. So here’s this week’s batch, including: – Programmers’ view on the design of the human brai...

Translation Tools

Machine translations have been somewhat of a holy grail in AI and language technologies for decades. And for a good reason. In a world of ever increasing international business and cooperation, effective communication is crucial. Fast and reliable, automated translations would therefore be of tre...

Mapping the Networks of Business

Through the years, I’ve seen more “value chains” than I care to remember. “Where do you see yourselves in the value chain?”, is a VC question ranking up there with “Are you burning enough?” and “Would you people consider yourselves to be a - [fill in the blank: infrastructure, content-only, aggre...

Everybody Looking to Nature for Solutions

When I say I’m interested biology because I believe that looking to nature for fresh ideas in software and other technology design, most people look at me like I’m crazy – or even tell me bluntly that I am. But I’m not easily offended nor easily convinced that it’s me and not them that are […]

Animal brained robots

Do you remember the “scribbling rat neurons“, Wetware wrote about a few weeks ago? In that project, neurons from a rat’s brain were used to control a robot arm, holding a pencil. To add a little dramatic effect, the “brain” and its “body” were on two different continents. While this sort of thing...

Unified Knowledge

I had an exam in the Philosophy of Science this week, so I’m still somewhat on the philosophical note. Science has of course interested me for a long time, but I had not really taken a good look at the foundations before. This should of course be obligatory for anyone that wants to be a […]

Google miner

Google is an extremely powerful tool. Don’t worry, I’m not joining the “Google is too powerful” debate, it’s outside Wetware’s scope anyway. But Google is more than just the simple text search. One of the brilliant things here being Google’s web APIs. That’s right; Google is allowing us – the ner...

Human vs. Computer – so we haven’t lost at chess?

It came as a shock to many of us when Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in a 6 game match in 1997. A computer had beaten the best human player in this game that to many is a defining symbol of human intellect. Even though it was “only chess”, it had to be a sign of […]

Grand Challenge: Journeys in Non-Classical Computation

The fourth and last review of Wetware related Grand Challenge proposals; we take a look at the ‘Journeys in Non-Classical Computation‘ project. This proposal differs from the rest of them in that it does not propose any direct goals, but rather journeys down some of the less traveled roads of com...

Listening to the walls

BBC yesterday posted an article about blind people who restore rudimentary vision using a system that turns the input from a head mounted camera into sound. The result has enabled a blind woman to distinguish similar objects, roughly make out obstacles in her environment and detect whether the li...

Grand Challenge: Architecture of Brain and Mind

Third in Wetware’s line of Grand Challenge reviews, we take a look at the ‘Architecture of Brain and Mind project‘ proposal. This proposal, moderated by Mike Denham, Professor of Neural and Adaptive Systems at the University of Plymouth, draws from a number of similar original Grand Challenge sub...

Grand Challenge: Memories for Life

The second review of Wetware-related Grand Challenge proposals discusses the Memories for Life project, proposed by Andrew Fitzgibbon with the Robotics Research Group at the University of Oxford and Ehud Reiter lecturer in Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen. The Memories for Life pro...

Grand Challenge: In Vivo In Silico

First in the series of reviews of the Wetware-related Grand Challenges I promised; a closer look at the project In Vivo In Silico, proposed by Professor Ronan Sleep at the School of Computing Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich. “In Vivo” is a Latin term commonly used in biology and medi...

Many Grand Challenges Wetware related

The Human Genome project and the project to create a championship chess playing program are among the projects recognized by the UK Computing Research Committee (UKCRC) as so-called Grand Challenge projects. Inspired mainly by the Human Genome Project “the Committee has noted that the progress of...

Note to self: Take notes

The single thing in the philosophy of mind that has surprised me the most is the importance of human language in thinking. Its importance in communication is of course quite obvious, but in the inner language we use to “talk to ourselves” its role is more open to dispute. I won’t go too far into […]

Man or a mouse

Few things amuse me more than pointing out to people how predictable we humans are. Our imprinted view of ourselves as almost not a part of the animal kingdom is of course very arrogant. Our animal-like behavior is however often quite apparent and one of the best examples is in crowd movement. Pi...

Shark Illustrated: Swimsuit Edition

At the Sydney Olympics in 2000, 28 of 33 Olympic Gold Medals were earned in Speedo Fastskin, a swimsuit overall that reduces water’s drag on the swimmer by 3%. The overalls lowered swimming times of professional swimmers by some 7.5%. The suit’s fluid dynamics are based on sharks’ skin, a design ...

Gathering common sense

As stated in the glossary, one of the problems in Artificial Intelligence is software’s lack of common-sense knowledge about the world. Of course AI is a wide field and lack of common sense does not hurt Deep Blue’s chess playing abilities or the capabilities of an OCR program to recognize charac...

Brain-Machine Interfaces – what? – when?

DARPA, US Department of Defense research arm, has for quite some time been running a Brain Machine Interface Program. This project first caught my attention when Technology Review wrote about Mind-Machine merger in May (subscription is required to read the full article). Brain Machine Interfaces ...

“Female” robots

Australian robotic software firm Kadence Photonics has made the world’s first “female” robots. Peter Hill, the founder of Kadence says that after seeing a TV program about the female brain he decided the day after that his line of robots should be based on some of its merits. The female robots di...

And there was a map…

Collective intellect (or stupidity) has always fascinated me and the Web allows curious people to test many such concepts with ease. Such interest was in part the reason for making my Are you random? test. Now, Douwe Osinga has come up with a brilliant collective mind project, where Internet user...

Genetic methods exploit environment’s “flaws”

Browsing through material on genetic computer methods I have on several occasions encountered a very interesting phenomenon – genetic methods that exploit flaws in their environment to help achieving their goals. Using genetic methods, people try to “breed” software that best meets the task that ...

Robosnail and mimcking of animal locomotion

MIT’s Fluid Dynamics Lab seems to be on a biomimicry roll. I recently wrote about the robostrider. Now it is the robosnail that mimics the locomotion of snails. Their 3-link swimmer is actually very interesting as well, but has yet to receive its 15 minutes of media-fame like its siblings. This k...

Artistic brain or brainless artists?

A collaboration art project between the Potter Lab at Georgia Tech and SymbioticA Research Group recently grabbed the attention of the likes of Nature and Wired. The project is called MEART (official site). In short it is a robot arm that draws pencil drawings on paper, controlled by real living ...

Water striders mimicked

Researchers at MIT have solved the mystery of how the insects known as water striders move across water’s surface. While it is no mystery how they manage to stay afloat (many of us have surely done experiments with water’s surface tension), previous theories on how they manage to move on the surf...

DNA plays Tic-Tac-Toe

Technology Review recently had an article on a project named MAYA where DNA has been “programmed” to play the game of tic-tac-toe. Up until now, most DNA computing projects have been about throwing DNA at solving really large problems, such as the travelling salesman problem or similar tasks. Whi...

Snake-like robot uses genetic algorithms to make up for injury

New Scientist recently reported on a snake-like robot that uses genetic algorithms to learn how to move. If a part of the robot is damaged, the GA process will find a new method to move about, if the damage is not too severe for it to be able to move at all. This seems like […]