Yearly Archives: 2004

Brain-computer direct interface

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100 electrodes implanted directly into the motor cortex of a 24-year-old quadriplegic man allows him to control computer directly and hence play videogames and check email. Read the article in Nature . I would be interested in reading the explanation of the man on how he learnt to control the computer and how he feels in controlling it. The similar questions are: “how have you learnt to move your finger?” and “how do you feel when you move a finger?”. It is something it is difficult (or impossible?) to explain, it just seems natural. I may guess it is the same for the man and his brain control on the computer. Unluckly the article does not analyze this. (found via BoingBoing)

Enormous P2P Network by Google

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When millions of users will have Desktop.google.com installed, Google will simply release a new version in which the user can check a box and say “Share the files in my disk” (maybe only files in a certain directory). This will create in a second an enormous P2P (peer-to-peer) network, in which you can search for files directly on other users’ disks. What do you think? Make sense?
UPDATE: If I were Google, I let users choose also “share your files only with your friends on Orkut”. In this way Orkut would becoma a uber-useful network (now is a bit pointless), and Google Corporation will have all the worlds users for all the services. And increase what it knows.

What Google knows about you

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Just few days ago I was commenting on new google features and now we have another one: Desktop.google.com. It allows to index and search every file stored in your filesystem, every site in your Internet Explorer cache, every email in your Outlook, every chat/instant message in your AOL. (It is only for Window$ so I have no way to try it.)
This reminded me of a post of Alf Eaton:Things Google knows about you. The list (now increased) is pretty scary.
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Sharing research papers

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Citeseer is less useful today than how it was 2 years ago. It seems they stop the crawling looking for papers. [I have a project about adding “web of trust” to citeseer so that every user can express a degree of interest in another users’ kept bibliography) but it seems I never have the time to seriously start it.] Anyway this post is to cite 2 interesting related projects: LionShare and Eprints … (read below for links and details)
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Google addons

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Google print, Google SMS, Google helps China censorships.
The Google Italian version is now offering: maps (just search for an Italian city, such as Bologna), trains timetables (just search for two Italian cities, such as bologna roma), UPS packets monitoring (just enter an UPS code, such as 1Z1234567891234567). [found via Pandemia]
For the train timetable, Google.it doesn’t use the Italian Trenitalia but the German reiseauskunft. Well, I guess they are more reliable (both as train service and Internet site).
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Past week in Fribourg

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I’ve spent the past week (21-24/10/2004) in Fribourg (Switzerland) working and discussing with Hassan Masum. I was guest of the Theoretical Physics Department of the University of Fribourg, precisely of the Interdisciplinary group leaded by Prof. Zhang. They apply methods and tools of Theoretical Physics (Statistical Mechanics, Probability Calculus ecc.) to other fields of research, namely economics, game theory, sociology or biology.
Hassan and Prof. Zhang are writing a book on Reputation Society. To get an idea of the topics you might want to have a look at their Manifesto for the Reputation Society.
We had 4 days of very interesting discussions. Perhaps they were not very focused (this is typical of me, I must admit) but we were free to jump from future economics systems to copyright and intellectual property issues, from emergent democracy to computation trust systems, from collaborative filtering to religion, from recommender systems to privacy, from … We were annotating issues in this wiki page and from it you can have an idea of the scope of our discussions.
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FOAF file updated

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I updated my FOAF file based on the new <foaf:knows> relationships I collected at the FOAF workshop. I took as an example the perfect Morten’s FOAF file.
Want to know if you are one of my friends? Check my FOAF file or analyze it via Semaview applet or via Foafspace (Foafspace graph applet does not work in my Firefox) or via FoafExplorer or via eikeon web view. Are there other tools that render a FOAF file?
I have encoded in it also some trust relationships and submitted to Trust and Reputation in Web Based Social Networks project. Why don’t you do the same?

When computers will beat humans … at football?

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I spent the entire afternoon looking at the chess match between DeepJunior (a program) and Michele Godena (better Italian human at chess) organized in my institute. The computer played white, was in a better position throught the all game and eventually won. I had some hate feelings against the computer and I think I’d define these feelings as irrational but still I was hating the computer. Anyway, the scary thought that arised to my mind was: “how long before computers (robots) will beat humans in the world football championship?” (the real one, the one of Ronaldo and Zidane).