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'Scientist Yaneer Bar-Yam has developed a computational model of the economy that uses virtual actors to populate the world, instead of digital representations of specific individuals, companies, and brokers, enabling researchers to change how the actors behave and study how those changes affect the economic ecosystem. Bar-Yam says the principle behind the model is that humans regularly solve problems by imaging how certain behaviors will affect specific outcomes, but in a complex system such as the economy, which can be affected by fear, rumors, and misinformation, the ability to forecast accurately is severely reduced. He wanted to understand why the economy was so turbulent, and his model provides a unique explanation for the instability.'
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'Microsoft's augmented reality software analyzes scenes from a camera and matches those images to images from a database to overlay supplementary information on the display. Microsoft researchers say that a smartphone with augmented reality would enable engineers to overlay plans for pipes on images of city streets, or allow users to see a bus route and estimate when the next bus is due at a certain stop. Augmented reality has been in development for more than a decade, but only recently has the computing power and hardware of smartphones become sophisticated enough to handle the technology.'
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'The Washington University in St. Louis computer science department is using a new "active learning" approach to teach undergraduate students in an effort to better prepare them for the work place. Active learning uses a learning-laboratory-based tutorial teaching concept in which students are encouraged to get out of their seats, move around, and interact with classmates. "At the heart of active learning is the hallmark of interactive face time and students taking a more active role and not just repeating what a professor wants to hear," says Washington professor Cindy Grimm. "We think it provides a motivation to learn things that they have to know to do something that they really want to do."'
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'4D Immersive Holographic Spaces will be joint multi-view multimedia-rich spaces where people can immerse themselves in their physical full body size into a joint cyber-physical space with other people, and execute physical activities (e.g., physiotherapy rehabilitation), walk around people and observe detailed full-body social behaviors and communication cues of people in real-time, as if they were co-located in the same room, even though they are geographically distributed and thousands of miles apart. The impact of such systems would be dramatic, contributing to the increase of innovative economic opportunities, to the “green energy” efforts, and to the decrease of gap between regions of “have” and “have-not” experts. With respect to innovation leadership, venture capitalists will for the first time be able to interact with entrepreneurs located thousands of miles away as if they were next door.'
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"Web Science acknowledges that the World Wide Web does not exist without the participation of people and organizations; indeed significant proportions of people’s lives are now spent on-line in many countries. The conference will therefore address major issues of people’s behaviour and motivation on-line, their ability to trust websites or agents, their security and privacy. Crucially: how can the design of the Web of the future ensure that a system on which - as Tim Berners-Lee put it – ‘democracy and commerce depends remains stable and pro-human’?"
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'Google’s Deep Web search strategy involves sending out a program to analyze the contents of every database it encounters. For example, if the search engine finds a page with a form related to fine art, it starts guessing likely search terms — “Rembrandt,” “Picasso,” “Vermeer” and so on — until one of those terms returns a match. The search engine then analyzes the results and develops a predictive model of what the database contains.'