links for 2008-11-23

• Future Phones to Read Your Voice, Gestures | Gadget Lab from Wired.com
  'In the future, the buttons on cell phones and portable devices may be replaced with features that respond to voice commands and gestures. Such interfaces would enable users to speak to their phones instead of typing, pointing with a finger instead of clicking a button, and gesturing instead of touching.'
  (tags: hci scenario+planning haptic+interface)
• RIT|The Next Step in Health Care: Telemedicine
  'Rochester Institute of Technology is collaborating with a team led by the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine that recently tested technology, which allows for the transmission of high quality, real time video to multiple locations. Using a secure, high-speed network, an endoscopic surgery at the University of Puerto Rico was broadcast to multiple locations in the United States. The experiment also included a multipoint videoconference that was connected to the video stream, allowing for live interaction between participants.'
  (tags: telepresence telemedicine)
• IBM Tries to Bring Brain Power to Computers - PC World
  'The researchers want to put brain-related senses like perception and interaction into hardware and software so that computers are able to process and understand the data quicker while consuming less power, said Dharmendra Modha, a researcher at IBM. The researchers are bringing the neuroscience, nanotechnology and supercomputing fields together in an effort to create the new computing platform, he said.'
  (tags: information+science society+and+culture hci)
• Technology Review: How Google's Ear Hears
  'If you own an iPhone, you can now be part of one of the most ambitious speech-recognition experiments ever launched. On Monday, Google announced that it had added voice search to its iPhone mobile application, allowing people to speak search terms into their phones and view the results on the screen.'
  (tags: cognition hci search)
• Nov. 19: Carnegie Mellon Theory of Visual Computation Reveals How Brain Makes Sense of Natural Scenes - Carnegie Mellon University
  'Computational neuroscientists at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a computational model that provides insight into the function of the brain's visual cortex and the information processing that enables people to perceive contours and surfaces, and understand what they see in the world around them.'
  (tags: cognition hci visualization)
• A future without programming | InfoWorld | Analysis | 2008-11-20 | By Tom Kaneshige
  "I was showing my business partner some of this stuff the other day and he turned to me and asked, 'How do traditional developers stay in business?'" Smith says. "It's such a game changer. I think it turns developers from wizards who read the magic book and know the syntax into business analysts who understand the processes and goals of what they're trying to achieve."
  (tags: programming Web2.0)