Blog: Microsoft to developers - Here's how touch is supposed to work

Microsoft to developers - Here's how touch is supposed to work

By Adrian Kingsley-Hughes | February 23, 2012, 12:34am PST

Summary: Good news for users … unless they’re a south paw.

Microsoft has released a document that tells developers how touch should work for Metro UI apps on Windows 8 systems.

While a lot of what’s in the four-page PDF document is common sense, there’s also some interesting research contained in the document. For example, the document highlights the best areas on a tablet screen for interaction and reading:

Blog: IBM Says Future Computers Will Be Constant Learners

IBM Says Future Computers Will Be Constant Learners
IDG News Service (02/17/12) Joab Jackson

Tomorrow's computers will constantly improve their understanding of the data they work with, which will help them provide users with more appropriate information, predicts IBM fellow David Ferrucci, who led the development of IBM's Watson artificial intelligence technology. Computers in the future "will not necessarily require us to sit down and explicitly program them, but through continuous interaction with humans they will start to understand the kind of data and the kind of computation we need," according to Ferrucci. He says the key to the Watson technology is that it queries both itself and its users for feedback on its answers. "As you use the system, it will follow up with you and ask you questions that will help improve its confidence of its answer," Ferrucci notes. IBM is now working with Columbia University researchers to adapt Watson so it can offer medical diagnosis and treatment. Watson could serve as a diagnostic assistant and offer treatment plans, says Columbia professor Herbert Chase. Watson also could find clinical trials for the patient to participate in. "Watson has bridged the information gap, and its potential for improving health care and reducing costs is immense," Chase says.

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Blog: Weave Open Source Data Visualization Offers Power, Flexibility

Weave Open Source Data Visualization Offers Power, Flexibility
Computerworld (02/08/12) Sharon Machlis

The open source Weave project is a platform designed to make it easier for government agencies, nonprofits, and corporate users to offer the public a way to analyze data. The platform enables users to simultaneously highlight items on multiple visualizations, including map, map legend, bar chart, and scatter plot. The benefits of Weave's interactivity go beyond the visual appeal of selecting an area on a chart and seeing matches highlighted on a map, notes Connecticut Data Collaborative project coordinator James Farnam. Weave aims to help organizations democratize data visualization tools, creating a way for anyone interested in a topic to explore and analyze information about it, instead of leaving the task solely to computer and data specialists, says Georges G. Grinstein, director of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell's Institute for Visualization and Perception Research, which created Weave. "Now [you're] engaging the public in a dialog with the data," Grinstein says. "That's why Weave is open source and free." Weave is so powerful that one of the challenges of implementing it is how to narrow down its offerings so that end users would not be overwhelmed with too many options, says the Metropolitan Area Planning Council's Holly St. Clair.

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