Monday, October 31, 2011

Google Translate It already speaks 57 languages as well as a 10-year-old. How good can it get? By Jeremy Kingsley

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/10/google_translate_will_google_s_computers_understand_languages_be.single.html
"A computer that translates "natural language" is the holy grail of artificial intelligence—language being so integral to our intelligence and to our humanness that to crack it would be to achieve artificial consciousness itself. But until relatively recently, attempts at it have mostly sucked. They’ve tended to mix the words of one language with the grammar of the other, getting both wrong in the process. Mostly, this is the fault of literal translation—the kind of process that translates kindergarten as children garden. Newer methods—dominated by Google—turn the problem around: Using data, statistics, and brute force, they succeed in part by their refusal to "deconstruct" language and teach meaning to computers in the traditional way."

Saturday, July 30, 2011

Doug Cutting talks about Hadoop, and open source | ITworld

Doug Cutting talks about Hadoop, and open source | ITworld: "Doug Cutting has changed the way that IT does Big Data. Hadoop, the Open Source project he started, has made it so that any company with access to a rack of commodity PCs and a reasonable amount of programming skill can do the type of large scale data analysis work that was previously done only on supercomputers. Enterprises such as Amazon, eBay, Facebook and IBM, all the way to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors are taking advantage of tremendous value offered by this Open Source hit. Hadoop is a game changer."

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Why Harry Potter's Latest Trick Is to Speak a Syrian Dialect - WSJ.com

Why Harry Potter's Latest Trick Is to Speak a Syrian Dialect - WSJ.com: "DUBAI, United Arab Emirates—When Khulud Abu-Homos, a television producer at OSN network here, decided to dub the Harry Potter movies into Arabic for distribution in the Middle East, she faced a quandary: which Arabic?

The Arab world, it turns out, isn't one world at all. It's a collection of overlapping worlds that harbor a dizzying array of diverse people, cultures and language. The rest of the world noticed this recently in the varied ways the Arab Spring democracy movements have played out."

Monday, July 18, 2011

From Technologist to Philosopher - Manage Your Career - The Chronicle of Higher Education

From Technologist to Philosopher - Manage Your Career - The Chronicle of Higher Education: "Getting a humanities Ph.D. is the most deterministic path you can find to becoming exceptional in the industry. It is no longer just engineers who dominate our technology leadership, because it is no longer the case that computers are so mysterious that only engineers can understand what they are capable of. There is an industrywide shift toward more 'product thinking' in leadership—leaders who understand the social and cultural contexts in which our technologies are deployed.

Products must appeal to human beings, and a rigorously cultivated humanistic sensibility is a valued asset for this challenge. That is perhaps why a technology leader of the highest status—Steve Jobs—recently credited an appreciation for the liberal arts as key to his company's tremendous success with their various i-gadgets.

It is a convenient truth: You go into the humanities to pursue your intellectual passion; and it just so happens, as a by-product, that you emerge as a desired commodity for industry. Such is the halo of human flourishing."

Thursday, May 12, 2011

Business, software and languages...

class-built-apps-fortunes-nytimes: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance: "After a few false starts, he created an app that let people send points and 'kisses' to friends. It struggled until Mr. Matei, who speaks several languages, translated the app. The next day, traffic jumped fivefold. He added games, and employees, and the app became one of the most popular Facebook programs in Europe. In late 2009, he sold to Zynga for an undisclosed sum."

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

What the E.C. Won’t See – Systran Introduces MT for European Commission Corpus - GLG News

What the E.C. Won’t See – Systran Introduces MT for European Commission Corpus - GLG News: "What does this prototype mean for the market? As we have note in earlier posts, the rules-based MT engines have been adding statistical modules to offer hybrid solutions, supporting application programming interfaces, and improving their user interfaces. What Systran has done with this release is demonstrate both its new engine’s ability to be tuned to specific domains and its SaaS credentials, although the first instance won’t get the usage that it might have seen prior to December 16th, 2010. In any case, this new Systran prototype shows that there is plenty of room for competition and innovation in the MT sector."