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So after all that you are probably asking, “What is SimpleCV?” It is an open source computer vision framework that lowers the barriers to entry for people to learn, develop, and use it across the globe. Currently there are a few open source vision system libraries in existence, but the downside to these is you have to be quite the domain expert and knowledgeable with vision systems as well as know cryptic programming languages like C. Where SimpleCV is different, is it is “simple”. It has been designed with a web browser interface, which is familiar to Internet users everywhere. It will talk to your webcam (which most computers and smart phones have built in) automatically. It works cross platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc). It uses the programming language Python rather than C to greatly lower the learning curve of the software. It sacrifices some complexity for simplicity, which is needed for mass adoption of any type of new technology.

Researchers at MIT's Object Based Media Group (OBMG), led by professor Michael Bove, have developed a 3D hologram using the Xbox Kinect and a laptop. Three GPUs on a graphic card are used to generate diffraction patterns that produce a Star-Wars-Style hologram at 15 frames per second. More information is available in a PopSci web article.

German researchers have built an anthropomorphic robot hand that can endure collisions with hard objects and even strikes from a hammer without breaking into pieces. In designing the new hand system, researchers at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, part of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), focused on robustness. They may have just built the toughest robot hand yet. The DLR hand has the shape and size of a human hand, with five articulated fingers powered by a web of 38 tendons, each connected to an individual motor on the forearm.

The vigilante-style statement of dissent called Operation Payback is coming to an end. Loosely organized by anonymous supporters of Wikileaks, the aim of Operation Payback was to target companies and organizations that dropped support for Wikileaks - or even opposed the group's actions - by attacking their public-facing Web infrastructure. Using a software program called LOIC, which automates DDoS attacks (a type of Web-based attack that can take sites offline), the supporters targeted high-profile Websites like Visa and MasterCard, taking them offline briefly during the first stages of what later became a full-on cyberwar. More recently, and with less success, the attackers went after PayPal and Amazon, too.

WebP is a method of lossy compression that can be used on photographic images. WebP offers compression that has shown 39.8% more byte-size efficiency than JPEG for the same quality in a large scale study of 900,000 images on the Web. The degree of compression is adjustable so a user can choose the trade-off between file size and image quality.

We had to cover monads eventually, and there are many great monad tutorials out there (see, for example, here: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Tutorials#Using_monads). In fact, there are web resources concerned solely with organizing the many monad tutorials available in the wild, and developing new monad tutorials seems to be a popular sport in the Haskell community.Today, Ralf Lämmel's lecture goes back to the roots, essentially revisiting Wadler's "The essence of functional programming"—the 1992 paper that discovered monads and popularized their use in functional programming. Ralf Lämmel's lecture and accompanying code distribution show Wadler's seminal insight: those original scenarios and observations still make sense today. Indeed, Simon Marlow (a Haskell/GHC high priest @ MSR Cambridge) recently noted: "it's still the best monad tutorial" (see http://twitter.com/simonmar/status/21397398061).

The MATLAB team at MathWorks tested performance scaling of the backslash ("\") matrix division operator to solve for x in the equation A*x = b. In their testing, matrix A occupies far more memory (290 GB) than is available in a single high-end desktop machine—typically a quad core processor with 4-8 GB of RAM, supplying approximately 20 Gigaflops. Therefore, they spread the calculation across machines. In order to solve linear systems of equations they need to be able to access all of the elements of the array even when the array is spread across multiple machines. This problem requires significant amounts of network communication, memory access, and CPU power. They scaled up to a cluster in EC2, giving them the ability to work with larger arrays and to perform calculations at up to 1.3 Teraflops, a 60X improvement. They were able to do this without making any changes to the application code. Here's a graph showing the near-linear scalability of an EC2 cluster across a range of matrix sizes with corresponding increases in cluster size for MATLAB's parallel backslash operator:

As we reported last week, search engine Cuil was unceremoniously shut down on Thursday, and there were reports that employees were told to go home and forget about getting paid. New sources tells us that Cuil was in the final stages of an acquisition as of last Wednesday, and everything was in place except the final signatures. Then the deal fell apart for some reason. Or put another way, Cuil found one last way to fail.

What made me fall of my chair is the methodology/architecture part of this statement. It’s hard enough (but doable) to use RDF to map philosophically similar APIs. It’s a non-starter to use it to bridge architectural and methodological differences. I have spent a fair amount of time looking at Semantic Web technologies in the context of modeling IT systems (see the “semantic tech” category of this blog). While I think they would be a great foundation I don’t see them ever coming anywhere near what Reuven describes.

The R programming language was featured about a year ago in a New York Times article (http://bit.ly/iaqQ). I've been an R user since 2000, so I've collected some resources for people who want to get started with R.   The first place to start is the R Project web site at http://www.r-project.org/. Next, you'll actually want to install R itself. There are several options, depending on your environment.

Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule. And it’s the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they’re rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen).

Researchers at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research are working on a new mathematical model to mimic the human brain's ability to identify objects. The model can predict human performance on certain visual-perception tasks suggesting it’s a good indication of what's actually happening in the brain. Researchers are hoping the new findings will make their way into future object-recognition systems for automation, mobile robotics, and other applications.

A new network design that avoids the need to convert optical signals into electrical ones could boost capacity while reducing power consumption.

“CMS” stands for Compact Muon Solenoid, a general-purpose particle physics detector built on the Large Hadron Collider. The CMS project posted a few comics which provide a nice, simple (if somewhat cheesy) explanation of what the CMS/LHC does. The LHC generates massive amounts of data of all different varieties, which is distributed across a worldwide grid. It sends status messages to some of the computers, job monitoring info to other computers, bookkeeping info still elsewhere, and so on. This means that each location has specialized queries it can do on the data it has, but up until now it’s been very difficult to query across the whole grid. Enter the Data Aggregation System, designed to allow anything to be queried across all of the machines.

In separate keynote addresses in Silicon Valley, two Internet pioneers gave different takes on the future of the network of networks Monday (May 24). Vint Cerf, co-developer of the Net's TCP/IP protocol, shared his thoughts with developers of the smart electric grid, seen as a massive embedded extension to the Internet. Larry Roberts, who helped launch the forerunner of the Internet, explained his ideas for remedying the growing congestion that plagues the Web today. Smart grid developers can learn from the lessons of the Internet, Cerf told attendees at Connectivity Week here. They should follow the model of the Net in creating a layered architecture with plenty of room for flexibility in areas that cannot be anticipated today, he said in a keynote at Connectivity Week.

With the GA release of Scala 2.8 getting very close, David Pollak, the creator of the Scala-based web framework: Lift, has announced a Scala community initiative that  will have an equally large impact on Scala developers.  The Fresh Scala Initiative aims to address the issue of version fragility in the ecosystem.  You may have heard that Scala 2.8 is not binary compatible with the 2.7 branch.  Therefore, some community members have banded together to maintain a repository and provide nightly builds of popular Scala library collections to build against Scala 2.8.  

Building a dynamic PHP site requires you to understand how CRUD (create, read, update, delete) functions work. There are a variety of ways to implement these functions include databases, and most commonly through mySQL.  With these functions you can add new entries to the database (registration), view existing entries (retrieve users or fields), update the entries to your table or delete users (who may unsubscribe or permanently delete their accounts.) For a user account based sites, these functions are essential for keeping your user and information database up to date.

The World Wide Web Consortium has launched a new specification called "XProc," which provides a standard framework for composing XML processes.  It streamlines the automation, sequencing, and management of complex XML processes, the standards body said.  The "XML Pipeline Language" spec was developed to provide a framework for managing enterprise-level business processes.

Can we use HTML5 today? What can we do with it? Is it really going to kill Flash? You must have noticed a gradual increase in the frequency of these and similar questions being asked, debated and even answered. In my opinion, you must answer such fundamental questions yourself.