Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Bilski v. Kappos, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) plans to release new guidance as to which patent applications will be accepted, and which will not. As part of this process, they are seeking input from the public about how that guidance should be structured. The following [...]

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A guiding principle in information technology has been to enable people to perform tasks at the “speed of thought”. The goal is not just to make people more efficient in our use of technology, but to remove the delays and distractions that make us focus on the technology rather than the tasks themselves. For example, [...]

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In 2007, I persuaded MIT graduate students Michael Bernstein and Robin Stewart (who was interning at Endeca that summer) to help organize the first Workshop on Human-Computer Information and Information Retrieval (HCIR 2007), which we held at MIT and Endeca. Its success convinced us to keep going, and we enjoyed record attendance at this year’s HCIR [...]

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Image recognition is one of those problems that has presented long-standing challenges to computer scientists, despite being taken for granted by science fiction writers. Google Goggles represents one of the most audacious efforts to implement image recognition on on a massive scale. Tonight, I had the pleasure of watching my colleague, David Petrou, present a [...]

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One of the perks of blogging is that publishers sometimes send me review copies of new books. I couldn’t help but be curious about a book entitled “The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships“–especially when principal author Clifford Nass is the director of the Communications between Humans and Interactive [...]

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