Category: computing (page 11 of 11)

28: Spying for Metaphor

21 June 2011 / / Comments Off on 28: Spying for Metaphor

The US intelligence agency IARPA is putting a heavy research focus, not into lie detection or speech recognition, but metaphor.

That’s right, the figure of speech where you describe something as something else. But why would that be useful for …

25: The Most Human Human (featuring Brian Christian)

31 May 2011 / / Comments Off on 25: The Most Human Human (featuring Brian Christian)

Would you mistake a computer for a human?

That’s the basis of the Turing Test, a version of which plays out every year in the form of the Loebner Prize. Programmers bring their best work, and there’s a control group …

24: Planking

24 May 2011 / / Comments Off on 24: Planking

Do you plank?

Have you ever taken part in a flash mob, or been rickrolled?

Even if you haven’t, you may have wondered how the names for these and other Internet-related crazes got started.

Well, linguist Daniel Midgley is going …

18: App

5 April 2011 / / Comments Off on 18: App

Apple has apps. It even has an App Store.

But now Microsoft has challenged Apple’s attempt to trademark “App Store”, and Amazon wants to have its own Appstore. Is that allowed? Companies get to trademark words and terms they invent, …

15: Baby Talk

15 March 2011 / / Comments Off on 15: Baby Talk

When MIT scientist Deb Roy’s first child was born, he did what any proud father would do: he rigged his house up with cameras and microphones to capture every phase of his child’s language development.

What are we learning about …

10: Google and Bing

8 February 2011 / / Comments Off on 10: Google and Bing

The search engine giants are in the news.

Google is alleging that Microsoft’s Bing is copying its results. How do they know? And how does a search engine work anyway?

Linguist Daniel Midgley makes sense of the technology on this …

7: Watson

18 January 2011 / / Comments Off on 7: Watson

Last week, a computer system named Watson bested two human champions in a practice round of the trivia game Jeopardy!

Computers have beaten humans in chess before, but question answering is even more difficult because it involves the use …

1: Bots

23 November 2010 / / Comments Off on 1: Bots

Programmer Nigel Leck has written a program that detects arguments against climate change on Twitter, and automatically responds with appropriate information.

The climate deniers are often unaware that they’re not dealing with a human. This is just the latest in …

Newer posts »

© 2025 Talk the Talk

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑