IBM animates sign language avatar
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A group of students working for IBM develops technology that automatically converts the spoken word in British Sign Language.
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that it has made available an advanced software technology that can help predict the transmission of diseases across countries and around the globe to the open source community.
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InfoWorld - Seeking to assist software developers coping with many languages, IBM plans to offer its Safari technology to the Eclipse open source community, an IBM official said at the EclipseCon 2007 conference on Thursday.
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The software, developed by IBM&#39;s new Sensors and Actuators business unit, is designed to help businesses collect and act on data from RFID and other sensor-based technology.
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Movable parts in a silicone face enable 'emotional' response to key words.
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Honda Motor Co., with help from partner IBM Corp., is preparing to introduce an improved speech-recognition system that will allow drivers to get voice navigation guidance without having to manually punch in any information or take their eyes off the road to read a computer screen.
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Photorealistic 3-D avatars will play in a virtual garage during CEO Paul Otellini's presentation at International CES.
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(InfoWorld) - Forget Web service orchestration: IBM is getting into something a lot more fun. The company has worked with Japanese karaoke equipment maker XingÂ to develop a new type of wireless karaoke controller. People in bars and restaurants can use the controller to scroll through thousands of songs listed by artist, song or category, and choose the one they want by touching the screen, IBM said. The device sends the information over a Wi-Fi network to Xing's "karaoke command center," which cues up the song. Most karaoke systems today require people to leaf through a big catalog of songs and then type a corresponding number into a device. That can be difficult in a dark and crowded bar, especially after a second drink. The new controller comes in two models: the Kyoku-NAVI II and Kyoku-NAVI S. It is shock-proof and water-resistant, and can also be used to place food and drink orders. They'll be on sale in Japan starting in early November, IBM said. Pricing hasn't been announced. IBM has worked with Xing (pronounced ex-sing) on karaoke products for about two years, and this is the second set of controllers they've designed together, said June Namioka, an IBM spokeswoman in Japan. Xing approached IBM for the joint project because it has a long history designing portable products in Japan, including its ThinkPad notebooks, now owned by Lenovo, Namioka said. The storage and search capabilities come from IBM's DB2 Everyplace, a version of its database designed to be embedded in devices. The controllers are for use with two new Karaoke centers announced by Xing last month. Xing, a subsidiary of Brother Industries, has no plans to sell the devices outside of Japan, Namioka said. They will be sold by Xing, and not by IBM, she emphasized. "We're not getting into the karaoke market."
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Once developers sink their teeth into Core Animation, a powerful developer's toolkit embedded in the new Mac OS, we'll likely enter an advanced era of user interface design. Commentary by Leander Kahney.
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My avatar's more militant than your avatar IBM's Italian workforce is set to strike in Second Life tomorrow (27 September).â¦
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Ruby on Rails on Rails on Rails on Rails We'll hand it to IBM's researchers. They think big - really big. Like holy-crap-what-have-you-done big.â¦
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A highly functional bionic hand which was invented by a Scottish NHS worker has gone on the market.
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The Universal Home Application Programmer Interface Forum is working on a specification for analog and digital television designed to enable the creation of middleware and application software
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IBM Corp is lifting the covers on an experimental enterprise mashup technology built around a Wiki engine, and offering it on a hosted basis on its alphaWorks developer site.
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(InfoWorld) - When Massachusetts' government decided to use Open Document Format (ODF) as the default document file format throughout its agencies, a key concern was that ODF would not allow the visually impaired to use assistive computer technologies. On Wednesday, IBM Corp. said it has helped solve that problem by developing technology that will allow applications based on ODF to better communicate with products used by the blind to access visual information on computer screens. Through Project Missouri, IBM developed application programming interfaces, (APIs) collectively called iAccessible2. These APIs will make it easy for visuals in applications based on ODF and other Web technologies to be interpreted by screen readers that reproduce that information verbally, IBM said. IBM spokesman Ari Fishkind said that in the past it has been hard for screen-reading technology to keep up with the advent of cutting-edge development and file formats such as ODF, AJAX (asynchronous Javascript and XML) and DHTML (dynamic hypertext markup language). The latter two technologies allow increasingly complex visuals to be rendered in Web browsers, and those are difficult to translate for screen readers, he said. iAccessible2 not only will help ODF communicate better with screen readers that assist blind computer users, but it will also allow charts, pictures and other visuals based on AJAX and DHTML to be discerned by the visually impaired through those readers. "It's like a universal decoder ring," he said of iAccessible2. The technology is based on interfaces IBM originally developed with Sun Microsystems Inc. to make programs on Java and Linux platforms accessible to the blind. IBM has donated its work in Project Missouri -- so named because Missouri is called the "Show Me" state -- to the Free Standards Group, a nonprofit group that promotes open-source software. That organization will work on the technology and maintain it as an open standard so anyone can use it, IBM said. Other companies working on the development of iAccessible2 include Sun, Oracle Corp. and SAP AG. Mozilla Corp. also intends to integrate iAccessible2 into its open-source Firefox Web browser, Fishkind added. ODF has been approved as an international standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and is currently in competition with Microsoft's Open XML file format to become the industry's default file format for documents. Open XML is the basis of Microsoft's proprietary Office 2007 productivity suite that also recently was approved by the ISO as a standard. Companies such as IBM, Sun and others are promoting the use of ODF against Microsoft's technology, while others will support both ODF and Open XML just to be on the safe side, in case both are widely adopted. The rivalry between ODF and Open XML heated up last year when Massachusetts put forth a proposal to change its default file format to ODF for all of its state agencies, which would mean they would have to stop using Microsoft Office. This eventually led Microsoft to submit Open XML as a standard as ODF was already going through that process. Increasingly, government agencies are moving their IT platforms to technologies that are considered standard throughout the industry, forgoing some technologies that are seen as proprietary.
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IBM has contributed speech technology to the Apache Software Foundation. By releasing its source code IBM hopes to bring a quick end to battles over competing, proprietary standards; solidifying the industry behind VoiceXML.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM and Cisco Systems have "soft launched" an IPTV (Internet Protocol TV) with HD, video on demand, and other capabilities at a demonstration center at the IBM Industrial Solutions Center in La Gaude, outside Nice, France. The demo facility, aimed at telecommunications and cable TV operators and other network operators, such as municipal fiber networks and power utilities, was opened Monday, ahead of Cisco's European-wide networkers event in Cannes. Olli Patja, an IBM Finland executive, described the modular IPTV offering during an unscheduled presentation at an all-day event for IBM and Cisco customers from the Nordic region and Baltic States. The package from IBM and Cisco will consist of six modules: the "head end" feeding digital TV and HDTV satellite signals into the network supplied by Cisco subsidiary Scientific-Atlanta; "conditional access" provided by Verimatrix and IBM; video on demand by Kasenna and IBM; the "core network" by Cisco; the "metro" (citywide or district-wide) network by Cisco, and the access or "last mile" DSL or fiber to the home from Cisco. The IPTV package will be officially launched in March, so IBM and Cisco officials were reluctant to be quoted by name regarding details. However, Henning Glegg-Sorensen, manager of IBM's Nordic Network Services said it would be fair to describe the opening of the demo facility as comparable to the distribution of beta software to testers and selected customers. The IPTV package, which can be integrated piecemeal with some existing cable and IPTV services, is aimed as an end-to-end product at operators who are upgrading or switching their networks to IP-based platforms. "This can be a major revenue source resulting from such an upgrade if you can deliver HDTV to households who are buying ever-cheaper flat TVs that are HD ready and capable," said one IBM executive. The demo center, when fully functional, will show how the package works during normal operations and under various sets of extraordinary conditions of concern to potential customers, such as fiber breaks, network congestion, and various critical equipment and software failures. IBM and Cisco representatives said reliability will be a key selling point as a study in Norway showed that breaks in cable TV broadcasts generated heavy complaint traffic to call centers much faster than electric power failures or interruptions of Internet service. The IPTV package to be presented in March is not the first time IBM has been involved in IPTV in Europe. In 2005, local IBM officials in Latvia together with Ericsson presented an IPTV offering at about the time the incumbent national telco Lattelecom was examining IPTV. Lattelecom later launched its own service based on Microsoft software and a high-speed ADSL2+ network.