Does it make toast?

One researcher who had just joined our wearables group said he wanted to design a “general purpose wearable.” I asked him “does it make toast?” He looked at me a little perplexed and said no, of course it doesn’t. “Then it isn’t really general purpose,” I responded. “Now, what’s the set of activities that you really intend for it to be used for, so we can design something that covers that set?” Whenever I’m designing a new device or application I try to come up with one to four usage scenarios. These scenarios form the corners of the design space. They also let me ask “if I built this, would anyone care” before I put lots of effort into designing.

(On a related note: whenever a project says “we’re trying to get our device into the hands of developers so they can figure out how to use it,” I worry. It’s fine if you already have some clearly compelling applications and you just want to find more, but too often it’s a tacit admission that you don’t really know why anyone would need your technology and you’re just hoping someone else can figure it out before your funding runs out.) 

Approximate the future.

One of the things the MIT Media Lab was good at was looking at technological trends and asking “OK, so where does this wind up in 10 years?” The wearables group was a good example: we knew that computers were getting smaller and more powerful, that microphones could soon be the size of a tic-tac, displays the size of your fingernail, etc., and we wanted to explore what we could do in that world. So we mocked it up as best we could, attaching displays the size of harmonicas to glasses frames or hats and putting computers in large purse-bags with camcorder batteries. It looked strange and was unwieldy, but we knew if we could look past the limitations that we knew would be solved by Moore’s Law then we could understand the challenges and opportunities that would remain.

Communications is always the killer app.

I remember one tutorial that Thad and I taught on wearable computing had a slide showing a cell phone, a GPS, a walkman, a camera/camcorder and a PDA (which back then meant notepad, calendar, to-do list and maybe a calculator), and we explained that soon all these devices would be converging into one. Thad and I disagreed on which of these applications would be the most important though — which application will convince people to buy the device, and which ones can you skimp on when you need to make trade-offs? Thad thought it would be home electronics like the camera and the music player. I remembered back to reading about Minitel and similar systems that always seemed to be subverted to be a communications device and declared that (human-to-human) communication would always be the killer app. Not all the interface decisions have gone my way (I was particularly surprised when the iPhone got rid of the physical keyboard, trading off more screen for harder input) but I’d still contend that if people had to choose between a phone/IM/SMS/Facebook device or all other smartphone apps they’d choose the former (especially if you throw the Web into that list).

What you should know once you have your degree.

Not really related to research but it’s something I tell people thinking of going into grad school:

When I got my Bachelor’s degree, I knew everything.
Then I got my Master’s degree, and realized that I actually knew nothing.
Then I got my PhD, and realized that no one else knew anything either.

• 1970s: Spoof email
• 2000s: Virus that sends email to all your contacts, virtual kidnapping scam
• 2010s: Fake caller-ID and robocalling, twitter bots, fake facebook profiles, cat phishing
• 2019: Deep fake videos, bot-assisted cat phishing, IRS-impersonation scam
• 2023: Impersonate voice and phone number in realtime phone call <– You are here
• 202?: Impersonate loved one in realtime video
• 202?: Automated voice-chat scam robocalls

She has more interesting experiments with DALL-E, AR and video processing over at her Instagram. (h/t to Boing Boing)

[Migrated from Google+]

[Migrated from Google+]

[Migrated from Google+]

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence – Fall 2011

[Migrated from Google+]

Scripting Gmail to snooze emails (so they come back later) is cool! (Actually, scripting Gmail is cool).
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/gmail-snooze-with-apps-script.html

But I bet Boomerang (http://www.boomeranggmail.com/) doesn’t like it so much. On the other hand, how smart was it to create an entire business that could be obviated by a single 48-line script?

Gmail Snooze with Apps Script – Official Gmail Blog

[Migrated from Google+]

“Cell phones have a small aperture, hence a large depth of field. In other words, most of the scene is in focus at once. However, if you record video while moving the phone slightly, and you add the frames of the video together, you can simulate the large aperture of an SLR. This app lets you do that.”

[Migrated from Google+]

I’m looking at one of your most iconic images, this is the photo of a young Afghan girl… she’s wearing a brick-red head scarf and there’s a green background and her eyes are just popping off the screen…

I think that just about says it all. You can also view an online gallery of what some of the great photos taken with Kodachrome look like after they’ve been scanned, digitized, and re-rendered on whatever computer monitor you happen to have. Such vivid colors!