Glass helps blind people see the world
鈥淥K Glass, recognise this.鈥� That鈥檚 all a visually impaired user of new software running on Google Glass has to say to find out the worth of the banknote they鈥檙e holding, or the brand of the bottled water they鈥檝e picked up in a shop. The system was developed by Rajat Bhageria, at the University of Pennsylvania, with two fellow students at a hackathon.
鈥淒ear Sony Hackers: now that u run Hollywood, I鈥檇 also like less romantic comedies, fewer Michael Bay movies and no more Transformers.鈥�
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Film-maker Michael Moore tweets in the wake of Sony鈥檚 decision to pull its new movie The Interview, a comedy about a plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Sony had already had executive emails and financial documents leaked by hackers
Tweets lift the lid on diet and health
Meal-inspired messages on Twitter can give a geographical insight into obesity and diabetes rates. Sofiane Abbar and colleagues at the Qatar Computing Research Institute scoured the tweets of 210,000 Americans for mentions of fast food chains, food and cooking and calculated an approximate calorie intake for each US state. The team found that their calorie counts were strongly correlated with local obesity levels, and quite closely related to the prevalence of diabetes ().
China鈥檚 Google understands you better
Watch out, Google. Awni Hannun and team at a Silicon Valley research centre owned by internet search firm Baidu 鈥搉icknamed 鈥淐hina鈥檚 Google鈥� 鈥� have come up with a new approach to speech recognition that they claim beats their rivals鈥� best efforts. The method uses a unique combination of neural networking techniques that is unexpectedly efficient, says Steve Renals at the University of Edinburgh, UK, who was not involved in the study ().
