The news that IBM’s Watson had beaten the humans on Jeopardy didn’t really come as a really big surprise for me. It’d been coming since Kasparov left the room in tears after losing to Deep Blue.

The argument then was that chess is about finite number of possible moves. The use of intensive mathematics, brutal processing logic and speed make chess a well defined challenge – computers were appropriately designed for such a challenge. However, natural language is very different. Modeling natural language mathematically is very challenging, and at the time (of deep blue vs. Kasparov), even natural language processing researchers admitted we were many years yet before computers would understand queries and respond to them in human language.  I’ve banged on about intelligent personal learning agents based on semantic technologies in the past, and Watson – a ‘natural language processing’ ‘pattern recognizing’ ‘world aware’ engine – is a huge step towards making that happen.

The eLearning industry has its roots in innovation, as a disruptive technology for education and training. At Upside, we strive to innovate in our product and service range, and find it’s a bit of a hit and miss affair.

It often makes me wonder, is there a set of rules we can use to foster innovation?

I came across this really interesting interview with Greg Kroah-Hartman – Linux Kernel Dev/Maintainer. In this interview, Greg talks about how the Linux project has accommodated the accelerating rate of change for the kernel. It was very interesting to draw parallels between some of what he says and learning.

More companies are looking to challenge Amazon Kindle’s hegemony in the eBook market. Sony has been in the fray for quite some time. Barnes and Noble made it clear several months ago that it too had designs on this market. Yesterday it released its dedicated eBook reader called the ‘Nook’ in New York city. The device has many features that distinguish it from the Kindle, including a color touch screen for control, and the use of the Google Android operating system.

Looks like a season for Awards; and as a vibrant community, it was about time LearnTrends joined in. Tony Karrer, Jay Cross and George Siemens have announced the first-ever LearnTrends2009 Innovation awards. They say “The awards will recognize products, projects, and companies that represent significant innovation in Corporate/Workplace Learning and Performance.” I like the idea, a focused award for innovation.

Last month Tony Karrer posted this interesting piece on the Business of Learning on his blog – eLearning Technology. It provoked a discussion on the topic with many different perspectives brought to bear.

Six in ten people (more than 4 billion individuals) around the world are carrying a powerful computing device in their pockets and purses. They don’t realize it, but today’s mobile phones have the computing power of a personal computer from the mid-nineties, while consuming a fraction of the energy and are made at significantly lower cost.

Recently we’ve been developing mobile applications for the iPhone. Mostly, this is a casual quiz game-type application where the user is presented with multiple choice questions. Based on the responses the user is presented with feedback about the efficacy of managing his time.

Workplace Learning is changing!

Time and again, we have seen Flash being extended in unique ways by leveraging the power of AS3. We caught something in the feeds yesterday that truly took us by surprise – face recognition using Flash. Check out the video here.

Summer time in India is family vacation time. While we’ve stopped fleeing abroad, we tend to travel farther from home just to experience what India has to offer. This time, for a change, we decided to explore more of our local coastline. The state we live in Maharashtra has a vast coastline known for its ruggedness, beaches and spectacular natural beauty. It’s known as the Konkan and while we’ve lived just a hundred miles from it and have visited on and off; we never found the time to feel its rhythms.

There’s been some buzz around Augmented Reality applications that are starting to show up on the web. BMW, GE and Toyota already have this technology at work on their websites.