For decades, humans have struggled to create machines that can extract meaning from human language, with all its messiness, subtle context, humor, and irony. Traditional approaches require a great deal of manual work up front to render material understandable to computer algorithms. The ultimate goal is to make this step unnecessary.

IBM hopes to advance toward this objective with Watson, a computer system that will play Jeopardy!, the popular TV trivia game show, against human contestants. Demonstrations of the system are expected this year, with a final televised matchup--complete with hosting by the show's Alex Trebek--sometime next year. Questions will be spoken aloud by Trebek but fed into the machine in text format during the show.

Störs du av att engelskan tycks breda ut sig på svenskans bekostnad i tid och otid? Anser du det vara en rättighet att i Sverige få t.ex. bruksanvisningar och resevillkor på svenska? Irriteras du av att det visas så många långfilmer på engelska och så få på svenska och andra språk liksom av att så många reklaminslag i tv och i andra massmedia i Sverige är på engelska? Ifrågasätter du kravet att skriva akademiska avhandlingar direkt på engelska vid så många utbildningar vid svenska universitet? Misstänker du att svenskspråkiga förlorar på att svenska företag går över till engelska som koncernspråk [...]? [...] I så fall borde vår webbplats intressera dig.

Liksom de flesta branscher håller sig mediavärlden i allmänhet och kanske etermediabranschen i synnerhet med ett eget fackspråk. Som leverantör av tittarsiffor bidrar MMS också till det som ibland kan uppfattas som svårbegripligt. Vi hoppas att denna ordbok ska bidra till en ökad förståelse.

MPEG-7, formally named "Multimedia Content Description Interface", is a standard for describing the multimedia content data that supports some degree of interpretation of the information meaning, which can be passed onto, or accessed by, a device or a computer code. MPEG-7 is not aimed at any one application in particular; rather, the elements that MPEG-7 standardizes support as broad a range of applications as possible.

Baen Books is now making available — for free — a number of its titles in electronic format. We're calling it the Baen Free Library. Anyone who wishes can read these titles online — no conditions, no strings attached. (Later we may ask for

an extremely simple, name & email only, registration. ) Or, if you prefer, you can download the books in one of several formats. Again, with no conditions or strings attached. (URLs to sites which offer the readers for these format are also listed.)

På Lingvistbloggen skriver vi som arbetar på Avd. för allmän språkvetenskap inom Inst. för lingvistik, Stockholms universitet, om lingvistik, språk och annat av allmänt intresse. Alla är välkomna att kommentera inläggen.

HTMLDOC converts Hyper-Text Markup Language ("HTML") files and web pages into indexed HTML, Adobe® PostScript®, or Adobe Portable Document Format ("PDF") files. HTMLDOC is available in both commercial and open source versions.

These days robot-loving Japanese are tinkering with screwdrivers and motors instead of heading to the beach or hot springs during the holidays. Tokyo's major store devoted to robots, Vstone Robot Center in the bustling Akihabara electronics district, sells robots of all sizes and shapes, including the tiny scuttling Robo-Q from Tomy Co. and the Pleo animatronic dinosaur toy from Ugobe Inc. of the U.S.

Just when you thought invisibility cloaks couldn't get any weirder, researchers come up with this: a way to make one object look like any other.

Ad Server Beans are an open source ad server product written in Java using enterprise technologies. It is used for:

- creating banner ad campaigns and tracking their progress;

- targeting these campaigns to specific audience based on different criteria: site content, demographics, visitor geo location, time, etc.;

- serving ads to sites.