I’m in Brazil

May 13th, 2013

Christ the Redeemer Hello, Rio de Janeiro.

I’m here for a conference but had a bit of time this weekend to explore before it starts.

It’s not enough time to properly learn about the city, but I’m having a fantastic time and thought I’d share a few random disconnected thoughts.

Weather. I should get the cliched observation out of the way first. It’s hot and sunny. Really sunny. I’m regularly covering myself in SPF50 and still ending up more than a little pink. Perhaps I’m just not used to this “being outside” thing.

It’s hilly. Actually, they’re called hills, but that doesn’t do it justice. The bus heading up to Corcovado went up one bit that was so steep I was convinced it would roll back down.

The hills
Wherever you go, the hills are part of the landscape

Rio isn’t a place for people who don’t like heights. Even ignoring people offering me helicopter rides or friends suggesting hang gliding, the big tourist attraction is getting a cable car to the top of Sugar Loaf mountain. The views are apparently amazing, but I thought it looked far too scary and gave it a miss.

Views from Corcovado hill
The view from Corcovado Hill

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Conversational Internet at W4A

April 27th, 2013

I wrote a thing.

I normally just write code. It’s safer that way. But a change is as good as a holiday, so earlier in the year, I tried writing in English. With sentences and paragraphs and everything.

I wrote a paper to summarise the Conversational Internet project for submitting to W4A, the 10th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility. And I’m pleased to say that it was accepted.

If you’re in Rio for WWW 2013 next month, look out for it!

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HiddenCity

February 17th, 2013

I’ve said before that I don’t like London. I avoid having to work in London wherever possible. But, if I’m honest, I don’t really know the city that well and always tend to go back to the same old places when I am there.

Yesterday changed that a bit. Amy and I went to London for a tour with HiddenCity, and I saw more of it in one day than I’d seen in years.

A HiddenCity trail is basically a treasure hunt delivered by SMS messages. You get a text message with a clue for something to find. Once you’ve worked it out, you reply by SMS. If you’re right, you get the clue for the next step of the hunt.

and we're off Answer number 1

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Demonstrating IBM Watson for healthcare

February 9th, 2013

I work on a computer system called IBM Watson – I might have mentioned it once or twice before?

Yesterday, IBM unveiled the progress that we and our partners have made with Watson in healthcare at an event in New York.

IBM Watson: New Breakthroughs Transform Quality Care for Patients

I didn’t get to go, but I did keep half an eye on what was happening through twitter. Here are some of the tweets that caught my eye.

 

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Trying to take a picture

December 29th, 2012

Amy and I share a lot of pictures of the kids. Sorry… it’s kind of an unavoidable parent thing.

For example, Amy recently got them to model some hats she’d crocheted.

And people make nice comments saying how pretty they are and how good they are in photos.

But they don’t realise how much effort it takes to get to that picture.

Look at some of the photos it took to come up with one of her looking… sane. (And this is after I weeded out the ones that were blurry, out of focus, or essentially duplicates).


slideshow of some previous attempts (on flickr)

Basically I’m looking for pity. (Is it working?) ;-)

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My New Year’s Resolutions for 2012

December 29th, 2012

I don’t always do New Years Resolutions, but this year I did, coming up with over a dozen things that I wanted to achieve in 2012.

With a couple of days left, it’s time to see how this worked out.

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What has Watson been doing this year?

December 27th, 2012

IBM Watson is a computer system created to answer questions – questions posed in unstructured, free, natural English language.

It answers using knowledge that it builds for itself by reading and understanding the contents of books and other documents.

It learns how to identify answers by being trained, learning from experience how to interpret the evidence in it’s knowledge.

I wrote a (long and rambling) post in January about work that had been done on Watson since it was unveiled to the world.

Here’s a quick overview of a few things that’s happened since then.

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What makes Watson different?

December 18th, 2012

I’ve tried to explain IBM Watson to a lot of people this year. A common theme in questions I’ve had has been comparing it to search engines like Google.

Sometimes people ask why one is “better” than another. Sometimes they just ask how they are different.

It’s not surprising. A natural response to learning about something new is to put it into context of things that we already know.

In addition, we describe Watson as a question answering technology and over the last few years many people have perhaps become a bit conditioned to thinking that if they have a question then they can Google for it.

There are many differences between search engines and Watson, both in what they can do, and in how they try to do it.

Here is one example.

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