Today, you can translate almost any word, phrase or document by simply plugging it into a search engine.
Microsoft, however, is envisioning a future where you'll be able to hold a conversation with anyone around the world without the obstacle of language barriers.
At Re/code's inaugural Code Conference, Microsoft unveiled it's real-time speech translator for Skype—a technology that conjures up references to "Star Trek" and "A Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" that's been in the works for years.
The demo made the technology look natural and fluid—simply speak as you would in normal conversation, and the person on the other side would hear your words followed by a clean translation in their preferred language.
The "Star Trek"-like translator will become available before the end of 2014.
Vikram Dendi, a technical and strategy advisor for Microsoft Research, was brought on to the team five years ago specifically to work on translation technology.
We spoke with Dendi to learn a little more about how Microsoft created its real-time translator. Here's the lightly edited Q&A.
Business Insider: When Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella talked about Skype's real-time translator on stage, he emphasized how humanistic the technology is. What has Microsoft done to make the translations seem natural and conversational?
Vikram Dendi: So one of the early realizations for us as we were investing in translation was that it was really important that we don't think like computers.
We don't think like computers.
It was really important that we think of it as a human communication problem. While we were doing very cutting edge work on the computer science side, we were also looking very closely into how people communicated with each other.
I used to spend a lot of time going to a number of different countries where I'd interact with translators. And I came to the realization that no translators agrees 100 percent on how is best to translate something. If you take something and give it to two different translators, there will be a variation in how they translate.
Ultimately the end goal is to really create an understanding. So a lot of the work that we have done in our translation engine was really around creating a lot of flexibility and customizability.
For example we have something called a Translator Hub. The Translator Hub allows you to bring in -- For more information read the original article here.
A popular encryption tool used and endorsed by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden abruptly shut down on Wednesday, with its website telling users the tool is "not secure" without giving additional detail.
The decade-old tool — called TrueCrypt — allowed users to encrypt sensitive files and hard drives and was a favorite of security-minded individuals. One of those people was Edward Snowden, who hosted a "Crypto Party" in Dec. 2012 to teach a group of people how it to encrypt hard drives and USB sticks, while still working as a contractor for the NSA in a Hawaii.
But the sudden closure of TrueCrypt has led some to speculate the anonymous developers behind it had aroused the eye of the U.S. government and they decided to just throw in the towel. (Snowden's encrypted email service, Lavabit, suffered a similar fate).
The "advisory comes as a shock to the security community, though no one has been able to confirm its authenticity so far," wrote Runa Sandvik, a developer of the Tor anonymous web browser, in Forbes.
Snowden's endorsement of Truecrypt almost certainly put a target on those anonymous developers, 100x so if moonlighting Feds.
— Dan Kaminsky (@dakami) May 29, 2014
Interestingly, the shut down came as a full-scale professional security audit of the TrueCrypt software was underway, led by Matthew Green, a cryptographer and professor at Johns Hopkins University, journalist Brian Krebs reported.
So far, the audit had not found anything suspicious in the code, but Green told Brian Krebs the fact TrueCrypt has been taken down could lead some to believe there's some "big evil vulnerability in the code."
"I was starting to have warm and fuzzy feelings about the code, thinking [the developers] were just nice guys who didn't want their names out there,” Green told Brian Krebs. "But now this decision makes me feel like they're kind of unreliable. Also, I'm a little worried that the fact that we were doing an audit of the crypto might have made them decide to call it quits."
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The mountainous background of the banner suggests OS X 10.10 will be receiving a land-related name to complement the water-based name given to OS X 10.9, possibly Yosemite or El Cap, as the image appears to feature the state park's El Capitan rock formation. We detailed some of the names Apple has apparently filed for trademarks on back in April. Some trademarked land-themed names include Yosemite, Redwood, Mammoth, California, Diablo, Miramar, El Cap, Redtail, Condor, Grizzly, Tiburon, Skyline, Shasta, and Sierra.
Because OS X Mavericks only introduced minor visual changes, OS X 10.10 is expected to feature a more drastic redesign, adopting a "flatter" look and taking on some iOS 7-style design elements. While little is known about the operating system at this point, we will get our first glimpse of the operating system on Monday June 2 at 10 AM Pacitic Time, when Apple kicks off the Worldwide Developers Conference with its keynote presentation.
Apple will be live streaming the event both on the web and on the Apple TV. MacRumors will also provide a live blog, live tweets via the MacRumorsLive Twitter account, and a spoiler free page for those who want to watch the full keynote at a later time.
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As the Top Gear team once famously demonstrated, the motion of the ocean makes for a bone-jarringly rough ride the faster you move across its surface. However aboard this prototype catamaran from Nauti-Craft, you'll barely feel the rolling of the waves at any knot.
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-- For more information read the original article here.
If Google continues to move forward with self-driving cars, the company could pose a serious threat to the auto industry, General Motors global product chief Mark Reuss told Bloomberg.
Even though GM is working on its own autonomous cars, Reuss told reporters yesterday that GM is not directly in a race against Google.
“Anybody can do anything with enough time and money,” Reuss said. “If they set their mind to it, I have no doubt [that Google could become] a very serious competitive threat.”
Still, Reuss doesn't envision autonomous cars taking over cities "anytime soon."
On Tuesday, Google revealed a prototype driverless car without pedals, breaks, or a steering wheel. Google plans to deploy at least 100 of these this year.
Since launching the driverless car program in 2009, Google's cars have logged over 700,000 miles. It also recently set out to tackle autonomous driving on city streets.
SEE ALSO: Taxi Drivers Are Threatening To Shut Down Central London In Protest Of Uber
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Physicists at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands were able to successfully "teleport" information over a distance of 10 feet, reports the New York Times.
There's a lot going on in that idea, so let's break it down.
The rules for the subatomic world are totally unlike the rules for our macroscopic world. A particle can be in multiple places at the same time, and can even disappear on one side of a barrier and reappear on the other side without actually traveling through it. This comes from quantum theory, and while it sounds totally nonintuitive, it's one of the most successful models physicists have for understanding our world.
Many scientists around the world today are working to develop "quantum technology," which is simply any technology that hinges upon these totally "abnormal" properties of the super-small stuff that makes up our world. The Mount Everest of quantum technology would be to build a quantum computer that could quickly solve problems that would leave our classical computers stumped. Instead of the standard bits we use in computers today — ones and zeroes — quantum bits, or "qubits," can describe a one, a zero, or any value in between.
If this all sounds crazy or hard to understand, you're in good company with a lot of smart people. Hang in there. A legitimate, functional quantum computer (it's debatable as to if one has actually been built yet) would be absolutely bursting with computational potential.
Back to our Dutch scientists — they trapped qubits in diamonds and were able to establish a measurement of the qubits' spin. This measurement is the acual information that was "teleported," by way of a process called quantum entanglement. To simplify this idea a lot, entanglement is essentially what happens when one particle copycats another, even over a distance. Change the spin of one particle, the other instantly changes its spin to match.
Einstein famously decried entanglement, calling it "spooky action at a distance." But repeated variations of this experiment only lend more credence to it as a completely valid natural phenomena that we are slowly learning to manipulate.
Forget Google Fiber. Once this stuff is perfected, a quantum internet that's built upon it could mean instantaneous transmission and receipt of data around the world or even the universe! In 1964, an Irish physicist named John Bell -- For more information read the original article here.
Magic floors that sink into the ground to create a pool are always cool but even those trick pools aren't as camouflage as this hidden pool. What looks like a seemingly normal backyard can actually transform into a pool when half the grass retracts to reveal the water. Fun!
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-- For more information read the original article here.
When it comes to cyber security, the Defense Department has their work cut out for them. Hackers, adversaries, network security breaches, information obfuscation and confiscation – these are just a few of the constant threats to our military and government networks. In defense against these dangers, DARPA is doing their part to ensure network protection and information security.
And they're using FOUR BIG THINGS to do it.
(DoD graphic illustration by Jessica L. Tozer/Released)
These four revolutionary programs will teach computers to think and learn. They will stop hackers in their digital tracks. They're going to make the future more exciting, and more innovative, than ever before.
“I really think there are two wars that are happening,” says Dan Kaufman, DARPA's Information Innovation Office director. “The one war, which we're sort of familiar with [is] the kinetic war. On the network warfare, I think it's sort of a new war. It's this crossover between criminal organizations and terrorists organizations.”
So let's talk cyber warfare.
When you hear about cyber stuff, most people tend to think about their PC, or their home computer system. That's obviously important, but it's not even the half of it. In fact, about 98% of microprocessors are embedded, Dan says.
“Think about it: everything in the world today has a computer. Your phone, your TV, your insulin pumps, all our weapons systems. These are all computerized and DARPA sees huge promise in it. We get these wonderful benefits from network technology.”
But how are they going to protect these systems? So glad you asked…
The FIRST BIG THING is called HACMS (pronounced like “Hack 'ems”). It stands for High-assurance Cyber Military Systems.
“Think about computers,” Dan says. “A computer is the only thing that we buy today where the day you buy it, it's fundamentally broken.”
What he means by that is this:
When you buy your computer, one of the first things they tell you is to “go home and patch it.”
“Well okay,” you might say, “but didn't I just pay you three-thousand dollars?”
So you patch it, and you say, “Now it's fixed.”
And they say “No, next Tuesday there will be more patches.”
You say, “Will it ever be fixed?”
They say “No.”
That's a little bit crazy, don't you think? DARPA does, too.
“If you think about this even broader,” Dan continues, “how are we going to apply -- For more information read the original article here.
-- For more information read the original article here.