Madd0's Tech Blog

The award ceremony of imagine Cup 2008 took place on Tuesday, July 8th in the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris. SUPINFO teams were competing in two different categories: Game Development and Software Design.

Traditionally, prizes are handed out to the three first places in each of the nine categories of the competition. However, this year many special prizes were also awarded. One of these, an invitation to participate in the “BT Innovation Accelerator” program was won by Régis Hanol and Gauthier Chanliau–SUPINFO Languedoc Roussillon in Montpellier, Sébastien Warin–SUPINFO Nord-Pas de Calais in Lille and  Jean-Noël Gauthier–Ecole des Gobelins, of team Well’k Home.

The winners of this program, growth catalyst for innovative projects, are invited to work directly with the BT teams that will help them take their student project and transform it into a business plan. For them, Imagine Cup is only the beginning of the adventure!
I would also like to congratulate Frédéric Pedro, Anthony Chen Kuang Piao and Nicolas Gryman – SUPINFO Ile de France, and Maximilien Paitel – SUPINFO UK of the ECOThink team, who were able to distinguish themselves among 200 000 competitors and made it to the world finals with a few other privileged teams.

Finally, I’d like to encourage all students to follow these exemplary teams by registering today for the next edition of the competition, the world finals of which will take place in Cairo and Alexandria, in Egypt. The theme will be “Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems facing us today.” Students will be asked to create software solutions that are aligned to one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). More information about the MDGs can be found at http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals.

Registration for Imagine Cup 2009 is already open. You’ll find more information at http://www.imaginecup.com.

OK, maybe the title doesn't mean much, but I couldn't think of anything better. So how about you just watch the videos?

I was barely finished with last week's TED post when I stumbled upon the first of this week's recommendations. I know I said that TED videos were only 18 minutes long, but I guess when you're Jane Goodall you're inherently expected to need a little more:

As inspiring as Mrs. Goodall might be, I would have preferred a longer talk from Alan Russell, the speaker on this video called Why can't we grow new body parts?:

Those of you who know me personally, know that, as active as I might be during the week, on weekends I'm basically a vegetable. Well, I'm exaggerating a little, but I do like to take it slowly on weekends. For instance, I like to stay in bed late. I prepare for this on Friday night by leaving my laptop and all my remotes, as well as books or anything I might need in the morning, next to the bed. This way, I can stay under the covers as long as possible, which is usually until my body requires some energy input, or would like to output waste. Anyway, I'm starting to digress here...

Another thing I like to do on weekends is spending a while with TED. I should actually say on TED, but your mischievous little minds will probably wander where they shouldn't. At least until I explain what, and not who, TED is. From their website:

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

Every year TED brings together "the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers" who give 18-minute talks about what they do. Speakers include Chris Anderson, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Bill Clinton, Philippe Starck, Al Gore, Jane Goodall, Frans Lanting; and I've only mentioned the "famous" ones here (by which I mean, the ones I know), but there's also "regular" people: mathematicians, anthropologists, musicians, physicists, computer scientists. People you've (or at least I've) never heard about before, such as Majora Carter (actually her talk is the one that made me discover TED), Kenichi Ebina (not everything is talk at TED, there also onstage performance), Ron Eglash, Robert Full and plenty of others.

Most of these talks are described as inspiring, fascinating, beautiful and even funny. I definitively don't mind spending my whole weekend watching these people talk 18 minutes at a time. That's why I've decided that every week I'll be sharing my favorite TED videos on the blog. Every Sunday, when technically possible, I will post here the videos I like the most in an attempt to get you inspired by these wonderful people.

So let's start with the one that got me started. Majora Carter's Greening the ghetto:

And so that you can see how diverse TED videos actually are, here is an extremely funny video from Ze Frank:

See you again with more TED next week ;)

This is the first in an irregular series of posts where I bring you nice surprises I've found while browsing the Internet.

I found today's surprises in my RSS aggregator just waiting to be shared with the rest of the world*.

Both of today's surprises come from totally different sources, but they do have one thing in common: innovation. Both concern technology that is not yet available, but that's totally awesome. They actually have a second thing in common which I discovered just before writing this post, but I'll let you watch the videos first to see how keen your eye is.

So, today's first surprise comes from the O'Reilly Radar post entitled Context Aware Image Re-Sizing. How cool does that sound? If you're not convinced, I'll let you see the video then:

Now what do you think? One of the things I'd really like to do with my blog is enable a FlowDocument-like experience for reading my posts. Unfortunately, you can resize and reflow text as much as you like, images will always be a problem; well, until technology like the above is widely available, of course.

The second surprise is called LucidTouch and I found it through Engadget. The name by itself is not very compelling to me, but take a look at this demo:

I've always wanted an "Origami" PC because I feel that in the future we'll probably all have one of those in our bags most of the time. If technology like LucidTouch actually gets into devices like UMPCs, I'm sure my feeling will become a prediction.

So, did you figure out what else these two technologies have in common?

Well, even though the second one is said to come from Microsoft Research on Engadget, really only one of five researchers works there**. The other four work at MERL, where the two researchers of the image resizing application also work.

MERL?

Yes, MERL: Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab, the American branch of Mitsubishi's R&D. If you've never heard about them, you might want to take a look at their impressive project list.

Well, that's all for today, but the Web is host to plenty of secrets, so expect more Surprise bags in the future.

* Yes, I know that if I found them in my aggregator and if they're already on the Internet, they have already been shared with the rest of the world. That unfortunately is not true when I'm talking about "the world," because when I say it I'm obviously talking about the only world that matters: the one that revolves around me.

** I am not at all implying that because only one researcher comes from MSR they've had lesser impact or influence on the development of the technology, I just want to bring more attention to Mitsubishi to make the link between both videos.