Category: New Technology Papers

The traditional way of interacting with computers is changing. The mouse and desktop metaphor was invented in the 70s and now with advances in input techniques, such as touch and motion sensing, we are seeing new types of interaction with computers. Smart phones have touch interfaces and the newly released iPad is bringing touch hand-held computers. Microsoft has released Surface and will release project Natal later this year. The field of Human-Computer Interaction or HCI is getting very interesting.

Thomas Hahn wrote a paper on HCI as part of my New Technology course. In this paper he addresses some of the current trends such as touch, motion control and speech recognition.

This is from the abstract:

Human Computer Interaction in the field of input and output techniques has developed a lot of new techniques over the last few years. With the recently released full multi-touch tablets and notebooks the way how people interact with the computer is coming to a new dimension. As humans are used to handle things with their hands the technology of multi-touch displays or touchpad’s brought much more convenience for use in daily life. But for sure the usage of human speech recognition will also play an important part in the future of human computer interaction. This paper introduces techniques and devices using the humans hand gestures for the use with multi-touch tablets and video recognition and techniques for voice interaction. Thereby the gesture and speech recognition take an important role as these are the main communication methods between humans and how they could disrupt the keyboard or mouse as we know it today.

The paper is here: Future Human Computer Interaction with special focus on input and output techniques

Social networking is a hot topic today. With the rise of Facebook and the popularity of Twitter and now Foursquare, interest in social networks and social media has risen. We are just starting to understand the meaning of social networks and the potentials.

Magnús Sigurbjörnsson wrote a paper in my New Technology course about social networks, titled Will Social Networking be Everywhere? An interesting statistics in the paper is that the average user spends 55 minutes on Facebook everyday, which would mean 4% of your life!

From the introduction:

By bringing social networking closer to your real life, your behavior with your friends might become different. With constant updates from your friends of what they are doing, will the social networks slowly ruin your normal social life? Is there an opportunity to implement something into people’s lifestyle? That is something that the largest social networks need to decide. If so, I think that social networking might even end up with becoming everywhere around us. Only of course, if you want it to.

Will Social Networking be Everywhere

After reading 43 papers as part of my New Technology course, it’s time to make some of them available. One interesting topic is the future of the web. Bergur Páll Gylfason wrote a paper on the topic of the semantic web titled, The Future Of The Web – Semantic Web.

From the introduction:

The World Wide Web is getting 22 years old this year and it has gone through a lot of changes. At first it was just documents with text and hyperlinks and then came photos, videos, search engines, social networks and so what comes next? I think the next step is that the web is getting much more Semantic. The Semantic Web is all about connecting data and making it readable by machines, we have all this useful information in different databases all over the world, medical-, Pharmaceutical -, government-, personal information and so much more and none of it is connected. What if we could connect all that information? How would we do it? We use Semantic technologies to connect the data and make machines understand it.

The Future of the Web – Semantic Web