Tuesday, April 30, 2013

How do you know whom to trust? - Ram Neta

Published on Apr 30, 2013
View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-do-you-...

We believe a lot of things because we've been told - from our personal acquaintances and also experts. With so many belief systems being passed to us, how do we know whom to trust? Using contemporary examples, Ram Neta explains when listening to experts is a good idea...and when it's not.

Lesson by Ram Neta, animation by Colleen Cox


Sunday, April 21, 2013

Moving deadlines and appointments from Excel to Outlook

In a school or other organization, sometimes it would be nice to send employees a list of appointments or deadlines to be imported into their Microsoft Outlook calendars all at once. This video shows how it's done.


Microsoft's Concept of How 2019 Will Look Like - Official Video

What do you think the world will look like in 2019? Predicting future trends is usually done poorly by analysts so companies seem to want to give consumer a glimpse of what they want the future to look like. Microsoft has just released a video showcasing magical gadget after magical gadget. Earlier this month "Microsoft Office Labs Vision 2019," was released and now we have "Productivity Future Vision (2011)". Both are inspiring and beautifully edited.

Monday, April 15, 2013

Next Generation Counselor?





Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ejczMs6b1Q4

The USC Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) is a leader in basic research and advanced technology development of virtual humans who think and behave like real people. ICT brings together experts in clinical psychology, cognitive science, computer vision, speech processing and artificial intelligence. This video shows two interactive technologies recently developed for multimodal perception and healthcare support:

Multisense automatically tracks and analyzes in real-time facial expressions, body posture, acoustic features, linguistic patterns and higher-level behavior descriptors (e.g. attention, fidgeting). From these signals and behaviors, indicators of psychological distress are inferred to inform directly the healthcare provider or the virtual human.

SimSensei is a virtual human platform specifically designed for healthcare support and is based on the 10+ years of expertise at ICT with virtual human research and development. The platform enables an engaging face-to-face interaction where the virtual human automatically reacts to the perceived user state and intent, through its own speech and gestures.

Please note that due to privacy concerns, the people shown in this video are actors. SimSensei is not designed for therapy or medical diagnosis, but is intended as a support tool for clinicians and healthcare providers.

For more information, please contact directly the Principal Investigators of this project: Louis-Philippe Morency (morency@ict.usc.edu) Albert (Skip) Rizzo (rizzo@ict.usc.edu)

Learn more about USC ICT at http://ict.usc.edu