Given
that most offices are likely to generate plenty
of paper documents for the foreseeable future,
researchers are devising ways to use computers
to track and organize printed materials. A
computer vision system that doesn't require
documents to sport special tags or marks holds
promise. Full
story
Conversations
control computers
Workplaces are filled with brief conversations about
scheduling and assignments that require people to
make notes and mark calendars. Speech recognition
software that captures appropriate snippets of these
conversations makes it possible to use one set of
utterances to converse and to control a handheld
computer. A set of prototype applications helps
automate the mundane aspects of working with other
people.
DNA
scheme builds computers
Researchers have made computers from test tubes
of DNA. DNA has also been used to assemble basic
electronic circuitry. A combination of the techniques
paves the way for automatic assembly of computers.
A pair of parallel processing architectures illustrates
the possibilities.
