Microsoft Is Teaching Kinect to Understand Sign Language

Microsoft Asia and the chinese Academi of science's Institute of Computing Technology has collaborated to use the KINECT to recognize computer Sign-Language. They've demonstrate the Microsoft Kinect's ability to translate signs by tracking hand and body actions.

Microsoft Research says in "translation mode" the Kinect can translate sign language into text or speech. Both isolated word recognition and continuous sentence recognition were tested. In "communications mode," an avatar can help an individual who is deaf or hard-of-hearing communicate with someone who can hear by converting the sign inputs into text and vice-versa.

It all works through a process Microsoft Research refers to as "3D trajectory matching:" Kinect for Windows software helps decipher the hand movements, which are then matched to identify a word.

Microsoft Research Asia and the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have teamed up to use Kinect for Windows to effectively track complex hand motions in 3D space. By combining the data from both the RGB camera and the depth-sensing infrared camera in the Kinect, these researchers were able to develop an impressive system to aid communication between the deaf and the hearing.

Read more: Sign Language Recognition and Translation with Kinect

TITAN Super Computer

The U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory launched a new era of scientific supercomputing Monday with Titan, a system capable of churning through more than 20,000 trillion calculations each second — or 20 petaflops — by employing a family of processors called graphic processing units first created for computer gaming.

Titan will be 10 times more powerful than ORNL's last world-leading system, Jaguar, while overcoming power and space limitations inherent in the previous generation of high-performance computers

JOOMLA 3.0.1 Security Release

The Joomla Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Joomla 3.0.1. This is a security release. This release also fixes several high-priority problems with version 3.0.0. 

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR 3.0.0 SITES: 
If you plan to update a site from 3.0.0 to 3.0.1, you need to install the Joomla 3.0.0 Hot Patch before doing the update to Joomla 3.0.1. See the Hot Patch Instructions for more information. This is NOT required for updating from version 2.5.x.  If you require the FTP layer you will need to manually FTP the update. Also, please note that version 3.0 users need to make sure the Update server is set to "Short Term Support" in the Joomla! Update component. Otherwise, no 3.0.x updates will show.
The Production Leadership Team's goal is to continue to provide regular, frequent updates to the Joomla community.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690

We all knew that NVIDIA was working on a dual-GPU video card to replace the GeForce GTX 590 that was introduced last year, but no one knew when exactly it was coming. We, ourselves, only found out when this card was launching this past Saturday when NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang told the world the news at the GeForce LAN in Shanghai, China.  The company's new video card, the GeForce GTX 690 was designed from the ground up to deliver the highest performance of any graphics card in history. NVIDIA didn't stop there though as they paid special attention to the appearance of the card to ensure that this cards design would be over the top. When a pry bar and a wood crate showed up at our door, we knew this card was something special.

AT&T to flip switch on 4G LTE network

At an event at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show, AT&T finally offered details about its plans for 4G coverage. At today's Developer Summit, the telecom giant revealed that it plans to launch its 4G LTE network by the middle of 2011. In addition, AT&T says its HSPA+ deployment—a technology T-Mobile is touting as 4G—now covers "virtually 100 percent of its mobile broadband network" with customers seeing download speeds of up to 6Mbps (T-Mobile's flavor claims to offer download speeds of up to 21Mbps).