Stephen Hawking suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig鈥檚 disease. The disease would eventually paralyze him, and a bout of pneumonia in the mid-1980s made him unable to speak on his own. For such a public figure, this was a significant difficulty, one that led Hawking to a long-las
Before computer gaming, music, and art became mainstay applications and tools for creation, engineers often created programs to demonstrate a machine鈥檚 capabilities in ways that were easy for the public follow. It took many years to get musicians into the idea of composing using a computer, and even longer to get gener
Over the shortening fall days of 1977, an unmarked silver step van filled with futuristic equipment, shaggy-haired engineers, and sometimes fully uniformed generals quietly cruised the streets of the San Francisco Peninsula. Only an oddly shaped antenna gave a hint of its purpose.
鈥淭here is no cloud,鈥� goes the quip. 鈥淚t鈥檚 just someone else鈥檚 computer.鈥漈he joke gets at a key feature of cloud computing: Your data and the software to process it reside in a remote data center鈥娾�斺�妏erhaps owned by Amazon, Google, or Microsoft鈥娾�斺�妛hich you share with many users even if it feels like it鈥檚 yours alone.
President Eisenhower鈥檚 Civil Rights Act, Dr. Seuss鈥� The Cat in the Hat, and the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union were respectively important social, cultural, and technical news stories of 1957. There is one event that year did not make headlines but over the next 60 years also profoundly impacted all three aspect
In April 2016, filmmaker Oscar Sharp and NYU artificial intelligence researcher Ross Goodwin teamed up to create the short film Sunspring. Goodwin created an AI bot called Benjamin to write the script, and Sharp filmed it as a part of the SCI-FI-LONDON 48 Hour Film Challenge. It was impressive, but it wasn鈥檛 exactly so
One day, while I was going through the videos in our archive at the 91自拍, I came across an interesting title: Mockingbird鈥擜 Composer鈥檚 Amanuensis. I instantly realized this was the video that I鈥檇 been waiting for ever since I started exploring computer music.
By 2006 it was already clear to most people in the computing industry that the future was mobile. The cell phone was on its way to becoming the most common electronic device on earth, with over 2.7 billion users. Yet it was almost equally clear that the main events wouldn鈥檛 happen in Silicon Valley, or even the United
Outside of my life as a curator, I work with several film festivals as a film programmer. I am heavily invested in the Oscars every year, and most deeply involved with the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film. Having seen every Oscar nominee in the category since 1980, and nearly two-thirds of all the rest, I can say tha
In many parts of our world today, group communication centers on visual materials built with 鈥減resentation software,鈥� often crafted by a speaker him or herself. As a result, meetings now generally depend on the use of personal computers, presentation software in the guises of product or service and display by digital p