FxGqlC v2.3

A new version of FxGqlC has been released.

The major changes are documented here:
https://sites.google.com/site/fxgqlc/home/fxgqlc-manual/changes-in-fxgqlc-2-3

You can download FxGqlC v2.3 here:
https://sites.google.com/site/fxgqlc/home/downloads

Faculty Summit 2012: Online Education Panel

Posted by Peter Norvig, Director of Research

On July 26th, Google's 2012 Faculty Summit hosted computer science professors from around the world for a chance to talk and hear about some of the work done by Google and by our faculty partners. One of the sessions was a panel on Online Education. Daphne Koller's presentation on "Education at Scale" describes how a talk about YouTube at the 2009 Google Faculty Summit was an early inspiration for her, as she was formulating her approach that led to the founding of Coursera. Koller started with the goal of allowing Stanford professors to have more time for meaningful interaction with their students, rather than just lecturing, and ended up with a model based on the flipped classroom, where students watch videos out of class, and then come together to discuss what they have learned. She then refined the flipped classroom to work when there is no classroom, when the interactions occur in online discussion forums rather than in person. She described some fascinating experiments that allow for more flexible types of questions (beyond multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank) by using peer grading of exercises.

In my talk, I describe how I arrived at a similar approach but starting with a different motivation: I wanted a textbook that was more interactive and engaging than a static paper-based book, so I too incorporated short videos and frequent interactions for the Intro to AI class I taught with Sebastian Thrun.

Finally, Bradley Horowitz, Vice President of Product Management for Google+ gave a talk describing the goals of Google+. It is not to build the largest social network; rather it is to understand our users better, so that we can serve them better, while respecting their privacy, and keeping each of their conversations within the appropriate circle of friends. This allows people to have more meaningful conversations, within a limited context, and turns out to be very appropriate to education.

By bringing people together at events like the Faculty Summit, we hope to spark the conversations and ideas that will lead to the next breakthroughs, perhaps in online education, or perhaps in other fields. We'll find out a few years from now what ideas took root at this year's Summit.

Regular expression matching in C++11

A part of the boost (http://www.boost.org/) functionality regarding regular expressions has been included in the new C++11/C++0x standard.

This code works on GCC and even on Visual C++ 10 (Visual Studio 2010) and above:
    std::regex rgx("(\S+@\S+)");

    std::smatch result;
    std::string str = std::regex_replace(std::string("please send an email to my@mail.com for more information"), rgx, std::string("<$1>"));
    // str contains the same text, but with the e-mail address enclosed between <...>.

More information on regular expressions can be found here: http://www.regular-expressions.info/ .

Replace all occurrences of a character in a std::string with another character

in one line of C++ code, using C++11/C++0x:

std::string str = "my#string";
std::for_each(str.begin(), str.end(), [] (char &ch) { if (ch == '#') ch = '\\'; }  );
// str now contains my\string

The for_each function code calls the lambda expression (indicated in yellow) for every character, and the lambda expression replaces the '#' with a '\'

The future of technology?

Click the image to make it bigger:

Source: http://envisioningtech.com/

2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2030 2040 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2019 2020 2030 2040 ROBOTICS BIOTECH MATERIALS ENERGY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SENSORS GEOENGINEERING QUANTITATIVE FORECASTS INTERNET INTERFACES UBICOMP SPACE BITS ATOMS RELATIVE IMPORTANCE CONSUMER IMPACT CLUSTER OF TECHNOLOGIES The node size indicates the predicted importance of a technology. The outline of a node indicates a consumer impact larger than the technological novelty. A jagged outline indicates a cluster of similar technologies grouped together. World population: 8 billion Source: U.N. – http://bit.ly/7nqQkS World population: 7 billion BRICs GDP overtakes the G7 Source: Goldman Sachs – http://bit.ly/nc9Wqj Petabyte storage standard Source: http://bit.ly/r9BYQc Exabyte storage standard Source: http://bit.ly/kPMKMb Terabit internet speed standard Source: http://bit.ly/kPMKMb World population: 9 billion Source: U.N. – http://bit.ly/7nqQkS Source: http://bit.ly/6MoQJc Sources: Intel – http://intel.ly/pWbH04 Ericsson – http://bit.ly/avvVok Alan Conroy – http://bit.ly/pofHp5 FutureTimeline – http://bit.ly/qz4ben Sources: Intel – http://intel.ly/pWbH04 InternetWorldStats – http://bit.ly/AKbO5 Source: U.N. – http://bit.ly/7nqQkS Global online population: ± 2 billion Connected devices: ±10 billion Global online population: 4-5 billion Connected devices: 30-50 billion $150 Hard disk: ±200 Tb Standard RAM: ±750Gb Global online population: ± 2.5 billion Connected devices: ±15 billion $ 1.000 computer reaches the capacity of the human brain (± 10 15 calculations per second) Vertical farming Weather engineering Seasteading Desalination Carbon sequestration Climate engineering Arcologies Commercial spaceflight Sub-orbital spaceflight Lunar outpost Mars mission Solar sail Space elevator Space tourism Inductive chargers Thorium reactor Traveling wave reactor Fuel cells Multi-segmented smart grids Biomechanical harvesting Bio-enhanced fuels Artificial photosynthesis Space-based solar power Piezoelectricity Photovoltaic glass Nanogenerators Enernet Tidal turbines Programmable matter Personal fabricators Molecular assembler Metamaterials Additive manufacturing Graphene Optical invisibility cloaks Biomaterials Carbon nanotubes Self-healing materials Nanowires Antiaging drugs Stem-cell treatments In-vitro meat Nanomedicine Artificial retinas Rapid personal gene sequencing Synthetic biology Personalized medicine Gene therapy Hybrid assisted limbs Smart drugs Synthetic blood Organ printing Smart toys Robotic surgery Telematics Appliance robots Self-driving vehicles Domestic robots Powered exoskeleton Embodied avatars Swarm robotics Utility fog Commercial UAVs Fabric-embedded screens Reprogrammable chips Picoprojectors Volumetric (3D) screens Flexible screens Skin-embedded screens Modular computers Tablets Boards Retinal screens Eyewear-embedded screens Context-aware computing Smart power meters Biometric sensors Machine vision Optogenetics Depth imaging Biomarkers Neuroinformatics Near-field communication Pervasive video capture Computational photography Speech recognition Haptics 4K Augmented reality Gesture recognition Multi touch Immersive virtual reality Holography Telepresence 4G 5G Cloud computing Interplanetary internet Exocortex Photonics Virtual currencies Cyberwarfare Mesh networking Reputation economy Remote presence VR-only lifeforms Machineaugmented cognition Software agents High-frequency trading Natural language interpretation Procedural storytelling Machine translation Research & visualization by Michell Zappa mz@envisioningtech mz@envisioningtech.com mz@envisioningtech.com Envisioning emerging technology for 2012 and beyond Last updated: 2012-02-10 Understanding where technology is heading is more than guesswork. Looking at emerging trends and research, one can predict and draw conclusions about how the technological sphere is developing, and which technologies should become mainstream in the coming years. Envisioning technology is meant to facilitate these observations by taking a step back and seeing the wider context. By speculating about what lies beyond the horizon we can make better decisions of what to create today. BY SA

Improving Google Patents with European Patent Office patents and the Prior Art Finder

Posted by Jon Orwant, Engineering Manager

Cross-posted with the US Public Policy Blog, the European Public Policy Blog, and Inside Search Blog

At Google, we're constantly trying to make important collections of information more useful to the world. Since 2006, we’ve let people discover, search, and read United States patents online. Starting this week, you can do the same for the millions of ideas that have been submitted to the European Patent Office, such as this one.

Typically, patents are granted only if an invention is new and not obvious. To explain why an invention is new, inventors will usually cite prior art such as earlier patent applications or journal articles. Determining the novelty of a patent can be difficult, requiring a laborious search through many sources, and so we’ve built a Prior Art Finder to make this process easier. With a single click, it searches multiple sources for related content that existed at the time the patent was filed.

Patent pages now feature a “Find prior art” button that instantly pulls together information relevant to the patent application.

The Prior Art Finder identifies key phrases from the text of the patent, combines them into a search query, and displays relevant results from Google Patents, Google Scholar, Google Books, and the rest of the web. You’ll start to see the blue “Find prior art” button on individual patent pages starting today.

Our hope is that this tool will give patent searchers another way to discover information relevant to a patent application, supplementing the search techniques they use today. We’ll be refining and extending the Prior Art Finder as we develop a better understanding of how to analyze patent claims and how to integrate the results into the workflow of patent searchers.

These are small steps toward making this collection of important but complex documents better understood. Sometimes language can be a barrier to understanding, which is why earlier this year we released an update to Google Translate that incorporates the European Patent Office’s parallel patent texts, allowing the EPO to provide translation between English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Swedish, with more languages scheduled for the future. And with the help of the United States Patent & Trademark Office, we’ve continued to add to our repository of USPTO bulk data, making it easier for researchers and law firms to analyze the entire corpus of US patents. More to come!

Export of Office Outlook contacts to GMail

To import your Microsoft Office Outlook contacts to GMail or Google Apps, you need to export them first to a CSV file.

• In Outlook, go to the "File" tab in the ribbon menu, and click "Options" in the left sidebar.
• In the Outlook Options dialog, click on "Advanced" in the sidebar, and click the "Export" button. 
• In the first step of the Import and Export wizard, select "Export to a file", and click "Next".
• In the second step, select "Comma Separated Values (Windows)", and click "Next".
• In the third step, select your Contacts folder that you want to export (normally "Contacts"), and click "Next".
• In the fourth step, enter or select the filename, e.g. "contacts.csv".
• Click "Finish" to start the export.

When you import this file in GMail, and you are a member of a Windows Active Directory domain, the e-mail addresses are not imported.  Instead, the e-mail address field in GMail contains the "distinguished name" of your contact as known to your ActiveDirectory.  E.g. "cn=jsmith,ou=promotions,ou=marketing,dc=noam,dc=reskit,dc=com".
The real e-mail address is however included in the CSV file, as part of the column "E-mail Display Name", which contains the full name and the regular e-mail address between parentheses, but this column isn't used by the GMail import.

You could replace all E-Mail Addresses in the file using an Excel formula, or manually in a text-editor.
Or you can simply use this FxGqlC command to replace all e-mail address columns with the e-mail address taken from the display name:

select replaceregex($line, '\"/o=.*?\",\"EX\",(\".*?\((.*?)\)\")', '"$2","EX",$1') into [contacts2.csv] from [contacts.csv]

The same method can be used to replace national telephone numbers into an international format:
select replaceregex($line, '\+?(32\d{8,9})', '+$1') into [meucci3.csv] from [meucci2.csv]

You need to adopt the regular expression to a format appropriate for your contacts.

Import the resulting file in GMail, and that's it.