IT Happens : November 2003 Monthly News Notice of IT Happenings
Issue - 29

Feature of the month
AUTOMATIC SPEECH TRANSLATOR
Researchers at IBM are on the verge of using computers to bring people closer together with a system that translates spoken language on the fly. The speech-to-speech effort started a couple of years ago “as an adventurous research project,” says David Nahamoo, manager of the human-language technologies group at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. 
The group has now built a working prototype: a laptop computer uses speech recognition software to process spoken words into text; sophisticated translation algorithms convert the text into a second language; and then the computer uses text-to-speech technology to “speak” the translated phrase. 
So far, the prototype works only for English and Mandarin Chinese. The IBM team chose these languages in part because so many people speak them; another reason is that they represent extremes of differences in just about any linguistic parameter for instance, in “prosody,” or the meaning given to a word or sentence by the speaker's inflection. The system works with phrases likely to be used in specific situations, namely, travelers ordering in a restaurant, navigating a city, or seeking emergency medical care. Project coordinator Yuqing Gao says the laptop prototype works well enough for two people speaking different languages to carry on a rudimentary conversation. 
A version of the system that runs on a personal digital assistant is already in development, and though the group isn't planning work with other languages, the technology is language independent; once a need is identified, it can rapidly be applied to any pair of languages. It is likely to appear in laptops or personal digital assistants by mid-2004.

(Source : www.cnn.com)

IT-Quote

IT Snippets
Digital Reps never get cranky
Imagine that you're struck in traffic on your way to the airport. Clearly you need to make a new reservation ,so you connect to a travel Web site using your 
3G-enabled mobile phone-but you're too preoccupied to key in the codes. You click on the “talk to an agent” button , and a face instantly appears on your screen. Even through traffic noise drowns out her voice occasionally, you can fill in the blanks by reading her lips. In only a few minutes, you''ve updated your reservation and you reach the airport within minutes to spare all thanks to the agent-the virtual agent.

Researchers at AT&T may have hit on technology that could greatly improve the interaction between man and machine with its Sample-Based Visual Text to Speech technology. This is a new technique that lets any computer put a friendly and convincingly humanlike-face on its speech based communications backbone.
AT&T's solution breaks speech down to the visime(visual phoneme) level and records each discrete position of the mouth(some of which are on-screen for as little as 20 milliseconds) for later assembly. Words are formed from combinations of each of these individual mouth positions,resulting in highly accurate “readable” speech.

And it doesn't stop with the mouth. The entire face is rendered on a 3-D wireframe, and the components are pulled from the database as needed to render visimines,words,phrases and sentences combined with the proper expressions and head movements. The wire wireframing rendering lets the head be rotated 10 to 15 degrees through the recordings and storage space. When this is combined with AT&T's natural voice speech recognition technology , the result is a computer that can carry on a limited but natural conversion.
AT&T envisions the software as being particularly useful for e-commerce sites.

(Source : www.technologyreview.com

SPINTRONICS- The Emerging Science
Physicists at Stanford University of Tokyo have found a way to solve dissipation problem of electronic devices that is energy loss or dissipation, as signals pass from one transistor to the next, by manipulating a neglected property of the electron its “spin” or orientation typically described by its quantum state “up” or “down”.

Electronics relies on Ohm's Law, which says application of a voltage to many materials results in the creation of a current. That's because electrons transmit their charge through the materials. But Ohm's Law also describes the inevitable conversion of electric energy into heat when electrons encounter resistance as they pass through materials.

“ We have discovered the equivalence of a new Ohm's Law for spintronics--the emerging science of manipulating the spin of electrons for useful purposes”, says Shoucheng Zhang, a physics professor at Stanford.

The spin of the electron can be transported without any loss of energy, or dissipation. “ Furthermore this effect occurs at room temperature in materials already widely used in the semiconductor industry, such as gallium arsenide. That's important because it could enable a new generation of computing devices.

(Source : www.technologyreview.com)

http://en.wikipedia.org/

IT Humour
The boy is smoking and leaving smoke rings into the air.
The girl gets irritated with the smoke and says to her lover:” Can't you see the warnings written on the cigarettes packet, smoking is injurious to health!”

The boy replies back: “ Darling, I am a programmer. We don't worry about warnings, we only worry about errors.”

IT Quiz

1. What is Rational Rose ?

2. What is meant by Trojan horse in Computers ?

IT Quiz Solutions

1. Rational Rose is an object-oriented Unified Modeling Language (UML) software design tool by IBM intended for visual modeling and component construction of enterprise-level software applications. In much the same way a theatrical director blocks out a play, a software designer uses Rational Rose to visually create the framework for an application by blocking out classes with actors, use case elements (Ovals), objects (rectangles) and messages in a sequence diagram using drag-and-drop symbols.
   
2. In computers, a Trojan Horse is a program in which malicious or harmful code is contained inside apparently harmless programming or data in such a way that it can get control and do its chosen form of damage. A Trojan horse may be widely redistributed as part of a computer virus. The term comes from Homer's lliad. In the Trojan War, the Greeks presented the citizens of Troy with a large wooden horse in which they had secretly hidden their warriors.