India’s NPTEL lectures online
India follows MIT opencourseware, with those great lectures on a wide range of topics. I’m viewiing the ones by professor Dasgupta on Artificial Intelligence.
08.26.07God is in the chapel!
Europe's largest computer is housed in my university in a chapel near the rectorate. I guess it could be a good place to look for God if it is a really big number. Very pretty, I wonder if it's running useful programs though. Afaik you can request cpu time for free for non-profits or research projects. 
Can it be done with transistors?
I’m reading Jeff Hawkins On Intelligence, and at the same time thinking about the necesary steps that should be done in order to make computers behave more like humans. In parallel I’ve been reviewing some papers in OCR, one about detection of regions on pictures with text, Textual region location in complex images using test feature classifiers and other about recognition of handwriten numerals, Recognition o fhandwritten numerals using topological structures and Fourier descriptors of numeral contours (thanks to proffesor Xavier Maldague o f université Laval). It’s suprising how hard we are trying in making computers do human-like tasks. If we look at it from the perspective of how the brain cortex works according to Hawkins, the way engineering looks at the problem may be a lot faster for finite state machines to work with, but I doubt it can be as flexible as the human way. Read the rest of this entry »
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