Archive of month: 2010

Tesseract optical character recognition to read plaques

The tesseract engine (wikipedia) is a very capable OCR package, I’m playing with it after a thought for my AI Handbook plan. OCR is a pretty interesting subject, it drove a lot of early computer research as it was used to automate paper filing for banks and companies like Readers Digest. This TesseractOSCON paper gives […]
14 years ago

New book/wiki – a practical artificial intelligence ‘cookbook’

Having almost completed The Screencasting Handbook I’m now thinking about my next project. I’ve been involved in the field of artificial intelligence since my first computer (a Commodore 64 back in the 80s) and I’ve continued to be paid to work in this area since the end of the 90s. Update – as mentioned below […]
14 years ago

22nd £5 App Write-up for WildLife, Plaques, Robots, Go and Golf Gadgets

Last night we ran our 22nd £5 App event, videos for each speaker are listed below. The lovely Thayer Prime of Data.Gov.Uk provided us with 3 copies of Programming the Semantic Web to give away, this was particularly well timed given the semantic nature of our two main talks. Thanks Thayer! WildLife Near You by […]
14 years ago

£5 App Tues 30th March – Wildlife, Robots and Plaques

On Tuesday 30th March we’ll have our 22nd £5 App night running from 8pm at The Skiff. We’ll have: Wildlife Near You by Simon Willison and Natalie Downe Open Plaques by Jez Nicholson and Simon Harriyott BotBuilder robots by Steve Carpenter ScoreSure Golf Pro by Chris (video) as a Show n’Tell Jamie Campbell on Google’s […]
14 years ago

Science companies around Brighton

Two years back I posted an entry listing the science companies I knew around Brighton who are involved in high-tech software (i.e. not science companies who make physical products). The list has changed a bit with some nice additions so I’ve updated it below.  If you know of one that I’m missing do send me […]
14 years ago

Fix for ConceptNet error “Settings cannot be imported, because environment variable DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE is undefined”

If you’re using ConceptNet and you see: ImportError: Settings cannot be imported, because environment variable DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE is undefined. then the fix is simple (I’ve been hacking away at an idea whilst at IUI2010 – thanks Rob for the fix). To replicate the error run: from csc.nl import get_nl en_nl = get_nl('en') en_nl.is_stopword('the') The fix is […]
14 years ago

Intelligent User Interfaces 2010 conference

I’m at IUI 2010, this is a mostly academic conference focused on using new techniques to make intelligent user interfaces.  I’ll update this entry as the conference proceeds. Day 1 (Sunday) – Workshops I’m in the Eye Gaze for Intelligent Human Machine Interaction workshop, there’s a full breakdown of this session’s talks here. The talks […]
14 years ago

pyCUDA on Windows and Mac for super-fast Python math using CUDA

I’ve just started to play with pyCUDA which lets you run parallel math operations on a CUDA-compliant NVidia graphics card through Python. Update – I’ve written a High Performance Python tutorial (July 2011, 55 pages) which covers pyCUDA and other technologies, you might find it useful. CUDA stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture – it […]
14 years ago

Come to my screencasting SkillSwap in Brighton on Jan 27th

On January 27th here in Brighton I’m co-running a SkillSwap evening, I’ll spend 45 minutes teaching screencasting (based on a Mac) and Andy White will spend 45 minutes teaching podcasting.  We’ll cover planning, recording, editing, distributing and mics between us. We’re both aiming the talks at freelancers (so they can communicate better with clients) and […]
14 years ago