Alien watch

Watch What I Watch

This paper presents a high-level overview of Yahoo Research Berkeley’s approach to multimedia research and the ideas motivating it. This approach is characterized primarily by a shift away from building subsystems that attempt to discover or understand the “meaning” of media content toward systems and algorithms that can usefully utilize information about how media content is being used in spec...

The alien hand syndrome: What makes the alien hand alien?

The alien hand syndrome is a deeply puzzling phenomenon in which brain-damaged patients experience their limb performing seemingly purposeful acts without their intention. Furthermore, the limb may interfere with the actions of their normal limb. We report a case of alien hand syndrome following a left medial frontal and corpus callosum ischemic lesion. From our clinical observations and the pa...

Alien hand sign or alien hand syndrome?

Industry Watch

The last six months have seen a number of interesting announcements and products in the commercial language technology arena. Here are some that caught my eye, and which you might find interesting too. First, let’s look at the text analytics world (more on that term below). A number of the major vendors in this space have announced new versions of their software, and a lot of the activity here ...

Security Watch

I n the computer industry, standards play an important role by enforcing security baselines and enabling compatibilities among products. In the early days of computing, lacking common agreements, problems ensued with floating point configurations, ASCII vs. EBCDIC encoding battles, and little vs. big endian data mixups. Such issues, especially when they affect data integrity, can pose a securit...