Explainer: Autonomous and Semi-autonomous vehicles
You’ve heard of autonomous vehicles — cars that can drive themselves. But what you may not know is that there are actually multiple levels of possible autonomy, and we’re living with some of those early levels now with newer vehicles that includes advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). These systems help with safety and comfortable driving. […]
11 Lessons from Microsoft
(Alex Hinrichs, a long-time Microsoft release manager, just announced his retirement. Here are some of the lessons he’s learned, posted on LinkedIn). I heartily agree with all of these! Engineering is all about people. Big software projects are built by giant human systems, and giant human systems run on relationships. Good relationships require trust. Trust is built via daily face-to-face […]
Beat Box Breakdown: Board Game Creation
Here are some pictures, as well as some of the instructions for the game. Your hip-hop journey in Beat Box Breakdown travels in a clockwise spiral as you move from listener to garage rapping to freestyling in local venues to national online acclaim and then opening in national stadiums, culminating in Coachella, Los Angeles and […]
TED Talk: Balancing Life in Writing and Tech
I recently had the opportunity to talk at some length with an engaged set of students. (I talk regularly to school groups, and if you’d like to book me to talk to your school group, you can contact my booking agent here.) We discussed both my high tech career as well as my writing, and […]
Trains, planes and Seattle supercommuters
Reprint: Seattle Times For two years, technology product manager Ned Hayes would rise before the sun at 4 a.m. every Monday to drive to SeaTac airport from his home in Olympia. He would hop a flight to San Jose, Calif., and arrive at his workplace in Palo Alto just in time for the weekly 9:30 […]
Glasses as the Ultimate Interface
Brain interface glasses! I have to admit this has been my ultimate dream, for a long time. In fact, I even wrote a chapter in my technology book about “invisible” or nearly invisible interfaces as the wave of the future. In February 2008, there’s finally a high-fidelity brain to computer interface — they even have an acronym […]
Multi-Modal Computing – What it could mean
In 1998, there were research groups looking at multi-modality, and by 2000, folks involved in standards creation were already thinking about multi-modal inputs. Today, Google has a group devoted to multi-modal inputs, although the Wiki is a little bare. New stuff over at IBM on this topic. CTG (from whom I borrowed the accompanying graphic to this post), specializes in multi-modal […]