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Digital Planet: 03/06/2008

Factual: Science & Nature

03/06/2008

BBC World Service - Digital Planet, 03/06/2008

Technology news with Gareth Mitchell and Bill Thompson. Every Tuesday.

WINDOWS 7
Microsoft has been giving a sneak preview of Windows 7, the follow up to Vista at a technology event called All Things Digital in San Diego. Bill Gates was there, just ahead of standing down from the day to day running of the company. In a panel interview he was joined by the current Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Before a demonstration of Windows 7, the pair spent time addressing criticisms of Windows Vista.


RECONSTRUCTING THE STASI FILES
Following the unification of Germany, its citizens have been keen to discover some of the information held on them by the Stasi secret police. There were files kept for 6 million people, and many were shed at the fall of the Berlin wall. A decade ago, researchers began the massive task of reassembling the documents – 45 million in all. It’s data recovery that could take decades. But now a team at Berlin's Frauenhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology has been using the latest image recognition technology to speed up the process. Digital Planet’s Tristana Moore reports from Berlin.


SEMANTIC WEB
Training for students where learning exercises are videoed with the idea that playback is coming under greater scrutiny thanks to the semantic web. For the tutors, selecting relevant extracts to review is time consuming. Now a team at Southampton University's School of Electronics and Computer Science has developed an annotation system where key moments are logged as the training’s going on. The system is something of a proving ground for next generation web search based on meaning, the ‘semantic’ web. The leading researcher joins Gareth Mitchell to discuss it further.


RIDER SPOKE
How do you make art out of blanket wifi coverage, a wireless enabled computer, a smart phone, GPS and a bicycle? Well, an artistic collective called Blast Theory has the answer. They’ve specialised in fusing art and technology since the company’s inception in 1991. One of their latest projects, Rider Spoke, is a case in point. Colin Grant climbed aboard his bike to take part in the interactive offering at the recent International Brighton Festival.

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