Computer Science Weblog (some links from the December 2000 surfing)

http://www.codeproject.com

If there was an ArturMarques.com "site of the year" award, its 2000 edition would *easily* go to CodeProject.com, one of the most brilliant websites of the whole Internet.

The Code Project is so rich in features and so well presented, that you simply can NOT point something wrong with it and you surely will have a hard time thinking about how to improve it! It offers interviews, reviews, chapters of commercial books, forums, and a selective, nearly perfect, coverage of what is happening in the "coding community".

CodeProject.com's contents aren't the only thing to praise on this website. If you care to know about the people who are behind it, then be amazed with the commitment of a girl and some boys, living in Australia, Germany and the USA...

http://www.sourcexchange.com

SourceXchange is a brilliant idea. This website is all about developers and sponsors: the first do the coding; the second do the funding. This way, if you have a project that needs money, you could propose it and cross the fingers, waiting for something that has already happened to a dozen of people: an affirmative answer and the successful conclusion of the initial concept.

Sponsors don't need to be organizations and developers don't need to be teams. This way, if you aren't that much of a programmer, or if you just want to "bet" on a project that you believe in, then you can easily do it. On the other hand, if you are alone on your bedroom, you won't be discriminated, although you'll have to be someone very special, to rival some of the teams who apply to challenges, proposed by sponsors.

http://www.miccai.org/

The MICCAI 98 was the first international conference on medical image computing and computer-assisted intervention. Since then, the MICCAI didn't die and it debuted a website of its own, out of the MIT URL (www.ai.mit.edu/conferences/miccai98) who first hosted it.

From my point of view, to a certain extent, some forms surgery require more dexterity, than formal knowledge of Medicine, meaning that some brilliant doctors simply don't dare doing it. This also means that many medical interventions have a very high risk of failure, just because of the natural lack of precision, of the human hand. For example, some ear implants end up damaging the facial muscles of the ones being implanted, because such muscles are *very* near the auditory nerve...

Imagine the lack of tremor of robotic technology, with the sensibility of the human hand! But this was just an example.

If you are interested in present and future software and hardware for medical purposes, make sure you attend the MICCAI, or, at least, browse its website.

http://www.ai.mit.edu/events/colloquium

There is edge technology and there is beyond the edge! The MIT AI Lab (Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) is committed to spreading the word on what's beyond the edge! If you want to know what currently are the state-of-the-art efforts in Computer Science, then there is one very obvious place to go, and that is the MIT AI colloquiums page, from the URL above.

Visiting the MIT AI Lab colloquiums page, should give you an abstract view what of people are trying to achieve. I found it very interesting that many works are using biological approaches to problems, as a la Creatures, or a la Gil :).

One of the most interesting events of 2000, was Tom Knight's "Computing with Life", held on September 28. Tom talked about embedding digital logic within living cells, using protein concentration as an intracellular signal... ie, he talked about biochips. His motivation makes lots of sense, as the simplest cells are better sensors than the most expensive robots, thus making better and cheaper input devices, for many robotic appliances.