Computational Information Geometry Wonderland

Last February, I was strikingly introduced with the truly pioneer work of visionary artist Albert ROBIDA (http://www.robida.info/). In short, Robida painted over 60.000 drawings and illustrated well over 200 books in his artist life. Albert Robida envisionned not only many IT products well ahead of his time, but he was also already awared and convinced of ecology problems. To give a remarkable example of Robida's visionary talent, let us point out that Robida imagined and painted a deviced called the phonoscope in 1883. The phonoscope is simply the precursor of the 21st century home theater (see imghttp://www.robida.info/images/visionnaire/journal_telephonoscopique.jpg). It is related to Edison's telephonoscope , also disclosed in an invention report in 1879 (imghttp://www.flickr.com/photos/seriykotik/208841133/). Perhaps, more strikingly, Robida envisionned the e-learning application with a remote teacher giving a lecture for a student at home: imghttp://www.robida.info/images/visionnaire/cours.jpg However, for most of the people, the most striking drawing we saw was the ancestor of the Mp3 Walkman at imghttp://www.robida.info/images/visionnaire/phono-operagraphe.jpg In this illustation, you can observe a shepherd (a walk man) listening to music in mountains. In other words, the music devices we carry everyday was already imagined two centuries ago. If such a device was already imagined, was about recording music? Very recent work carried out in March 2008 by American audio historians recovered the first recorded sound by little-known
parisian Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville on April 9, 1860: Au Clair de la Lune, a French folk song (an ex. Scott's 1857 drawing of a phonautographic recording session was discloded in his patent paperwork registered at the french intellectual property office (INPI). More details of the ingenious process that consists in printing the sound on a sheet of paper is explained at linkhttp://www.firstsounds.org/ Note that the device could not play sounds back. (Edison used a sheet of tinfoil to record in 1927 ?Mary had a little lamb", see http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/recording/mary.html)

To conclude, let us mention that Albert Robida also wrote and illustrated the book "The Electric Life" where he depicts life in the 20th century and warns mankind of the potential danger of using non-controlled technology. How timely! We're all now fully aware and have imminently to face this issue.

Frank Nielsen.

A few links:.

A short biography:.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Robida

Robida's "Twentieth Century" book:.

http://www.amazon.com/Twentieth-Century-Classics-Science-Fiction/dp/0819566802/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208178705&sr=1-1

History of the first recorded sound:.
http://www.firstsounds.org/

... Robida ? 19?????? 20???????????????????????????? 60,000??????? 200??????????????????????????????????????????????? (http://www.robida.info/)????????????? IT ????????????????????????????????????????????????

Robida ????????????????????????1883????????? ? "phonoscope" ????????????? "phonoscope" ?????????????????????????????????? 1879?? Edison ? "telephonoscope" ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????Robida ??? "e-?????" ???????????? ?????????????????????????????????????? ... WALKMAN ??????????????????? (a walk man) ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ... ?????????????????????????????????????????????????? ????????????????????? (2008?3?) ??????????????? Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville ? 1860 ?4?9???????????? Au Clair de la Lune ?????????? ??????????Scott ???? 1857?????? phonautographic ????????????????????? (INPI) ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????? ?????????????????(??????????????) ??????????????????? (???? Edison ?1927????????????????????????????)

??? Albert Robida ????????? "The Electric Life" ??????????????? 20???????????????????????????????????????????????????? ...

Frank NIELSEN, excerpts 2008.

Yesterday, on my way to the coffee machine, I had a look at Science mag issue. Looking at the short perspective articles, I found the one labeled/tagged "computer science" that grabbed my attention.

Cultural modeling in real time
www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/317/5844/1509

I enjoyed reading much because (1) it is short but informative, (2) it is dedicated to a wide audience, (3) it describes a recent trend.

The focus is on building behavorial models of peope/groups to be able to predict conflicting situations (eg., Iraq, Darfour, etc.), something that goes by the name of computational cultural reasoning. These terms seem at first glance contradictory, but they are not as the author Prof. Subrahmanian (CS Dpt@UMD/USA) exemplified daily working systems: T-REX, SCPER, KEDS, etc. crunching text/video sources.

The ultimate question is to know whether we can automatically learn "determining conditions" from social data news such as blog/utube, and other SNS services. Informally, from the viewpoint of signal theory, can we observe and predict spike activities that human analysts may easily miss due to the amount of heterogeneous data to consider?

Science mag did a great job in populating its space with CS columns recently. Another perspective on the Sept 21st issue is due by B. Chazelle (CS@Princeton/USA) that summarizes the last decade of progress in coding and computing. Definitely, a good point to emphasize the S in cS!

Coding and computing join forces