Probably most of You already know these videos.. I believe that these videos shows and explains how can You innovate based on certain rules and defined processes.. or not! 
In these videos You can see how IDEO, one of the most important Innovation company all over the world, is from the inside and can watch how they produce a new prototype form the scracht.
The idea is to create a new shopping car in only five days!
Tim Brown, CEO of the "innovation and design" firm IDEO, says the design profession is preoccupied with creating nifty, fashionable objects — even as pressing questions like clean water access show it has a bigger role to play. He calls for a shift to local, collaborative, participatory "design thinking."
Watch the full talk here.
Check out these great themes to be discussed in the conference!
source: GIS and Science
Mobile: The iPhone, Android, and Symbian mobile OS’s are continually advancing the state of the art. By creating a wide-spread platform that allows for third-party development and geolocation they are bringing along the whole industry. The phone is going to become the primary I/O device for geodata in the near future. What new applications are you building for it? How are the social aapps effecting society and our notions of privacy?
Realtime Mapping: Mobile phones are being used to generate maps and other geodata. Sensors across the world are capturing more data every second. Reality mining systems are being used to release this data to users in realtime. Who is making the most of this deluge? How can they handle these new data sets?
Temporal Information: Realtime data requires the element of time to be added. This is uncharted design territory. How should time come to the Web?
Rich Analysis: Web mapping is moving past just allowing the display of data (aka red-dot fever). There are now many tools online that help people analyze data and could, in time, challenge traditional GIS systems. How is the Web different? Will end-users take up richer tools?
Geolocated Web: Every updated browser can now geolocate it’s user. Websites are now going to start using this information. What should they do with the information? What new services can be created?
Mobile Advertising vs. Services: Will people pay for their mobile apps directly or through ads? Which makes for a better product, a better user experience and a more stable revenue stream?
Augmented Reality: The combination of a camera, a GPS and a compass on a mobile phone is going to let us layer information on top of the world. What do you want to see? How will you edit the layers?
3D: Photosynth-like apps are becoming more commonplace. Google’s 3D Warehouse is filled with models. It’s safe to say that 3D is here. But do we need it? What are its limits?
Open Data: Governments are treasure troves of data. Increasingly they are releasing it online for free. How does open data effect the web? How can this data be widely available and yet maintain its creators? How is this critical information being put to use?
Crisis Mapping: The tools of neogeography are being used to spread the word of humanitarian and natural disasters. What are some of the best (and worst) examples?
Open-Source: The backbone of any independant mapping site is open source software. What are the newest tools that can be used to handle the location-enabled web?
I was fortunate enough to attend a TEDxEdges Conference held in Lisbon on September 18th.
For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, let me tell you what the TED experience is like from the point of view of a girl who cannot write a line of code to save her life.
It’s a room full of (geeky) people, of which 90% are (geeky) men, all carrying their (geeky) laptops, iPhones and smartphones so they can update their (geeky) Twitter account by the minute. Actually, I took my laptop and iPhone as well, so what does that say about me?… Anyway… Of course there were some wearing suits, but I bet they wished they wore a “Portuguese Do It Better” t-shirt (in fact, one of the speakers did), because TEDx is not about business. Not at all. It’s about inspiration.
“Ideas Worth Spreading” – this is concept behind the entire TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) experience. It’s about sharing a vision, no matter on what subject. You can have a speaker talking about his dream to save Antarctica from Global Warming and the next one is presenting you a machine that turns used frying oil into scented candles. How cool is that?
The Portuguese TEDxEdges has a local, self-organized programme, where x stands for “independently organized TED event”. This time, it was all about boosting Portuguese confidence in what concerns innovation, skills, entrepreneurship and celebrate the worldwide renowned Portuguese “desenrascanço” (or, as one of the speakers put it, “our ability to pull a MacGyver”). Lovely.
The event had some heavyweights among the speakers, one of them being Carlos Zorrinho, lead responsible for the Portuguese Technological Plan, or Miguel Sales Dias from Microsoft. But if I said those star speakers did a better job than the rest I wouldn’t be fair.
If you didn’t have the chance to attend live on Second Life, and because all the presentations will soon be available at the TEDxEDGES website, I strongly recommend viewing some of them. Especially the ones by Tiago Forjaz (“Does Money Bring Happiness?”), who was truly inspirational, and the one by Paulo Glórias (“When Fun Meets Technology: A Creative Market”), where he claims that innovation is not only coming up with something completely new, but also combining different areas of expertise in a totally unexpected fashion. Like Rock and Classical Music – can anyone say Mike Oldfield? Oh, and don’t forget the one by António Murta (“Portugal, Yet Another Silicon Valley Wannabe?”), defending Portugal must stop making excuses not to excel. Part of the employees working at Israel’s top IT companies can be drafted to the army at any time in case of armed conflict. And they prevail as market leaders. No way can Portugal come up with a better excuse than that for not being creative, innovative and exceptional. And having the skilled resources and committed people as we do, it’s absolutely unforgivable.
Did you know President Barack Obama was actually advised to take Portugal as an example on how to change the education system and bring up a truly digital generation? Check it out here: http://www.grownupdigital.com/index.php/2009/06/obama-should-look-to-portugal-on-how-to-fix-schools/
Bet you didn’t know that… So why aren’t we doing better, when it’s obvious that WE CAN?
Hell, watch all presentations! You can email me ranting if you thought it was a waste of energy.
Furthermore, if you find the time, take a look at other matters mentioned during the various talks, being “The Story of Stuff” just an example: http://www.storyofstuff.com/
So, in a nutshell, if you’re lucky enough to get an invitation to a TED conference, you will sit in a packed room the entire day watching 20 minute presentations until 7p.m. – and time rushes by. Only when your legs and other parts of your body are getting numb do you check your watch and 8 hours have passed. Time does fly when you’re having so much fun! It is a true privilege to sit amongst so many dreamers, ambitious and enthusiastic people. They’re not (just) technicians; they’re simply committed and stimulating people. And where else would you get funky jazz music during coffee break?
They are planning a new TED event here in Lisbon within the next six months, one year tops. I’ll be there for sure. Because when you leave TED you’re hyped. You feel you can take on the world, your head spinning with ideas.
In the meantime, bring it on – we are ready to own the world of R&D!
Um termo que está muito na moda nos dias de hoje é o cloud-computing… Uma das possíveis definições é:
is a paradigm of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the "cloud" that supports them. (fonte: Wikipedia)
Poderia entrar em pormenores e tentar explicar o que é, o que suporta, como funciona, etc.
Neste post apenas pretendo passar a mensagem da grandiosidade desta “cloud” e todas as mais valias que são geradas…
Sandro
If you use a product that delivers something in one hour and someone tells you
“Hey you’re wasting time with it, this software can do that job in ten seconds!”
you’ll definitely try it.
Well, this situation can arise today in GIS world, when you need to execute complex algorithms that analyze great amounts of Raster or Vector data that can take hours, or even days.
If it’s possible to develop a multi-thread implementation for those algorithms, then I bet that some GIS companies are already working on it. Take for example the Manifold software, they argue that some of the functionalities of their software execute in less time than most of the GIS products that other companies offer. Although this is true for some GIS functions, which can be converted to multi-thread, the conversion using the Nvidia CUDA SDK and ATI Stream SDK is only possible for some special cases (yet). These SDKs allow the programmer to implement algorithms that can be parallelized into hundreds of processors that the GPUs may offer, instead of the 16, 8, 4 or 2 cores that the CPUs can provide in our desktops (in the short term).
ESRI and other GIS companies will not despise these technologies and they are most probably researching new ways of using it in their algorithms or products, although anyone heard about it, I bet my Euros they are…
Therefore I predict that we will have 2 orders of magnitude in performance improvement in the next year or so, for a limited set of geo-processing functionalities. The performance improvement will depend entirely on the capability of the research community in “parallelizing” the current (well known) GIS algorithms.
Right now it’s possible to create an application made in C, C++, .NET or Java that can use the CUDA C functions library to communicate with the GPU.
The CPU architecture vs. GPU architecture (the GPU can have hundreds of processor units and has a small memory cache shared across small sets of those processor units).
In short, I think this will be a huge step forward for those companies that invest in these areas (parallel GPU computing), especially if their products have functionalities which take a lot of time to execute, don’t you agree?
Um UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) é definido como um avião pilotado remotamente. Existem 2 tipos de UAVs: os modelos controlados via-rádio a partir de uma determinada localização e os modelos pré-programados com planos de voo através de sistemas complexos de automatismos. Na actualidade, estes modelos são utilizados a nível militar (para espionagem ou mesmo como arma) ou para fins científicos, de entre os quais a análise de terreno é um exemplo.
Os Sistemas de Informação Geográfica (SIG) desempenham um papel muito importante no planeamento de voos em qualquer aplicação possível para os UAVs. Recorrendo a ferramentas SIG, é possível fazer uma análise bastante complexa e extensiva de todos os parâmetros que podem influenciar um voo, como por exemplo:
Figura 1 – Análise de Turbulência
Um excelente ponto de partida para a definição do plano de voo é a colocação dos pontos de interesse do voo num mapa, de forma a que posteriormente se possam sobrepor diversas camadas – layers - com as informações acima descritas para a validação do voo.
Com o aumento de aplicações a utilizar estes dispositivos para recolha de informação é essencial centralizar toda a informação de planeamento num único SIG, com vista a melhorar a performance do voo.
As ferramentas SIG apresentam ainda uma outra vertente igualmente importante na análise dos resultados extraídos dos voos. Estes resultados podem ser representados por imagens, vídeos ou dados provenientes de qualquer tipo de sensor que permita retirar informação do terreno. Qualquer das informações referidas pode ser analisada numa aplicação SIG como, por exemplo a análise de uma determinada característica do terreno:
Figura 2 – Análise de características do terreno
Por fim, os vídeos podem ser reproduzidos sobre um mapa, tornando possível a visualização em vídeo da área estudada. Pode ainda ser feito processamento de imagens multiespectrais com ferramentas específicas de análise (por exemplo ENVI) para detectar algum tipo de objecto ou fonte de calor.
Figura 3 – Visualização do vídeo do voo sobre um mapa
Mapas, gráficos, estatísticas, tabelas, são apenas alguns exemplos de representações visuais de informação com que lidamos no nosso dia-a-dia.
Visualizar a informação de forma clara e efectiva, através de símbolos, elementos e composições gráficas, e por vezes até recorrendo a animações e efeitos para representar situações como a evolução dos dados com o decorrer do tempo ou sob o efeito de factores relevantes, fornecem ao espectador uma informação rica, auto explicativa, elegante e descritiva, que, na maioria dos casos, se torna o ponto-chave para o sucesso de projectos que envolva dados em grande escala.
Novas, modernas e inovadoras abordagens à “leitura” da informação conseguem-se com composições cada vez mais complexas que demonstram de forma mais simples os conceitos principiais de dados, informação e concepções abstractas, que de outra forma seriam impossíveis de representar e analisar quase momentaneamente, como situações de risco, interacções e interligações.
Fontes de inspiração
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/06/50-great-examples-of-data-visualization/
A partir de amanhã, e com uma cadência semanal serão colocados vários posts neste blog… Estes posts serão colocados não por mim mas por alguns dos meus colegas com os quais trabalho no meu dia-a-dia…
Entre os temas habituais serão também colocadas reflexões sobre sistemas de informação, novas tendências, desenvolvimento de software, integração de tecnologias, etc.
Todos os comentários são bem vindos e serão a única forma de aumentarmos a partilha do conhecimento entre todos!
Sandro
