The second half of the morning covered in the labs briefings from Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, and AT&T as well as a fun bit on John von Neumann by George Dyson.

Rick Rashid talked for Microsoft...focussed on devices they are developing, one of which a person wears in order to capture (and digitize) as much information as possible about the person's environment for further use. Another, like the map table at Applied Minds, was a desktop surface which combined real time image analysis with a projector so you could use direct physical manipulation of objects which may have other images projected onto them from the projector. Eg: a sheet of paper is turned into a viewport for a set of images.

Gary Flake talked about Yahoo! Labs and the work they are doing there. He introduced a new game called the Tech Buzz Game which Yahoo is using to tap the collective wisdom of the web which I initially thought was comparable to Slashdot's moderation and meta-moderation, but is instead more comparable to the delphi coracle of John Brunner's Shockwave Rider. There's a couple things going on, first they've defined a new market auction concept: Dynamic Pari-mutuel Auction. That this works by having people predict the popularity (or obscurity) of various terms in search land, in the specific case a Buzz index. If your prediction is correct you get more "dollars" to spend and bet on further predictions. They developed this in tandem with a company named NewsFutures. That it's an electronic market in outcome prediction. The market is infinitely liquid and does not require a market maker (these are my notes, not necessarily my opinions).

Peter Norvig talked about Google Labs. I...I didn't take many notes, which generally means I wasn't interested or didn't find anything to note down. He demoed a personalized version of search but it wasn't clear if it's live yet. Basically you slide a scale ranging from no personalization to (I guess) high personalization based on a profile you've completed. The search results are then filtered based on the intersection between your profile, your personalization level, and the actual results.

The only bit I'll note from George Dyson's talk was this quote which I'm certainly mangling: Real Progress is crossing phenomena which he may have attributed to Nils A. Barricelli though I wasn't too clear on that.

Kevin Kealey presented from AT&T. Mostly about spam, and the realization from AT&T's perspective that all this crap is weighing down their networks and costing them real money. So they have developed technology (which he's going into further in a session I just missed) to filter spam/spim/spit and bots and whatnot at the network layer.