AT&T Labs Research

Haptic steering wheel and other cloud-based services showcased by AT&T researchers

by: Staff, May 1, 2012

The recent Living the Networked Life showcase was a chance for AT&T researchers to demo new projects: a bio-acoustic door lock, a car system that alerts when you forget an item, Air Graffiti for air-tagging locations with art, photos, sounds, or other information. What's the connection?

All are cloud-based services designed to make life easier, and all experiment with innovative interfaces. As one example, a steering wheel uses haptics to convey navigation information more seamlessly and with less distraction than audio or visual cues. Read more.

◄

►

Mihai Pătraşcu is a recipient of Presburger Award

Mihai Pătraşcu is a joint recipient of the EATCS 2012 Presburger Award, which acknowleges the contributions of young scientists in theoretical computer science.

The problems studied by Pătraşcu involve efficient data structures and understanding how computers can most efficiently represent and manipulate data. His contributions to fundamental results on lower bounds for data structures revolutionized and revitalized a field that was silent for over a decade.

Technology-driven plot lines, by AT&T

In an episode of Touch, a Fox TV drama about human interconnectivity, a father aims his smart phone at a building to retrieve a message left by his autistic son. This scene both advances the story and demonstrates Air Graffiti^TM, prototype technology from AT&T Research to tag a physical location "in the air" with videos, photos, and songs.

Story and technology are even more tightly integrated in the Daybreak web series debuting May 31.

Postscript to the Netflix Prize contest

Those who followed the Netflix Prize might wonder what happened with the $1M-winning solution. A blog post by Netflix reveals the $1M solution was never used. Does this mean the contest was for naught?

No. As Chris Volinsky explains in a news article, Netflix is still using the main methods that he, Bob Bell, and Yehuda Koren (now at Yahoo!) developed to win the first-year $50,000 progress prize. All three later became part of the winning coalition in the third and final year.

The Achievement of the OEIS

For close to 50 years, Neil J. Sloane has been collecting and cataloguing integer sequences. The result is The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS),a constantly updated repository of 200,000+ sequences and one of the first large-scale exercises in crowd-sourcing to expand mathematical and scientific information.

For years hosted on AT&T Research servers, the OEIS is now under the stewardship of The OEIS Foundation. Read more

Developers: Tap into AT&T's speech expertise

Speech interfaces are becoming de rigueur for mobile apps. Users find them easy, but implementing these interfaces is not easy. Speech technologies are complex and require expert knowledge.

AT&T should know. The AT&T WATSON^SM speech engine—known for accuracy and speed—represents decades of research. In June, AT&T will make this technology available in API form. If interested now, send an email to

A service that won’t let you forget

Ever drive off without your wallet, laptop, or other needed item? Got My Stuff, a new, car-based project from AT&T Research may fix that problem. It works like this.

When you turn your car key, Got My Stuff checks to make sure you don't forget items you need for your destination. But why limit such a useful service to the car? Got My Stuff may soon move to the home, the workplace, and other locations where it’s possible to forget something.