Today in Tech: IT demand & economic slow down; Man Vs Machine moves to abstract sketches

NS Ramnath
Updated: Oct 1, 2012 01:19:45 AM UTC

IT demand in an economic slowdown N Chandrasekaran, CEO of TCS, has often pointed out to the folly of looking at GDP growth rate of a region to assess the demand for IT services. The IT investment decision of a specific company is driven by its own specific needs. For example, a company might be based in Europe, but might want to expand in other, more robust markets. The key is to talk to the customer.

Kris Gopalakrishnan, Co-chairman of Infosys makes a similar point in an interview with Business Standard today. He says he expects the period of slow growth to last upto three years or even more. It's strategy:

In the short term, we have to focus on specific deals and specific customers. And, whatever we are doing in the strategy side will take medium to long-term to fructify. We have gone through our 3.0 strategy and I am confident this is the right strategy in the medium to long term. We are investing into new markets. We are investing into building our client relationships. Recently, we have announced a position called ‘client partner’ to manage large accounts.

We discussed its new sales strategy here.

 

Man Vs Machine moves to abstract sketches
What's difficult for human beings is often easy for computers. For example, multiplying a 10 digit number with a fifteen digit number. But, often, what comes easy for us is difficult for computers. For example, we can see a cartoon, and see that it represents, say, the finance minister. Traditionally, for a computer that has been difficult.

Now, Researchers from Brown University and the Technical University of Berlin have come up with a computer application that can recognize simple abstract drawings almost as well as humans - and at real time. (via Ars Technica).
Check out the video below

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/49311857[/vimeo]
The application learned to identify these sketches pretty much the way we learned to identify them - by looking at hundreds of sketches. “There’s just no way to learn to recognize say, sketches of lions, based on just a clever algorithm. The algorithm really needs to see close to 100 instances of how people draw lions, and then it becomes possible to tell lions from potted plants,” Brown University news report quotes one of the researchers - James Hays, assistant professor of computer science at the university as saying. The paper is online here.

Also of interest

  • Facebook Users Judge Attractiveness Based on Others’ Comments: Mashable
  • Code Club deciphers school IT skills: FT
  • More American households dropping television service but still watching TV : Mercury News
  • Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer discusses new products and services, the state of the company and its future: Seattle Times
  • Larry Page tops 2012 Media Guardian 100: Guardian
  • Start-ups fight back as patent wars intensify: Reuters

 

 

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.

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