Today is the Intel Developer Forum Day 0 - the day before the conference actually starts. Intel is hosting a pre-conference event for media and I am attending these morning sessions.
The sessions are briefings with the worldwide media where several Intel visionaries discussing current areas of research.
Jim Held, Intel Fellow and director tera-scale research computing program, introduced a new category of connected visual computing usage models in which people will share experiences and information online within highly intuitive, interactive visual interfaces.
Initial examples include two main categories: Simulated Environments, such as virtual worlds, online multiplayer games, and 3-D Cinema; and Augmented Reality, where images from the real world are combined with digital information to provide an enhanced view of the globe around us.
Below you see a video with Ultra Mobility Group Uday Keshavdas showing three Intel Atom-powered devices that will be on hand this week at IDF San Francisco, including the special Oylmpic edition Lenovo ideapad.
Mary Smiley, director Emerging Platforms Lab, discussed a major focus area within Intel’s Carry Small, Live Large research effort. The goal is to create technology that provides greater value to the user by maintaining a better understanding of users, their situations, needs and environment through sensors and inference. Sensors can provide massive amounts of data.
However, one of the many challenges in sensor research is to accurately interpret and understand that data in order to make effective use of it. Smiley demonstrated one research project that is using sensing and inference for personal health management, called "Mobile Wellness Management". This context-aware research platform continuously monitors a mobile person’s vitals and captures his/her food intake in order to set fitness goals, better understand the person’s level of activity and how much food the individual consumes.
A variety of on-body sensors provides better insight into a person by providing more data points from which to infer the person’s specific activity.
Those are pictures from Mary Smiley's session today:
Afterwards we were welcome to visit a small exhibition with some of the research Intel is conducting. The most interesting ones are completely different: one is related to health and vital sensors and the other one is about offloading 3D processing so that Mobile Internet Devices can take advantage of highly visual environments without the need of having a 3D engine - everything is done in the cloud and an optimised protocol transfer the images ready to be shown to the mobile devices. Pictures below:
