Latest Publications on Industry and Research
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Amazon Echo and Skype
I’ve been using my Amazon Echo for a couple of months now and I’m still in awe. The speech recognition, without any training, is great. “Alexa, play KQED” is reacted to promptly and will actually play KQED. It is also intuitive. I did not need a manual to try “Alexa, set volume to 3.” It…
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Should cars be programmed to make life or death decisions?
With self-driving cars in our near future, I’ve seen more and more articles about the moral dilemma of what the car should do when faced with an impossible decision, for example, to either kill a grandmother or drive into a flock of children. In my mind, the pundits are getting it all wrong; the underlying…
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Another take on explaining open source business models
Open source remains popular and I find myself explaining the economics of it to ever broader audiences. Rather than talking legalese or philosophy, I’ve been wondering about a pitch that focuses on the high-level strategic objective of the companies that are paying for open source. Here is a short summary; let me know if you…
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Student startup passion vs. market potential
As part of being a professor, I’m trying to motivate student startups. Here, I want to talk about student startups coming out of a Master’s program. These are different from startups coming out of my research lab, which are based on work with my Ph.D. students. Master student startups are typically smaller, not based on…
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Example login designed to make users go away
Schufa is a German credit rating agency. By law it is required to provide information to consumers (while it makes all its money, for now, off corporate customers). As a consequence, its password and login screens have been designed, I suggest, to be as unusable as possible. Below please find a screen-shot of the PIN…
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Tabs vs. spaces and cause vs. effect
Stack Overflow of the “full stackoverflow programmer” fame just published a developer survey. Among the items was a question asking developers, what they prefer for indenting their code: Tabs or spaces? The majority of developers prefers tabs over spaces by a reasonable margin. What worries me, though, is the conclusion or the “trend” that the…