My little piece of Privacy

“My workshop is located in an old storefront with a big window facing towards the street. In an attempt to create more privacy inside, I’ve decided to install a small but smart curtain in that window. The curtain is smaller than the window, but an additional surveillance camera and an old laptop provide it with intelligence: The computer sees the pedestrians and locates them. With a motor attached, it positions the curtain exactly where the pedestrians are.

The whole setup works really well. But in the end, it doesn’t protect my privacy at all. It seems that the existence of my little curtain is leading itself ad absurdum, simply by doing its job very well. My moving curtain attracts the looks of people which usually would never care about my window. It is even the star of the street, now! My curtain is just engaged. And because of that, it fails.”

Download AVR-GCC and Processing codes

Download plans and schematics

Source: http://www.niklasroy.com/project/88/my-little-piece-of-privacy

Algorithms

The word "algorithm" is widely used and seen everyday. Below is an interesting lecture from University of Illinois, Department of Computer Science...

Yuri Gurevich

Microsoft Research
Title: The Church-Turing Thesis: Story and Recent Progress

Abstract:
The Church-Turing thesis is one of the foundations of computer science. The thesis heralded the dawn of the computer revolution by enabling the construct of the universal Turing machine which led the way, at least conceptually, to the von Neumann architecture and first electronic computers. One way to state the Church-Turing thesis is as follows: A Turing Machine computes every numerical function that is computable by means of a purely mechanical procedure.
It is that remarkable and a priori implausible characterization that underlies the ubiquitous applicability of digital computers. But why do we believe the thesis? Careful analysis shows that the existing arguments are insufficient. Kurt Gödel surmised that it might be possible to state axioms which embody the generally accepted properties of computability, and to prove the thesis on that basis. That is exactly what we did in a recent paper with Nachum Dershowitz of Tel Aviv University.

Beyond our proof, the story of the Church-Turing thesis is fascinating and scattered in specialized and often obscure publications. I will try to do justice to that intellectual drama.

Bio:
Yuri Gurevich is Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA. He is also Prof. Emeritus at the University of Michigan, ACM Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, a member of Academia Europaea, and Dr. Honoris Causa of a Belgian and Russian universities.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gurevich/

Original Link

More descriptions

Link to download the Video (Duration 1 hour 21 minute. Caution large file 1.14GB!! )

The download is very long but worth the wait; the concept and logic may take a few times to digest... especially for a non-computer science / math major.