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Quickies — MIT's Intelligent Sticky Notes
Iddo Genuth writes to mention that MIT researchers have made their first pass at bringing the common yellow post-it note into the digital age. Using a combination of artificial intelligence, RFID, and ink recognition, the team hopes to make the digital version as ubiquitous as possible. "The Quickie application not only allows users to browse their notes, but also lets users search for specific information or keywords. Using a freely available commonsense knowledge engine and computational AI techniques, the software processes the written text and determines the relevant context of the notes, categorizing them appropriately. "The system uses its understanding of the user's intentions, content, and the context of the notes to provide the user with reminders, alerts, messages, and just-in-time information" - said the inventors. Additionally, each Quickie carries a unique RFID tag, so that it can be easily located around the house or office. Therefore, users can be sure never to lose a bookmarked book or any other object marked with a Quickie."
English, mon frer, do you speak it?
If you make an intelligent sticky note that's so unique, it's one-of-a-kind, and you put it on Nigel Tufnel's amp, and he cranks it up to 11, will
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Apparently they're holding them over at the Human Resources department. I asked the receptionist for a Quickie and she had me sent there.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
is best. I have to write my sticky on a touch-sensitive pad which will then need to be transferred to the PC, undergo handwriting recognition and AI to try to ascertain what the heck I meant which will then try to organize that information.
Or, I can continue using my sticky notes and organizing them on my cube wall (a much larger surface and higher resolution then my 19 inch monitor), freely moving them from one place to another, changing meaning through organization without having to worry about manipulating them on a computer.
Forgive me but I believe this is a tool in search of a problem that does not exist.
So instead of keeping your passwords under the keyboard they'll be on the screen?
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
Mac OS Stickies
There are 10 kinds of people: ones who understand ternary, ones who don't, and ones who think this joke is about binary
>> The system uses its understanding of the user's intentions, content, and the context of the notes to provide the user with reminders, alerts, messages, and just-in-time information
"It looks like you're trying to: Post a Quickie."
"Would you like a Quickie?"
There's one that involves an optical pen that works with specially marked paper printed with a very fine pattern that it uses to get fine enough resolution for handwriting. The pen stores a number of notes and lets you upload them to your computer or transfer them to your PDA.
That solution works better because the paper (the consumable part) is just ordinary paper printed with the micro-pattern. I suspect that you could in principle print it on a color printer.
The trick is to make the notes compatible with the search and data management tools you already have. I don't see a new stickies program, however cool, being better than something that you could sync to your PDA/Phone/what have you.
I am all for the legitimate, open, and personal use of RFID tags, but the limited stickiness of post-it notes does not fit with the long-term usefulness of the app. It would make more sense for personal RFID tags to be in the form of fobs with magnets or velcro.
but everyone seems to have beaten me to it.
So how about instead of bitching I try to come up with some constructive criticism. How about the opposite, a little sticky-note printer that will spit out whatever is highlighted on your current screen and apply a little glue to the back side on the way out, ready for immediate deployment.
The form-factor should be such that it can fit into a hard-drive slot on your PC--and it can slide open like a CDROM for refilling consumables.
It should work both vertically and horizontally.
There, run with it and make your $millions.
I may be old-fashioned, but I see no need to use more than the assortment of paper I have on my desk for notes.
Paper costs ~$40 for 20 pounds; and I can pick it up, put it in my pocket, and take it to the grocery store. And if I drop it, its not damaged. An equivalent computerized system costs ~$300 (PDA) and does not respond well to being dropped. I would also have to remember to check my to do list. A note on a desk/keyboard/table/whatever is much more likely to be seen.
"I refuse to believe that everybody refuses to believe the truth." -- Lisa Simpson
Prior artwork for this idea from Apple/Saturday Night Live:
http://www.flamingmailbox.com/maccomedy/movies/postitnote.html
People at MIT are notoriously good at creating buzz around the concepts, demos, protypes and inventions that they come up with, especially at the Media Lab. Unfortunately, like everything that happens in academia, the signal to noise ratio is what it is and most of it has no future, sometimes for blatant reasons that one doesn't need to be a very sharp V.C. to figure out. Unfortunately that creates the impression that they are really a bunch of clowns that come up with useless stuff on a regular basis.
My birthday is coming up soon, so I asked her for a Quickie.
You should have seen her response !
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
When I was a kid a Quickie was something completely different, and they were readily available at BU, you'd get laughed out of the room and no one would believe you if you said you were going to get one at MIT.
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I remember this when it was called the Newton
--- ask me about nihilism, I will have nothing to tell you.
... since when do MIT students get quickies?
Or any sex, for that matter?
Bringing Post-it notes to the digital age? I hear that someday it will also be possible to create your own optical storage disks at home and be able to watch television program and download using a thing called the "internet". I think the article really refers to MIT inventing a time machine and using it to travel to the mysterious mystical year of 1996! Or at least that's what you would get from reading the summary.
As almost everyone knows, "digital Post-it notes" have been a common application since Mac System 7.5 or so, so that part of the summary is very misleading. If you RTFA, the real new development is the features used to manage them. That seems rather uninteresting, since if you care that much about the information, there are plenty of other ways to store and manage them that are better than "managed Stickies'.
Brett
You should get some sorta award here :)
The Russians (And the US) did, indeed, use pencils.
And NASA did, indeed, commission the creation of the pen.
I want the sticky note to die, instead of being planted further into the digital age. Five years ago they banned me from having real sticky notes at work because it ended up a mess -- speaks to my lack of organizational skills and obviously the sticky note didn't help. The sticky note is handy but cannot be organized properly in most contexts. Instead of individual squares of paper, just type a number of text lines in a text file, one for each item, label the file important.txt on your desktop and encrypt it if need be. The sticky note's time has passed. It's an item that should stay only in the real tangible world.
My excitement at the words "quickie" and "sticky" used together waned with the reading of the Summary and TFA. Damn you /., damn you to hell.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
...is almost universally eye-roll-inducing or rant inducing by most MIT grads. I met one Media Lab student whose thesis was about a stuffed animal that would move/make noises when someone you knew entered their office, and if you entered yours, it'd make other people's stuffed animals move and make noises. So instead of seeing your coworker's buddy icon go from idle to active, you have to remember that your monkey going "eeeeep" means Bob is back, and "ack" means Jane is back. Annoying, distracting, hard to associate, and not able to scale very well.
Yeah. Fucking stuffed monkeys got her a masters degree. From MIT. Hear that sound? Its the sound of people wiping their asses with MIT diplomas and flushing them down the toilet.
Please help metamoderate.
http://www.flamingmailbox.com/maccomedy/movies/postitnote.html
Many of stickies in front of my desk have no context, I already know the context, most of the note is stuff only I would understand. I guess the AI would fail miserably to classify ?
This was done already more than a decade ago at Xerox. It's probably one of the first ubiquitous computing applications and it's something that essentially started ubiquitous computing. It also doesn't work well.
The "MIT Lecture Browser" (keyword spotting in autio-visual data) that was also mentioned as being supposedly "innovative", has also been done many times before; it's just audio-visual keyword spotting. Putting lectures into an audio-visual keyword spotting system is about as innovative as putting your milk in the refrigerator.
Look at Dymo labelling machines. They are almost there, just so close. They spit out a label in just over a second. Imagine a yellow version with a weak glue that does exactly what you suggest.
I do wonder if Dymo have already thought of this and it is impeded in some way by patents.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Excellent, now I can put one on my bed headboard to avoid those.. awkward moments during quickies.
"How do you spell that beautiful name of yours, baby?"
Versatile, Intelligent, Sticky
http://www.uriahcarpenter.info/snl-macintosh-post-it.html
Voice recognition technology - Ray Kurzweil '70
Kurzweil did not invent "voice recognition technology"; I can't even think of a significant contribution he has made to the field.
Uh.....I'd say the above are some pretty important inventions and scientific breakthroughs.
MIT graduates and MIT researchers have made significant contributions, and MIT deserves to be considered on of the top institutions in the world. But at the same time, institutions like MIT have a propensity for taking credit for inventing things that really many more people contributed to.
Am I the only one who clicked on that and expected to see a potporri of newsbits featuring our beloved vaccuum cleaner icon?
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