Observations from WWNC ’09
August 11th, 2009The Worldwide Newton Conference 2009 took place over a week ago in Vancouver, BC, and John Coady at the NewtonTalk list offers his observations from the weekend’s festivities:
Larry Yaeger gave us a fascinating glimpse into the development of the Newton and, of course, the work that he spearheaded on the second generation print recognizer – which was based on the use of artificial neural networks – that made Newton OS 2.x so incredibly better than the original (non-Apple) version. We were shown some of the original Newton prototypes and development/testing equipment (I hope that one day these end up in a suitable exhibit in Apple’s own museum). Larry then took us on a short stroll into Polyworld where he currently explores the further application of neural networks, and their various properties, in artificial life systems (to me it looks just like a straight extension of his work on the Newton!!!).
Sounds like a blast, despite the low turnout.
I couldn’t make it, unfortunately, but WWNC organizer Ryan Vetter has posted materials from the conference at the WWNC 2009 site.
[Ed. note: I had “Dennis Coady” when it should have been “John Coady.” Sorry about that, John!]