Saturday, January 16, 2010

Why must I always restart my computer in Windows?

Look at this alert:



Shame on both Adobe and Microsoft because I don't really see the need of restarting the computer to install UPDATES of an application. This of course never happens in Mac-OSX or Linux.

From the user's perspective this is an ANNOYING service disruption. I agree that my applications should always be up-to-date, but I cannot accept that I have to stop, wait for reboot and resume my work just for updating applications.

This is not something that happens sporadically, it almost always happen and, worse, the user is almost never warned in advance that the system need to be restarted before installing the updates. This is a system design flaw which affects system's usability. Usability is not just fancy, colourful or transparent GUIs as it seems Microsoft is almost exclusively focusing on. I believe that these guys has to think about a more holistic view of usability which of course includes the notion of  UNOBTRUSIVENESS. In other words, please help me in doing my work without hassle.


Tuesday, January 12, 2010

My book published!


Cognitive Language Engineering


Towards Robust Human Language Technology


Vincenzo Pallotta


Abstract: Human Language Technology is essential in coping with today's information overload. To scale up, it must be robust and capable of making sense of noisy data. This book explores the topic of cognitive language engineering as a key for robustness. It can be used by students and practitioners alike, as a computational linguistics textbook and as a toolbox
for building robust natural language understanding systems. 

Keywords: Language, Computing, Linguistics, Information, Understanding, Cognition, Intelligence,
Knowledge, Semantics, Software.

About this book: 

"Pallotta's insight and critical discussion of the underlying mental models are core issues of present-day cognitive language engineering" [Prof. Hon. Giovanni Coray, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Switzerland]. 

“From a computational linguistics perspective Pallotta's book provides students and researchers with a powerful toolbox and many examples of real-world applications.” [Prof. Rodolfo Delmonte, University of Venice]. 

"Pallotta’s work on cognitive language engineering is a stimulating and well written treatise on models for computer applications that can interact using natural language. Practical and robust natural language systems begin to become a reality with this
fascinating work." [Dr. Afzal Ballim, Computational Linguist].

Number of pages: 407
ISBN: 978-3-639-21814-5
Price: 79 Euros