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."

Re:as ubiquitous as possible

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like saying that 1 is as close to unity as possible.
All they need to say is that they want to make the gadget ubiquitous.

Didn't Jens Alfke already solve this problem?

[notsoclever]

Mac OS Stickies [wikipedia.org]

Re:Sometimes simplicity...

[evanbd]

Please stop repeating that myth. Snopes [snopes.com] says you're wrong.

For those too lazy to read the link: Fisher spent their own money on the development, and the results were far better than pencils. Pencil leads break off and create an electrical and fire hazard, not to mention making dust. These are real problems in free fall that aren't present on the ground. Sorry, but your intuition of what works well on the ground will not translate in any meaningful way to free fall.

MIT

[El Cabri]

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.