In the 1960s, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana—Champaign developed a computer system that they hoped would expand access to education. They envisioned instructors usingthe system to build lessons, and students stationing themselves at machines—whose touchscreen plasma displays had a distinct orange glow—to complete coursework.
Source: ieee.org
For at least 2.6 million years, humans and our ancestors have been making stone tools by chipping off flakes of material to produce sharp edges. We think of stone tools as very rudimentary technology, but producing a usable tool without wasting a lot of stone takes skill and knowledge. That’s why archaeologists tend to use the complexity of stone tools as a way to measure the cognitive skills of early humans and the complexity of their cultures and social interactions.
Read More
Waze famously disrupted GPS navigation by crowdsourcing user data from mobile phones, instead of purchasing costly sensors tied to city infrastructure, as Nokia had done before them. Waze then scaled with low overhead costs by using machine learning algorithms to find precise traffic patterns that optimized each user’s route. The end result of this dynamic was massive layoffs at Nokia, and Google’s acquisition of / integration with Waze in 2013.
Read More