Welcome to NED.net User Group

Contest details

Compete against participants around the world in a contest to find the best applications for Windows Mobile-based Pocket PCs and Smartphones. Entries will be judged on usability, innovation, marketability, and platform optimization. Submissions must be sent to a Mobile2Market logo-testing partner by May 31, 2005.

Prizes

• 2 Grand Prize Winners receive $25,000 USD and application distribution.
  
• 4 Category Prize Winners will receive a $5,000 USD developer prize package and featured application promotions.
• 20 Finalists receive featured promotions through Mobile2Market.

* Enter by March 31, 2005, and receive free logo-testing (a $500 value).

For more information on this Contest, visit:
http://www.mobile2marketcontest.com/index.asp?s=M2MSK

If you are interested in learning ASP.NET 2.0, then this MSDN page is an excellent starting point. It compiles a lot of ASP.NET 2.0 resources - including a series of presentations by Jeff Prosise of Wintellect.

In our last event on Building Speech Applications in .NET we get to learn that people want more in depth seminar on the same topic. Well if you are one of them and want to learn more, then please join our mailing list and cast your vote in the polling section. Here's the link to our poll.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/neddotnet/surveys?id=1000820

The SASDK resource CD's will be available soon.

Another successful seminar by NED.net and Core.Net on Building Speech Applications using SASDK. Our speaker was Mr. Adnan Farooq Hashmi. The event was excellent and the demos shown were outstanding. We had around 50+ participants from NED, SSUET, FAST, SZABIST, JUW and other universities. I want to thank all our participants for showing overwhelming response at our events. In the end we distributed some Codezone magazines in the Q&A session. Our next event is line up for March 12.

International .NET Association Pakistan Chapter, IEEE NED Student Branch and NED.net User Group wants to invite you to a Free Seminar on Building Speech Applications by Mr. Adnan Farooq Hashmi on Saturday February 12, 2005 at 2 pm at CIS Lecture Theatre, NED University. Registration is closed for this seminar, so those who haven't registered are advised to bring their NIC with them to avoid enterence issues.

Agenda

2 :00 - 2:15 pm - Introduction to Imagine Cup by Hammad Rajjoub
2:15 - 3:30 - Talk on Speech Applications by Adnan Farooq Hashmi

About Imagine Cup

Imagine Cup is a technology contest that provides an outlet for students to explore their technological and artistic interests outside the classroom. Throughout this year Imagine Cup will recognize and celebrate student achievement in technology and art. There are nine very different categories that will give every student a change to participate. The finals are in Yokohama, Japan, an intriguing and stimulating destination for the top student minds from around the world to engage in conversation, debate and competition at the Imagine Cup finals. For more information visit Imagine Cup or INETA MEA website.

About The Topic

Speech is one of the most natural way to interact. When it comes to computers it is no different. If an application can be controlled solely by way of voice commands then the opportunity that lies is unlimited. Even though the idea of using speech as an input mechanism for an application is not new there are not a lot of applications that use speech as in input. In other words speech is still an big opportunity that is yet to be explored. Microsoft speech SDK is one of the many tools that enable a developer to add speech capability in to a applications. Speech SDK can be used in either C#, C++, VB or any COM compliant language. Broadly, speech can be divided in to two paradigms. Text to speech conversion and speech recognition.

This Seminar will showcase the benefits of building and deploying Multimodal Speech Applications, and explain the concepts behind the Microsoft Speech Application SDK (SASDK) and SALT (Speech Application Language Tags). The Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) enables multimodal and telephony-enabled access to information, applications, and Web services from PCs, telephones, tablet PCs, and wireless personal digital assistants (PDAs). The Speech Application Language Tags extend existing mark-up languages such as HTML, XHTML, and XML. Multimodal access will enable users to interact with an application in a variety of ways: they will be able to input data using speech, a keyboard, keypad, mouse and/or stylus, and produce data as synthesized speech, audio, plain text, motion video, and/or graphics. Each of these modes will be able to be used independently or concurrently.

Who should attend

• Individuals who want to get a fair idea about the new concepts in speech applications

• Students/Individuals working on Speech-enabled web applications

About the Speaker

Adnan Farooq Hashmi did his MS (Software Engineering) from SZABIST in 1999, and was awarded the Gold Medal for his batch. He was co-founder of Lynx & Connexions Inc. in October 1999, and was the application architect for an Internet based utility bill payment system that involved SSGC, PTCL, and KESC in 2000. He also founded Core IT Education Centre in 2001, which has been functioning as an Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU) Approved Study Centre for the past 2.5 years, and working to build E-Learning tools and next-generation Learning Management Systems (LMS). He has mainly been involved in the development of Enterprise applications using Oracle, SQL Server, ASP, and ASP.NET, and has also conducted Training for Government organizations in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. His focus is Academics, although he remains an avid Internet application developer.

• Click here to become a member of our .NET user group.
• For further inquiries contact Zeeshan at zeeshan.muhammad@ineta.org

Hoping to see you there !!

FACE RECOGNITION software does a poor job of capturing human skin tones and expressions. Microsoft Corp., in Redmond, Wash., with its eye on three-dimensional computer gaming applications, claims in U.S. application 20040210427 that by exploiting recent discoveries in measuring skin reflectance, it can improve images by scanning a face using multiple light sources. These sources include infrared, polarized-light, and narrow-wave-band beams.

FLASH MEMORY, which is ubiquitous in portable devices and digital cameras, requires careful memory management, especially as storage capacity grows. It's also prone to failure if the same memory blocks are repeatedly used. Samsung Electronics Co., in Seoul, South Korea, says it can not only lengthen memory life but also reduce the time it takes to alter data, in U.S. application 20040210706. The job is done by moving data that is being changed to a separate memory block—and its mapping information to another sector. The process is similar to the way in which a disk drive organizes data on a hard disk so as to avoid unreliable sectors and optimize the data for speed of access.

EXISTING CRYPTOGRAPHIC methods may not be equal to the task of securely handling patients' medical records because the entire file must be decrypted for any part of it to be read, says Systems Research & Development, in Las Vegas, in U.S. application 20040210763. The company proposes splitting data into separate streams prior to encryption so that, for example, a public health researcher could look for case histories related to a specific condition without having unlimited access to a patient's files.

Source IEEE Spectrum Magazine January 2005 Issue

Another successful event by NED.net on Flash Remoting. About 70 people attended our event which is a real boost for us. ASP.NET resource CD's were given to the hardworking volunteers. Another event is lined up on Feb 12. Thank you for your support and appreciations.