Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

The future face of SMS messaging?

While a number of global technology corporations have shut up shop in the region recently, one huge multi-national has invested millions in increasing its Cambridge-based research capabilities, to advance its technologies with applications in “enormous consumer markets.”

Japanese technology colossus, Toshiba, which developed the first PC laptop and DVD player, is bucking the recent trend and ramping up its operation in Cambridge, on the promise of exciting new technologies being developed by its three research teams.
The electronics giant has moved its three previously dislocated Cambridge research groups in the fields of computer vision, speech technology and quantum information under one roof in a newly renovated space at Cambridge Science Park in order to exploit the synergistic benefits.

“In terms of more exciting, very new, original projects, they can combine research – for example the speech and vision people,” said Prof Roberto Cipolla, the new  managing director of the centre.

“We’d like a greater interaction between computer vision and speech. We’re a world-leading speech group and a world-leading computer reading group and the combination could be quite powerful.”

Prof Cipolla told Business Weekly about some technologies on the horizon that could have come from the mind of sci-fi author Philip K. Dick – being produced by the newly unified teams.

“In the future it will be interfaces to machines like computers and TVs, and matching photo-realistic avatars with synthesised, realistic voices,” he said.

Prof Cipolla was guarded about specific applications of the technology, but gave a hint of its employment in a tool with an extremely broad appeal.

“There are millions of applications for the technology, and I don’t want to disclose ones that other people might copy.”
Prof Cipolla talked about the use of new developments in computer vision and speech technology to make a program which could convert boring text messages into a video of the sender, reading you the message.

“The most gimmicky would be a talking head which reads out text messages, so it looks like the person – you don’t just read text messages, you get a talking head.”

With the ability to dismiss such a commercially lucrative application as a gimmick, Toshiba must surely have some truly monumental plans for the technology.

“These are enormous consumer markets; these aren’t small markets,” said Prof Cipolla. The work could also revolutionise a number of other markets, including video-gaming and online shopping.

“If you can see your face being placed in a game or a 3D object you wanted to buy, you can make a 3D model of your body and use that to buy clothes or shoes made to measure.” Other technologies coming from the CRL could benefit the more lazy among us.
“You might be able to point at the TV and the system can work out that you are pointing at it and understand when you say ‘volume up.’ That’s an obvious one.”

As far-fetched as the technology sounds, it could find its way into reality, following in the footsteps of previous work from the CRL which has reached the shelves.

“As a result of close collaboration with Japanese research development and engineering groups in the Toshiba Group, some of CRL’s research output has already been introduced into Toshiba products,” said corporate senior VP and chairman of Toshiba Research Europe, Dr Ichiro Tai.

“The new laboratory facilities demonstrate the value which Toshiba Corporation places on CRL’s  achievements and Toshiba’s ongoing commitment to supporting innovation in Cambridge.”

Prof Cipolla made it clear why it had chosen to invest some of its estimated £5.4bn global R & D budget for the next three years in Cambridge when others such as Intel and Epson have moved out.

“Over the past 16 years Toshiba has forged extremely close links with the University of Cambridge and supported some of the brightest science students in the country by sponsoring ground-breaking research projects.”

“As a result, the Cambridge Research Laboratory has become a vital part of Toshiba’s worldwide R & D network and is responsible for a number of significant world-first developments, from Terahertz imaging to quantum cryptography.”