Michael Thomas, Senior Systems Architect at SAS. He holds two patents on high throughput visualization of real-time streaming analytics. He is the author of three books, several papers for SAS Global Forum and several articles. He is also a long time member of the SAS Chess Club.
Virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), eXtended reality (XR), mixed reality (MR), spatial augmented reality, hybrid reality. That's a lot of new technology and a lot of acronyms for a philosophical concept that has been pondered for millennia: what is reality? An intelligent reality is a technologically enhanced reality that
Chess has been intertwined with Computer Science since, well ... forever. Long before supercomputer Deep Blue, loaded with human-crafted chess algorithms, beat reigning world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. Well before AlphaZero AI defeated all of human chess knowledge with just a few hours of study. Way before computers even
I’m drawn to immersive analytics (IA) because it covers areas I’ve been looking at since 2012, and have been publishing on since early 2014, like virtual reality and data worlds. I’m retroactively applying the cool new term IA (not to be confused with AI for artificial intelligence) to all of my activities
Once again, SAS is sponsoring the North Carolina Scholastic Chess Championship. The 43 year-old event is at the Raleigh Convention Center this weekend, March 11-12th. SAS sponsors this event because of the STEM education benefits of youth chess. Hundreds of players have been preparing and studying. A few even practiced
North Carolina has over 300 miles of wide, flat Atlantic beaches as well as the highest mountain in the eastern United States, Mount Mitchell. The variety is impressive for a state that isn't even in the top half of the 50 states by size. One key reason is geometric: North Carolina
The Internet has been around a long time. "Things" have been around even longer. Put the things on the Internet, aka the Internet of Things (IoT), and you get so much hype that IoT is at the top of Gartner's "Peak of Inflated Expectations" – and poised for a fall into the "Trough of
It's an exciting time for reality! We've been technologically enhancing reality for a long time -- eye glasses, telescopes, binoculars, microscopes, photography, moving pictures, live streaming video over the Internet, etc. But whether it's augmented reality, virtual reality or somewhere in between, a new wave of eye wear technology is
The Amazon River starts as a small glacial stream, pictured at right, on a mountain called Nevado Mismi in the Peruvian Andes. This, and many other small streams, lead to over 1,000 named tributaries of the largest drainage basin in the world -- and the greatest diversity of life on
Young digital natives are learning chess at an unprecedented rate. Three-year-olds learn chess from the tablet and quickly become more knowledgeable than their parents. But unlike most tablet games, chess is a gateway to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education. We grown-ups must optimize the chess-to-STEM pipeline, but how? Consider this
If you've followed technology news in the last few weeks, you've probably seen a proliferation of awestruck faces wearing blacked out goggles, similar to the image I'm using here. The goggles are Oculus Rift immersive VR headsets, and the news is the $2 billion dollar acquisition of Oculus by Facebook.
What if virtual reality technology allowed you to immerse yourself in big data? That could be your future – and sooner than you think. It happened in August 2013 at the University of Washington: the first direct brain-to-brain communication, with one researcher controlling another researcher’s brain over Skype. Maybe in
