OpenCL: Parallel programmers' new best friend

Apple's Snow Leopard operating system, which hits the streets on Friday, has plenty of new technology--but one of its major new features will soon be available on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and other major platforms.

OpenCL, the Open Computing Language, was originally proposed by Apple to support parallel programming on GPUs. There are other GPU programming languages, such as Nvidia's CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) extensions for C and the Brook stream program language developed at Stanford University and included in Advanced Micro Devices' Stream Computing software development kit, but rather than choosing one of these languages, Apple chose to create a new standard independent of the big graphics vendors.

In fact, OpenCL is even independent of Apple. One of the first things Apple did was offer to hand it over to the Khronos Group, the same independent standards organization that manages the OpenGL standard for 3D rendering.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13512_3-10319075-23.html

High-Speed Robot Hand Demonstrates Dexterity and Skillful Manipulation

A few blogs are passing around videos of the Ishikawa Komuro Lab's high-speed robot hand performing impressive acts of dexterity and skillful manipulation. However, the video being passed around is slight on details. Meanwhile, their video presentation at ICRA 2009 (which took place in May in Kobe, Japan) has an informative narration and demonstrates additional capabilities. I have included this video below, which shows the manipulator dribbling a ping-pong ball, spinning a pen, throwing a ball, tying knots, grasping a grain of rice with tweezers, and tossing / re-grasping a cellphone!

Earthlings

EARTHLINGS is a documentary about humanity's absolute dependence on animals, but also illustrates our complete disrespect for these so-called "non-human providers".








The hope for the animals of tomorrow is to be found in a Human Culture
which learns to feel beyond itself. We must learn empathy,we must learn to see into the eyes of an animal and feel that their
life has value because they are alive.

UK team digs into data from scroll scans

University of Kentucky computer experts are entering the crucial stage of their quest to unlock the secrets of two Roman scrolls buried in a volcanic eruption almost 2,000 years ago.

The UK team, led by computer scientist Brent Seales, spent July in Paris, France, arduously making CT scans of the scrolls, which survived the famous 79 A.D. eruption of Italy's Mount Vesuvius. The delicate papyrus scrolls haven't been read or even unrolled since the eruption.

Seales' group recently returned to Lexington, bringing back two terabytes of stored computer data generated from the scans. Next, they must subject all that data to sophisticated computer processing at UK's Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments, aimed at producing 3-D images of the scrolls. The researchers hope that ultimately will allow them to digitally "unroll" the scrolls, and see what's written on them.

http://www.kentucky.com/142/story/905984.html

Humanoid Robot's Latest AI Abilities

PhysOrg.com) -- In August 2007, Le Trung invented Aiko, a Yumecom, or "Dream Computer Robot." Although it took only a month and a half to build Aiko's exterior, the artificial intelligence software has been a work in progress ever since. Recently, Le Trung has demonstrated his most recent improvements to the software, called BRAINS (Bio Robot Artificial Intelligence Neural System).
Aiko has the ability to identify objects, learn what new objects are, understand more than 13,000 sentences, and more. Image credit: Le Trung.



http://www.physorg.com/news170419268.html

Immersive Dome – Don’t just watch, join the action!

Dome projection replaces the flat movie screen – the »Immersive Dome« puts viewers at the heart of the action, and lets them actively participate. And instead of the conventional surround sound, a three-dimensional aural experience awaits visitors. At IBC, the trade show for the electronics media industry in Amsterdam, two institutes of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft debut the »Immersive Dome» in Hall 8, Booth C81.

http://www.fraunhofer.de/en/press/research-news/2009/08/immersive-dome.jsp

A-Z of Programming Languages: Scala

Twitter and LinkedIn both use it, but the darling of Web 2.0 start-ups is also popular with big corporates. Computerworld talks to Martin Odersky.

http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/315254/-z_programming_languages_scala?fp=4194304&fpid=1

Organic electronics a two-way street, thanks to new plastic semiconductor

Plastic that conducts electricity holds promise for cheaper, thinner and more flexible electronics. This technology is already available in some gadgets -- the new Sony walkman that was introduced earlier this summer and the Microsoft Zune HD music player released last week both incorporate organic light-emitting electronic displays.

Until now, however, circuits built with organic materials have allowed only one type of charge to move through them. New research from the University of Washington makes charges flow both ways. The cover article in an upcoming issue of the journal Advanced Materials describes an approach to organic electronics that allows transport of both positive and negative charges.

"The organic semiconductors developed over the past 20 years have one important drawback. It's very difficult to get electrons to move through," said lead author Samson Jenekhe, a UW professor of chemical engineering and chemistry. "By now having polymer semiconductors that can transmit both positive and negative charges, it broadens the available approaches. This would certainly change the way we do things."

http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/general/08-09NexCave.asp

3-D Technology from Modified HDTV LCD Screen

For the first time, a team of researchers at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at the University of California, San Diego, have designed a 9-panel, 3-D visualization display from HDTV LCD flat-screens developed by JVC.

The technology, dubbed "NexCAVE," was inspired by Calit2's StarCAVE virtual reality environment and designed and developed by Calit2 Research Scientist Tom DeFanti, Virtual Reality Design Engineer Greg Dawe, Project Scientist Jürgen Schulze and Visualization Specialist Andrew Prudhomme.

Although the StarCAVE's unique pentagon shape and 360-degree views make it possible for groups of scientists to venture into worlds as small as nanoparticles and as big as the cosmos, its expensive projection system requires constant maintenance — an obstacle DeFanti and Dawe were determined to overcome.

"It's always been our dream to make a projector-free LCD flat panel CAVE," DeFanti says. "The trick was to get the form of the huge StarCAVE into the space of a living room. We took a speculative leap by overlapping 9 panels, and it turned out better than we thought."

http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/general/08-09NexCave.asp

Where Phones in Class Are OK

Auten was one of nine students learning to create iPhone applications, or apps, for a new course at New Jersey Institute of Technology last spring. More than halfway through the seminar, the information technology major dreamed up two apps of his own, developed them with the knowledge gained in class, and sold them on Apple’s online store for $0.99 each.
Auten’s programs have since been downloaded 11,000 times and netted him more than $1,000, with Apple keeping 30 percent of the revenue. “Kids Be Gone” aims to annoy children by emitting high-frequency tones only they can hear, while “Party Music Strobe” shines a strobe light to the beat of any song played on the iPhone. Of their success, the 22-year-old remarked, “The stupider the application is, the more sales you get.”
A growing number of universities are teaching students like Auten to program for the iPhone, Google's Android, and other smart phone systems, fueled by the belief that mobile development is the next technological gold mine. Over the past year, department-sponsored classes have sprouted at Stanford University, University of Southern California, New York University, Seneca College in Canada, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and Mississippi State University, with other institutions following their lead. Others are extension or student-taught courses, such as at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon University.


http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/20/iphone

Public transport gets personal

European research project has developed technologies that pave the way for highly efficient unmanned public transport systems in our cities.

In our congested cities it is hard to imagine that private cars and taxis could ever be replaced by a public transport system that provides a personal, door-to-door service. But this is exactly the long-term vision of Michel Parent who directs the R&D programme into automated transportation at the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA).

“At the moment most public transport needs drivers to control the vehicles,” he says, “and that makes it suitable only for mass transportation. But the more you can automate vehicles and make them work on the existing infrastructure – in other words roads – then personal, rapid transit becomes feasible.

“Automation offers a massive boost in the efficiency of public transportation and is an ideal solution for our polluted and congested city centres. They can complement mass transportation systems by extending the reach of public transport, taking people from the bus, tram and train stations deeper into the heart of cities or to distant suburbs.”

Taking turns

Parent is the coordinator of CyberCars2, a European research project that is developing a wide range of technologies that, together, will make road-based automated transport systems a reality.

CyberCars2 builds on the work of two earlier successful projects funded by the EU. The first, CyberCars, developed a number of sense, control and guidance technologies to enable vehicles to navigate roads and avoid obstacles. These technologies were successfully demonstrated by the CyberMove project with a final demonstration in Antibes.

The technology to control single automated vehicles is therefore tried and tested – and is found in automated transport systems, including the ULTRa system under construction at Heathrow Airport and the Cybercab in Masdar, Abu Dhabi.

“The main challenge we wanted to address in the CyberCars2 follow-on project was how to operate and coordinate several different vehicles at high throughput,” explains Parent.

“Efficient transport systems require vehicles to cooperate with each other. [They need] to be able to communicate and negotiate with each other and with the infrastructure itself. We wanted to make this happen automatically, too.”

One of the most important aspects of the project, then, was to work out the best way to route data between vehicles.

“We have developed the routing layer so that vehicles can communicate even when they can't ‘see’ each other. We came up with the routing protocols to make it possible to do ‘multi-hop’ data exchanges between two vehicles on the move, by using a go-between, which could be another vehicle or part of the roadside infrastructure,” he explains.

The project also developed the data exchange mechanisms (based on web-services) and the standards for exchanging data about position and speed.

The project team is in discussions with the International Standards Organisation and the European Car-to-Car Consortium (a collaboration of stakeholders involved in vehicular communication) about the adoption of its communications layer as a standard for automated vehicle communication.

Speed up take up

Having endowed vehicles with an ability to ‘talk’, CyberCars2 addressed the control software that would allow them to cooperate. The aim was for several different cybercars, using a variety of sense and control technologies, to have the ability to move close to each other, yet remain safe from collisions.

Using computer simulations of intersections and merges, the project partners developed rules for how vehicles must negotiate with each other in close proximity. They also added so-called ‘platooning’ capabilities to the control software so that vehicles could follow closely behind each other.

The results of the project made quite a spectacle. A fleet of six cybercars (electric Fiat Pandas and a Citroen Berlingo van) and three unmanned buggies built by INRIA, were let loose on a figure-of-eight circuit in a special test zone in La Rochelle.

The cars successfully navigated the circuit using a wide range of different navigation systems – but that was just the 'old' technology at work. More importantly, the cars would communicate with other vehicles at the four-way crossover and slow down or stop to avoid collisions, then safely navigate the junction.

Various project partners are incorporating the results of the project into their own products. Demonstrations also take place in several other European cities as part of the CityMobil project.

“Automated transportation makes a lot of sense to reduce congestion and fumy cars, as a complement to mass transport,” says Parent. “We've proven that the technology now exists to deploy a fleet and run an efficient and safe system. We expect many cities will start to explore these options.”

http://cordis.europa.eu/ictresults/index.cfm?section=news&tpl=article&BrowsingType=Features&ID=90845

Desktop multiprocessing: Not so fast

Some time ago, computer vendors passed the point of diminishing returns concerning processor clock speeds, and could no longer keep hiking frequency rates. To maintain continued performance improvements, suppliers turned to installing multiple instances of the processor -- multiple cores -- on a processor chip, and as a result, multicore processors are now mainstream for desktops. But to realize any performance improvements the software has to be able to use those multiple cores.

And to do that, most software will need to be rewritten.

"We have to reinvent computing, and get away from the fundamental premises we inherited from von Neumann," says Burton Smith, technical fellow at Microsoft Corp., referring to the theories of computer science pioneer John von Neumann (1903 - 1957). "He assumed one instruction would be executed at a time, and we are no longer even maintaining the appearance of one instruction at a time."

But software cannot always keep up with the advances in hardware, says Tom Halfhill, senior analyst for the Microprocessor Report newsletter in Scottsdale, Ariz. "If you have a task that cannot be parallelized and you are currently on a plateau of performance in a single-processor environment, you will not see that task getting significantly faster in the future."

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9136633/Desktop_multiprocessing_Not_so_fast?taxonomyId=12&pageNumber=1

Wi-Fi via White Spaces

Long-range, low-cost wireless Internet could soon be delivered using radio spectrum once reserved for use by TV stations. The blueprints for a computer network that uses "white spaces," which are empty fragments of the spectrum scattered between used frequencies, will be presented today at ACM SIGCOMM 2009, a communications conference held in Barcelona, Spain.

TV stations have traditionally broadcast over lower frequencies that carry information longer distances. However, with the ongoing transition from analog to digital broadcasts, more unused frequencies are opening up than ever.

By tapping into these lower frequencies, it should be easier to provide broadband Internet access in rural areas and fill in gaps in city Wi-Fi networks. For example, the spectrum between 512 megahertz and 698 megahertz, which was originally allotted to analog TV channels from 21 to 51, offers a longer range than conventional Wi-Fi, which operates at 2.4 gigahertz. "Imagine the potential if you could connect to your home [Internet] router from up to a mile," says Ranveer Chandra, a member of the Networking Research Group at Microsoft Research behind the project.

http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/23271/page1/

Light Shed On Brain's Mechanism Responsible For Processing Of Speech

Researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have succeeded for the first time in devising a model that describes and identifies a basic cellular mechanism that enables networks of neurons to efficiently decode speech in changing conditions.
he research may lead to the upgrading of computer algorithms for faster and more precise speech recognition as well as to the development of innovative treatments for auditory problems among adults and young people.

Our brain has the capability to process speech and other complex auditory stimuli and to make sense of them, even when the sound signals reach our ears in a slowed, accelerated or distorted manner.

However, the neuronal mechanisms that enable our brain to perceive a word correctly, for example, that is pronounced in different ways by different speakers or to understand a heavy accent, was a mystery to scientists until now.

Research associate Dr. Robert Gütig and Prof. Haim Sompolinsky of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences at the Hebrew University have succeeded in describing a cellular process by which sensory neurons in the brain can automatically adjust their perceptual clocks and thus correct large temporal variations in the rate of sounds and speech that arrive from the environment.

According to their findings, which were recently published in the journal PLoS Biology, the bio-physical mechanism that exists in our brain enables single nerve cells in the cerebral cortex to perform word identification tasks almost perfectly.

The understanding of the process of speech decoding and the possibilities of its implementation in technology – by the development of neural network algorithms

for the identification and processing of various patterns of sound signals – could lead to the significant upgrading of speech recognition technology in communications and computing, for instance in telephone voice dialing or in voice and sound monitoring devices.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090812081944.htm

Feeding cancers softens them up for attack

You would think the worst thing you could do to a cancer patient is to "feed" their tumour. Yet drugs that improve the blood supply to tumours can help hasten their destruction, new research has shown.

The hope is that by giving the drugs to sufferers as a pre-treatment, it will make their cancers more vulnerable to subsequent chemotherapy or radiotherapy.

The strategy has already had some success in patients with pancreatic cancer, and a larger trial is planned now that the mechanism by which it works has been demonstrated in mice.

he drugs work by repairing and improving the quality of blood vessels supplying tumours with blood.

Most tumours have blood supplies that leave parts of the tumour starved of oxygen, or "hypoxic". The vessels are also leaky, stopping chemotherapy drugs penetrating deeply enough to kill the growth. The hypoxic regions also promote the genesis of the most malignant types of cancer cells, as they have to be hardier to survive the suffocating conditions.

This means that tumours well supplied with oxygen are actually more vulnerable to chemo- or radiotherapy, and researchers have for years sought ways to make use of this fact, including putting patients in oxygen chambers.

Now four drugs have been found that have the potential to weaken tumours in as little as three days by improving their oxygen supply.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17545-feeding-cancers-softens-them-up-for-attack.html

Why microbes are smarter than you thought

The vast majority of species on Earth are single-celled. Most of these languish in obscurity – many have never even been named – but some of the relatively few species that have been studied exhibit remarkable abilities.

Many of these are physical: some micro-organisms are amazingly strong; others can hibernate for hundreds of thousands of years or thrive in environments so extreme that they would kill off most other life forms in a flash.

But many bacteria and protists also exhibit behaviour that looks remarkably intelligent. This behaviour isn't the result of conscious thought – the sort you find in humans and other complex animals – because single-celled organisms don't have nervous systems, let alone brains.

A better explanation is that they're "biological computers" with internal machinery that can process information.


http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17390-why-microbes-are-smarter-than-you-thought.html?page=1

Experimental Tech Turns Your Coffee Table Into a Universal Remote

A new technology combines the coffee table with a universal remote so that people sitting around the table can tap on a screen to change the channel, turn up the volume or dim the lights.

CRISTAL (Control of Remotely Interfaced Systems using Touch-based Actions in Living spaces) is a research project in user interface that attempts to create a natural way of connecting with devices. The system offers a streaming video view of the living room on a tabletop, so users can can walk up to it, see the layout of the room and interact with the TV or the photo frame.

Here is the link:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/08/coffee-table-remote/

DNA 'Organises Itself' on Silicon

Shapes of DNA have been used to enhance the production of circuits for next-generation computer chips.

Researchers reporting in Nature Nanotechnology have now shown how to get engineered "DNA origami" to self-organise on silicon.

The origami can be designed to serve as a scaffold for electronic components just six billionths of a metre apart.

Making chips with components closer together leads to smaller devices and faster computers.

The six nanometre mark is nearly eight times better than the current industry produces.

Several research groups have shown that DNA itself can be used to store or manipulate data, and the juggling of DNA in a test tube or within bacteria has been shown to solve simple computational tasks.

The current method, by contrast, leverages the ability to design DNA strands into regular shapes such as triangles.

Such structures are tiny and difficult to manipulate, but the chemical groups hanging off DNA helices could be used as anchor points for them.

Because the eventual placement of the components puts them so much closer, the approach could lead to computers that are both smaller and faster.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8204906.stm

Killing Cancer Stem Cells

A new screening method identifies drugs that selectively target these elusive cells in tumors.

Recent evidence suggests that certain cancers may persist or recur after treatment because a small population of cells, called cancer stem cells, remains behind to seed new tumors. Though scientists are not yet certain about the role cancer stem cells play in disease, evidence is accumulating that these cells are particularly resistant to chemotherapy and radiation, and can linger in the body even after treatment.

The researchers used a library of 16,000 chemicals at the Broad Institute to look for compounds that killed these transformed breast cancer stem cells more effectively than they killed normal breast cancer cells. Gupta explains that since cancer stem cells are usually resistant to drugs, relatively few chemicals are effective--a mere 32 compounds were identified in the screen as preferentially treating breast cancer stem cells.

Jeffrey Rosen, a breast cancer researcher at Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston, TX, says that the study is an early example of a promising new turn in the hunt for cancer therapies. "It's very exciting that some groups are starting not to view tumors as homogeneous entities but to target subpopulations of cells we think are import for drug resistance," he says. However, Rosen notes that the results in mice were not as promising as the drug's performance in cells. He says that the cancer field is hampered by a lack of good animal models to determine which drugs will be relevant for therapies. The problem, he says, is "once you pull out a compound or drug, then how do you actually go the next step and show that it's really going to work?"

Weinberg calls the study "the first step in the direction of trying to eliminate these cells in tumors." He believes that even if the role of cancer stem cells in different kinds of cancer has not been resolved, "we have no doubt that getting rid of them is going to be an important part of creating cures."

Although this study focused on breast cancer, the researchers anticipate that the screen could be applied to any kind of epithelial cancer. Gupta says that while targeting cancer stem cells may not necessarily be a "magic bullet" in cancer treatment, "if you have a certain subpopulation of cancer cells that are resistant to standard treatment, you would want to find a compound that targets these cells." He adds that a drug that targets cancer stem cells could be used in combination with standard treatments to ensure that resistant cells are not left behind.

After some initial testing of several compounds, the researchers focused on one drug called salinomycin. They compared it to the actions of a drug commonly given in breast cancer chemotherapy, paclitaxel (also known by its brand name, Taxol), in cultured cells and in mice. While paclitaxel treatment leads to a higher proportion of drug-resistant cancer stem cells, salinomycin had the opposite effect, reducing the number of breast cancer stem cells in cultured cells more than 100 times more effectively than paclitaxel. The drug also reduced breast tumor growth in mice, although the reduction was less dramatic.

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/23222/page1/

Hints of How Google's OS Will Work

According to a post written by Sundar Pichai, a vice president of product management at Google, and Linus Upson, the company's engineering director, the open-source Chrome OS will consist of a Linux kernel with the Google Chrome browser running on top inside an entirely new desktop environment.

The Chrome browser was released nine months ago and is Google's effort to reinvent the browser completely: it's designed from scratch with Web applications in mind and is meant to be the only application that a Web-savvy user needs on her computer.

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/22987/

In Search for Intelligence, a Silicon Brain Twitches

For the last four years, Henry Markram has been building a biologically accurate artificial brain. Powered by a supercomputer, his software model closely mimics the activity of a vital section of a rat's gray matter.

Dubbed Blue Brain, the simulation shows some strange behavior. The artificial "cells" respond to stimuli and suddenly pulse and flash in spooky unison, a pattern that isn't programmed but emerges spontaneously.

Blue Brain is based at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. The project hopes to tackle one of the most perplexing mysteries of neuroscience: How does human intelligence emerge? The Blue Brain scientists hope their computer model can shed light on the puzzle, and possibly even replicate intelligence in some way.

We're building the brain from the bottom up, but in silicon," says Dr. Markram, the leader of Blue Brain, which is powered by a supercomputer provided by International Business Machines Corp. "We want to understand how the brain learns, how it perceives things, how intelligence emerges."

Despite the challenges, the push to understand, replicate and even re-enact higher behaviors in the brain has become one of the hottest areas of neuroscience. With the help of a $4.9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense, IBM is working on a separate project with five U.S. universities to build a tiny, low-power microchip that simulates the behavior of one million neurons and ten billion synapses. The goal, says IBM, is to develop brainy computers that can better predict the behavior of complex systems, such as weather or the financial markets.

The scientists behind Blue Brain hope to have a virtual human brain functioning in ten years -- a lengthy time period that underscores the scientific challenge. The human brain has 100 billion neurons that send electrical signals to each other via a network of at least 100 trillion connections, or synapses. How could this dizzying complexity ever be recreated in a virtual model?

Dr. Markram has adopted a systematic, if painstaking approach. He decided to work out the blueprint of its wiring and then use that map to rebuild the brain in an artificial form. He focused on a rat's neocortical column, or NCC, an elementary building block of the brain's neocortex, which is responsible for higher functions and thought. In a rat's case, that includes planning to obtain food.

A rat's NCC, comprised of about 10,000 neurons and their 10 million connections, functions much like a computer microprocessor. All mammals have NCCs, and the ones in humans aren't all that different from the ones in rats. However, humans have far more NCCs, which means far greater brain power. Dr. Markram figured that if a rat simulation did a good job of correctly mimicking activity in a real rat's brain, he could use the same model as a road map for simulating the human brain.

The rat's NCC has 10,000 neurons, and it takes the power of one desktop computer to mimic the behavior of a single neuron. To model the entire NCC, Dr. Markram relies on an IBM computer that can perform 22.8 trillion operations a second. This enables the simulation to be rendered as a three-dimensional object. Thus, when Blue Brain is running, its deepest inner workings are seen in astonishing detail, in the form of a 3-D simulation that unfolds on a computer screen.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124751881557234725.html

Apps 'to be as big as internet'

The market for mobile applications, or apps, will become "as big as the internet", peaking at 10 million apps in 2020, a leading online store says.

"The reality is that this space is only so big and only able to support so many people. Unfortunately the overhype that goes with [Apple's] App Store is what has driven so many to rush to develop for the market. It is fashionable to do apps and every media outlet tells you apps are cool.

Google believes the days of app stores are numbered

"But the economics are a different story. The ratio of those developers who will fail is about 90%; they will simply not make a return on their investment or make a good enough living at this," said Mr Laurs.

He said that will result in developers taking their talent elsewhere and also slow down the rate of growth in applications.

GetJar acts as an application intermediary, distributing apps and helping its community of 350,000 developers make money from their work.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8157043.stm

Yawn Alert For Weary Drivers

The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that at least 100,000 road crashes are caused by driver fatigue each year.
But what if your car could keep an eye on you while you drive and nudge you when you starting yawning and warn you to pull over and take a break? That's the aim of a new in-car yawn-detection system being developed by an international team in the US and India.

The new program is based around an in-car camera hooked up to image-processing software that captures a sequence of images of the driver's face. It then analyses changes in the face and accurately identifies yawning as distinct from other facial movements such as smiling, talking, and singing. The yawn frequency is then correlated with fatigue behavior and could then be hooked up to a warning system to alert drivers to the need to take a break.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090727102042.htm

Expensive Parallel Processing: Programming Tools Facilitate Use of Video Game Processors for Defense Needs

Video gaming computers and video game consoles available today typically contain a graphics processing unit (GPU), which is very efficient at manipulating and displaying computer graphics. However, the unit's highly parallel structure also makes it more efficient than a general-purpose central processing unit for a range of complex calculations important to defense applications.

Researchers in the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering are developing programming tools to enable engineers in the defense industry to utilize the processing power of GPUs without having to learn the complicated programming language required to use them directly.

The researchers are writing functions defined in the Vector, Signal and Image Processing Library (VSIPL) to run on GPUs. VSIPL is an open standard developed by embedded signal and image processing hardware and software vendors, academia, application developers and government labs. GPU VSIPL is available for download at http://gpu-vsipl.gtri.gatech.edu/ .

http://www.gtri.gatech.edu/news/programming-tools-facilitate-use-video-game-proces

DNA Computation

Biomolecular computers, made of DNA and other biological molecules, only exist today in a few specialized labs, remote from the regular computer user. Nonetheless, Tom Ran and Shai Kaplan, research students in the lab of Prof. Ehud Shapiro of the Weizmann Institute’s Biological Chemistry, and Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Departments have found a way to make these microscopic computing devices ‘user friendly,’ even while performing complex computations and answering complicated queries.

Shapiro and his team at Weizmann introduced the first autonomous programmable DNA computing device in 2001. So small that a trillion fit in a drop of water, that device was able to perform such simple calculations as checking a list of 0s and 1s to determine if there was an even number of 1s. A newer version of the device, created in 2004, detected cancer in a test tube and released a molecule to destroy it. Besides the tantalizing possibility that such biology-based devices could one day be injected into the body – a sort of ‘doctor in a cell’ locating disease and preventing its spread – biomolecular computers could conceivably perform millions of calculations in parallel.

Now, Shapiro and his team, in a paper published online today in Nature Nanotechnology, have devised an advanced program for biomolecular computers that enables them to ‘think’ logically. The train of deduction used by this futuristic device is remarkably familiar. It was first proposed by Aristotle over 2000 years ago as a simple if…then proposition: ‘All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.’ When fed a rule (All men are mortal) and a fact (Socrates is a man), the computer answered the question ‘Is Socrates Mortal?’ correctly. The team went on to set up more complicated queries involving multiple rules and facts, and the DNA computing devices were able to deduce the correct answers every time.

At the same time, the team created a compiler – a program for bridging between a high-level computer programming language and DNA computing code. Upon compiling, the query could be typed in something like this: Mortal(Socrates)?. To compute the answer, various strands of DNA representing the rules, facts and queries were assembled by a robotic system and searched for a fit in a hierarchical process. The answer was encoded in a flash of green light: Some of the strands had a biological version of a flashlight signal – they were equipped with a naturally glowing fluorescent molecule bound to a second protein which keeps the light covered. A specialized enzyme, attracted to the site of the correct answer, removed the ‘cover’ and let the light shine. The tiny water drops containing the biomolecular data-bases were able to answer very intricate queries, and they lit up in a combination of colors representing the complex answers.


http://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/site/en/weizman.asp?pi=371&doc_id=5565

I guess most of you got a GPS and sometimes get annoyed because of it's accuracy. Now, Linux-based technology developed at NICTA is on its way to help make personal navigation systems more accurate.

Automap , uses machine vision techniques that can detect and classify geometric shapes from video footage.

http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php?q=article/313968/new_linux-based_technology_make_smarter_gps&fp=&fpid=

Touchscreen for everything

Well, it seems that the future is around touchscreen. Both Apple and Microsoft are working on a transition to touch-enabled versions of OS X and Windows. Touchscreen are used for : mobile phones, digital camera, GPS, media players, medical robots( the haptics provide surgeons with tactile feedback that makes the advanced surgery possible).

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9135897/Haptics_The_feel_good_technology_of_the_year?taxonomyId=15&pageNumber=2

Game utilizes human intuition to help computers solve complex problems

People love to play games. But what if we can exploit this?

The online logic puzzle is called FunSAT, and it could help integrated circuit designers select and arrange transistors and their connections on silicon microchips, among other applications.
More here...

http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=7252

NIST Demonstrates Sustained Quantum Processing in Step Toward Building Quantum Computers

OULDER, Colo.—Raising prospects for building a practical quantum computer, physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated sustained, reliable information processing operations on electrically charged atoms (ions). The new work, described in the Aug. 6, 2009, issue of Science Express,* overcomes significant hurdles in scaling up ion-trapping technology from small demonstrations to larger quantum processors.

http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/ion_trap_computers080609.html

Healthcare, the Road to Robotic Helpers

Robots are whirring away in factories all over the world, building cars, phones and cookers. Yet they can do so much more. Robotics for healthcare has been tipped as the next big wave, and Europe should be poised to ride it, according to a European road-mapping study.

http://cordis.europa.eu/ictresults/index.cfm?section=news&tpl=article&BrowsingType=Features&ID=90794

To Teach Computing, a New Tool Calls on The Sims

A beta version of Alice 3.0 will be released, letting students create animated movies and games with new characters from The Sims video games and teaching advanced users the Java programming language in the process. The software is freely available from Carnegie Mellon's Web site.
A previous version, Alice 2.0, introduced a "drag and drop" feature that let students place characters and objects in relationships that resulted in actions, without manually typing in code.


http://chronicle.com/article/To-Teach-Computing-a-New-Tool/47956/

Has a nice tutorial, fun to play with it, here you can download it : http://www.alice.org/

Supercomputer Visuals Without Graphics Chips

Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory and elsewhere are working on a solution. Rather than moving massive datasets to a specialized graphics-processing cluster for rendering, which is how things are done now, they are writing software that allows the thousands of processors in a supercomputer to do the visualization themselves

Publicaţi postare

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23139/

It's fun to play with it, has a nice tutorial , if you have a time give it a try, you can download it
here.

http://www.alice.org/

Nanoelectronic transistor combined with biological machine could lead to better electronics

LIVERMORE, Calif. -- If manmade devices could be combined with biological machines, laptops and other electronic devices could get a boost in operating efficiency.

https://publicaffairs.llnl.gov/news/news_releases/2009/NR-09-08-02.html

Robots to get their own operating system

Operating System for Robots sounds great. Building a robot until now required hardware-level knowledge, also every time a new robot was made, many times from ground-up .
Robot Operating system will help a lot of sharing code. As it state in the article "People reinvent the wheel over and over and over, doing things that are not at all central to what they're trying to do."


http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327206.300-robots-to-get-their-own-operating-system.html

Electronic voting not so secure

Computer Scientists Take Over Electronic Voting Machine With New Programming Technique
We thought that now with poweful cryptograpy tehniques, electronic voting will be 100% secure.
Well, turns that it isn't quite so. More here....

http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/08-09ElectronicVoting.asp#

Supercomputers for every college

Just 10 years ago, supercomputers cost millions of dollars each and were installed only in elite universities and government labs. These machines were used in just a couple of fields, like astrophysics, or for sensitive military research. Today supercomputers, generally defined as among the fastest currently possible, run simulations to help researchers understand weather, outer space, oceans, economies, human biology, and more. And they can be built on the cheap.
http://chronicle.com/article/Your-College-Gets-a-Superco/47957/