Former Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) linguist Jeff Allen has helped CMU make available a data set of English/Creole translations, which organizations such as Microsoft Research are using to aid relief efforts in Haiti. Allen previously had spent nine months collecting translation data from different people in Haiti. CMU computer scientist Robert Frederking built a portable translator for a laptop computer and sent it to Haiti, but it was never used and was sent back to CMU. Those efforts are now bearing fruit in Haiti. “We put out on the Internet site of Carnegie Mellon 13,000 parallel sentences and 35,000 parallel terms,” Allen says. Microsoft Research had an English/Creole translator on the Internet within five days, including disaster-specific words and phrases based on the CMU data, says Microsoft’s Vikram Dendi. “We have taken other emergency-type notification and helped translate them into Haitian-Creole,” Dendi says. Meanwhile, Translators without Borders is distributing an English/Creole triage dictionary based on the new CMU data. “It contains a lot of interesting questions that you might ask someone to ascertain how serious their injuries are,” says the nonprofit’s Lori Thicke.

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Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is developing FLECK Nano, a miniature version of FLECK sensor nodes, which can record environmental conditions and send the data to a central location point. FLECK Nanos would be used primarily indoors to monitor things such as temperature and power use. “The idea of pervasive computing has been touted for some time, but is not yet available for everyday office items,” says CSIRO’s Phil Valencia. Two university students have been working with Valencia to develop the miniature sensors. Australian National University’s David Kooymans is focusing on reducing the energy demands of mobile FLECK Nanos and the University of Queensland’s Blake Newman is looking for ways FLECK Nanos could reuse energy from the environment.

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Communications networks’ efficiency could be upgraded with a new network coding approach co-developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Network coding is a scheme in which a router mathematically combines data packets into new, hybrid packets rather than handing them off to the next router. The researchers determined that the best method for combining data at the router is random combination. In random network coding, a router receives a group of messages and multiplies each of them by a different, randomly chosen number, and combines the results together into a hybrid message. The router relays the hybrid on to the next router in the network, while also including information about the random numbers it used to generate the hybrid. Random coding produces the most gains in networks with spotty connections, but with several possible routes between sender and receiver. The MIT researchers mathematically demonstrated that if the same group of messages was transmitted to several different receivers, random coding produced the most efficient possible utilization of the network’s bandwidth.

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Computers that can recognize users’ emotional states are under development in the hope that the machines can be made capable of improving users’ mood and performance. “Technologists have largely ignored emotion and created an often frustrating experience for people, in part because affect has been misunderstood and is hard to measure,” according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Affective Computing lab. Birmingham University lecturer Russell Beale points out that people become more engaged with systems that seem to exhibit emotional responses. “In the same way that it’s easier talking to someone who has empathy with what you’re saying, who gives you extra responses apart from just a straightforward verbal reply, it makes our everyday interactions much easier,” he says. “In the right cases, putting empathy into computer systems is really going to help.”

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