Students at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya’s Castelldefels School of Technology are working with Team FREDNET to place a small robot named PicoRover on the Moon. The robot is equipped with a built-in camera to send images from the lunar surface back to Earth. The prototype uses a spherical design that enables it to move along the lunar surface in low gravity and on uneven surfaces. The team plans to develop a fully autonomous robot capable of moving or stopping on the lunar surface as required. The team has developed controls for the device, which consist of a small computer equipped with Wi-Fi that weighs two grams. The current model is a 12-centimeter ball housing a motor, a battery, a remote control system, and a high-definition camera, all weighing less than 250 grams. The group also is developing antennas for sending the images back to Earth.
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UPC Students Try to Send a Spherical Robot to the Moon |
by sparky3887
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Gaming–Step By Step |
by sparky3887
The University of Alberta (UA) computing science department helped Edmonton game developer BioWare solve a pathfinding challenge in one of its videogames. The UA researchers were faced with the challenge of creating pathfinding programming capable of navigating complicated scenarios while minimizing the amount of memory needed. The researchers, led by UA professor Nathan Sturtevant, broke the decision-making process into separate levels, enabling the computer to calculate the steps needed by the character. “One of the things I really wanted to see was that if a character is standing on one side of the game map, would it be possible to mouse click on the farthest point away and watch your character then walk for 10, 20, 30, 40 seconds and get to where you wanted them to go?” Sturtevant says.
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Rutgers Researchers Show New Security Threat Against ‘Smart Phone’ Users |
by sparky3887
Rutgers University (RU) computer scientists have demonstrated how rootkits could surreptitiously instruct a smartphone to eavesdrop on a meeting, track its owner’s location, or rapidly drain the battery. Smartphones “run the same class of operating systems as desktop and laptop computers, so they are just as vulnerable to attack by malicious software, or malware,” says RU professor Vinod Ganapathy. Rootkit attacks on smartphones could be especially effective because smartphone users tend to carry their phones with them all the time, which creates opportunities for attackers to eavesdrop, extract personal information, or pinpoint the users location using the phone’s global positioning system.
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Computers Turn Flat Photos Into 3-D Buildings |
by sparky3887
Researchers at the University of Washington (UW) and Cornell University are developing PhotoCity, a system that uses graphics algorithms to create three-dimensional (3D) renderings of buildings, neighborhoods, and cities from unstructured collections of two-dimensional digital photos. To improve the quality of the renderings, the researchers plan to combine their system with a social game that permits teams to add images where they are needed to improve the visual models. The researchers also plan to accept public submissions, in an effort to collect 3D renderings of cities such as New York and San Francisco. The emergence of such collaborative systems has great promise for capturing the creative abilities of people and networked computers, says the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Peter Lee.
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What Is the Identity of Identity in the Digital Age |
by sparky3887
The Future of Identity in the Information Society (FIDIS) is a network of excellence established to prepare Europe for emerging digital identity issues. “We concluded that it is not one, single concept, but rather it is a host of pieces of information about an individual,” says FIDIS’ Andre Deuker. According to FIDIS, a person’s identity comprises all of the pieces of information that define a particular individual, from their DNA to how they like their coffee. One FIDIS project is photo response non-uniformity, which can identify the camera that took a particular picture by looking at the information underlying a specific image. Other FIDIS initiatives include special radio frequency identity tags and identity management systems (IMSs). FIDIS examined several IMS platforms and created a database for them, with the hopes that it will lead to greater interoperability between systems.
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What Is the Identity of Identity in the Digital Age |
by sparky3887
The Future of Identity in the Information Society (FIDIS) is a network of excellence established to prepare Europe for emerging digital identity issues. “We concluded that it is not one, single concept, but rather it is a host of pieces of information about an individual,” says FIDIS’ Andre Deuker. According to FIDIS, a person’s identity comprises all of the pieces of information that define a particular individual, from their DNA to how they like their coffee. One FIDIS project is photo response non-uniformity, which can identify the camera that took a particular picture by looking at the information underlying a specific image. Other FIDIS initiatives include special radio frequency identity tags and identity management systems (IMSs). FIDIS examined several IMS platforms and created a database for them, with the hopes that it will lead to greater interoperability between systems.
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Sketch-Interpreting Software |
by sparky3887
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have developed a system that can interpret sketches drawn on computer tablets. The sketch-recognition technology grew out of a collaboration with Pfizer, says MIT Ph.D. student Tom Ouyang. “We once visited their labs, and we noticed that on all their whiteboards and even on some of their windows they had all these chemical structures drawn using dry-erase markers, and when we talked to them they mentioned that they used these graphical diagrams all the time,” Ouyang says. The system combines information about the physical appearance of the final sketch with information about how it was drawn. Ultimately, the researchers see the software as part of a larger project to make interactions with computers as natural as interactions with human beings. “We want to interconnect this with some of the other things we’ve done with speech and Web-based lookup so that one could walk up to the whiteboard and sketch a molecule and say, ‘Has anybody published anything like this?’” says MIT professor Randall Davis.
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Data Center Project Could Produce Jobs, Partnerships |
by sparky3887
Binghamton University (BU) researchers are studying a holistic approach to data centers that could make them much less costly to operate and significantly reduce the carbon footprint for information technology. “The amount of energy we spend running our data centers in the U.S. is about 2.5 percent of the total national energy expenditure,” says BU professor Kanad Ghose. Meanwhile, the number of data centers is growing because of increasing demand for online services. Ghose says that most data centers only run at 40 to 60 percent of their maximum capacity. Cooling the data centers also requires a lot of energy. Ghose and BU professor Bahgat Sammakia are developing ways to spread the workload across all the machines in a network, planning in advance for the workload allocation and the cooling budget. The researchers are planning to set up an experimental data center to improve energy efficiency. Ghose wants to achieve an energy reduction of about 15 percent, which could translate into savings of more than 25 percent.
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Near-Threshold Computing Could Enable Up to 100x Reduction in Power Consumption |
by sparky3887
University of Michigan (UM) researchers are developing near-threshold computing (NTC) technology, which could allow electronic devices to operate at lower voltages than normal. The researchers say that NTC could enable future computer systems to reduce energy requirements by 100 times or more. NTC allows for advanced scaling of complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) devices, while improving energy efficiency. “The major impact of the work is that, for a fixed battery lifetime, significantly more transistors can be used, allowing for greater functionality,” says UM professor Ronald Dreslinksi. NTC also could help decrease power requirements without overturning the entire CMOS framework. Operating at near-threshold voltages could allow devices to require less energy while minimizing energy leakage. The researchers say that NTC could have nearly universal applications in data centers and personal computing. NTC also could be useful in sensor-based systems. By reducing the power requirements by up to 100 times in sensors, NTC could lead to future sensor designs.
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