Flying pixels have the potential to offer a more immersive three-dimensional (3D) viewing experience than 3D television sets, according to engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The engineers describe their unique 3D display, called Flyfire, as a flock of tiny aircraft carrying multicolored light-emitting diodes (LEDs). The pixels can hover in front of a viewer and form an image, but they also can change their position to add greater depth to the image. “It’s a 3D display with a dual aspect–it can show an image like a traditional display, but then those pixels can move and transform into another shape,” says MIT’s E. Roon Kang. The initial proof-of-principle experiments used quad-rotor helicopters more than 10 centimeters across, and the precise control of their altitude was within three centimeters. Kang says it could take at least five years to make a display with 1,000 or more of the small flying pixels. MIT’s Emilio Frazzoli says onboard controls and a central control system also will be needed to coordinate pixel movement.
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Nagoya University researchers have developed a light-activated switch to turn nanomachines on and off. The team used tiny triggered tweezers made of DNA to open and close in response to ultraviolet (UV) and visible light. “We are designing DNA nano-robotics that are mechanically operated by light rather than chemical fuel,” says Nagoya researcher Hiroyuki Asanuma. The researchers focused on a loop of DNA that looks like a hairpin with two arms. At the end of each arm, azobenzene groups are integrated into the DNA sequence. Under visible light, the azobenzene groups adopt the trans isomer, allowing the base pairs to join together. When UV light is applied, the azobenzene groups switch to the more sterically-constrained cis isomer. The system is fully reversible, allowing it to have great potential to be applied to other nanotechnologies that use DNA. “To be able to switch biomolecular conformational changes is of considerable interest for many applications in biomedicine and bionanotechnology,” says Technical University of Munich’s Friedrich Simmel.
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Microsoft Live Labs researchers have developed Pivot, a tool designed to visually organize large data sets. Pivot presents data in the form of several images accompanied by textual data. Users can zoom into the images to study individual pieces of data, or zoom out to see items grouped according to certain criteria. Data collections can contain a few images with static data attached, or they can be large and connected to a feed of changing data. Pivot is based on Microsoft’s Seadragon, software designed for manipulating large amounts of visual information. Users can make their own collections of data by converting images to the Deep Zoom format used by Seadragon, and annotate them using a format based on extensible markup language. Pivot also could provide a better way to sort through Internet search results, because users could sort through thousands of results visually, instead of just looking a list of the top 10 search results.
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professor Carole Palmer says data curation is an important part of supporting and advancing research. “This is especially important in data-intensive science, where the power of discovery lies in applying computational approaches to large, aggregated data sets,” Palmer says. She says researchers need to plan around data-management requirements from the beginning of their projects, and to think in terms of a data set’s lifecycle. The biggest hurdles to overcome in collecting, curating, and managing data over a long period of time involve cost and labor. Even with the Internet and search engines, data stored online does not last nearly as long as data preserved in print. “We’re just beginning to do the research needed to guide how we build large-scale, multidisciplinary data repositories and collect and manage data in ways that add value and promote sharing and integration across laboratories, institutions, and disciplines,” Palmer says.
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Vienna University of Technology researchers have developed the “deanonymization” attack as a way to reveal the identity of Internet users based on their interactions in social networks. The attack uses social networking groups as well as traditional browser history-stealing tactics to single out specific users. The researchers focused on Germany’s Xing business social network and Facebook and matched stolen browsing histories with social network group members to identify users. “It is the combination of history stealing and group information that is novel,” says Vienna University post-doctoral researcher Gilbert Wondracek. Criminals could use the deanonymization method for targeted attacks, which only requires that the victim visit a malicious Web site that contains the attack code. There is no fix for the attack, but users can turn off their browsing history or use a private-browsing mode to minimize the risk.
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Tom Mitchell, head of Carnegie Mellon University’s Machine Learning Department, says that advances in machine learning could bring about a transformation in psychology and neuroscience. Mitchell says that his group has trained an algorithm to study functional magnetic resonance imaging scans of a person’s brain activity and determine what object they are thinking about. “We can look inside your brain when you see the color red, and we can look inside my brain when I see the color red, and we can ask, ‘Is it or is it not the same pattern of neural activity?’ ” he notes. Mitchell speculates that people could conceivably be networked to exchange information so that one person can tell what the other is thinking. He observes that a number of researchers are developing brain-computer interfaces that can enable the decoding of a person’s thoughts. This could be particularly useful for “locked in” patients who are speech- and mobility-disabled.
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ACM has named Cornell University professor Jon Kleinberg the winner of the 2008 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences. ACM and the Infosys Foundation created the award in 2007 to recognize personal contributions by young scientists and system developers to a contemporary innovation that exemplifies the greatest recent achievements in the computing field. Kleinberg’s models show how information is organized on the Web, how it spreads through large social networks, and how the structure of these networks leads to the six degrees of separation phenomenon. “With his innovative models and algorithms, he has broadened the scope of computer science to extend its influence to the burgeoning world of the Web and the social connections it enables,” says ACM President Dame Wendy Hall. “We are fortunate to have the benefit of his profound insights into the link between computer network structure and information that has transformed the way information is retrieved and shared online.” ACM will present Kleinberg with the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award at the annual ACM Awards Banquet on June 27 in San Diego, Calif. Financial support for the $150,000 award is provided by an endowment from the Infosys Foundation.
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Florida State University (FSU) researchers have discovered four crystals that possess properties which could lead to the development of a new generation of computer chips and other information storage devices. “We identified these four crystals as ‘multiferroic,’ meaning that they are simultaneously ferromagnetic and ferroelectric in nature when cooled to a specific temperature,” says FSU professor Naresh Dalal. Multiferroic crystals could be used to create high-powered computer memories that could hold far more information than is currently possible, says FSU professor Sir Harold Kroto. “Theoretically, it might be possible to design devices that are much smaller and faster than the ones we use today to store and transmit data,” Kroto says. The researchers say that electronic devices using multiferroic crystals would have far less environmental impact than devices used today. “The four new multiferroic crystals that we have identified all substitute other, less toxic metals for lead, which is a potent neurotoxin,” Dalal says.
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The fusion of high-performance computing (HPC) and high-performance data (HPD) could potentially result in the generation of robust systems that are at least one order of magnitude faster than anything the HPC community currently uses for certain applications, says San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) interim director Michael Norman. Last November, SDSC announced plans to construct Gordon, a data-intensive supercomputer that is expected to read latency-bound files at 10 times the speed and efficiency of current HPC systems with the help of flash memory solid state drives. Ultimately, Gordon will possess 245 teraflops of total compute power, 64 TB of digital random access memory, and 256 TB of flash memory. Gordon also will assist in the integration of HPC and HPD because it is designed for data-intensive predictive science as well as data-mining applications.
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Japanese scientists have developed a statistical program that could enable portable baby-monitoring devices to determine whether infant cries mean a baby is sleepy, hungry, needs a change, or is in pain. Tomomasa Nagashima and colleagues at the Muroran Institute of Technology used a sound pattern recognition strategy to analyze infants’ crying patterns. The team analyzed the frequency of cries and the power function of the audio spectrum to classify different types of crying. Nagashima and colleagues were able to correlate the different recorded audio spectra with the emotional state of a baby as confirmed by the parents. Recordings of a crying baby with a painful genetic disorder helped the researchers differentiate the cries of babies who are in pain. They were able to achieve a 100 percent success rate in classifying pained cries and normal cries via their technique.
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