Accurate, large-scale three-dimensional (3D) computer maps could soon revolutionize how people manage and relate to urban environments. “Everyone is now familiar with 3D maps, we’re trying to take them beyond simple visualization,” says Glen Hart, the head of research at Ordnance Survey, the United Kingdom’s mapping agency. In a project to demonstrate the potential of 3D mapping, researchers used Lidar technology to capture the height of buildings, trees, and other features in Bournemouth, a coastal resort town in south England. Combining the Lidar scans with information from aerial photos and traditional surveys produces a full-color 3D map, built from more than 700 million points and accurate to 4 centimeters in x, y, and z. In comparison, the 3D structures in Google Earth are accurate to about 15 meters. Other efforts to advance 3D mapping include transferring the overlaying techniques already used on detailed digital two-dimensional maps to large-scale 3D maps, including information such as the layout of electric cables or data on air pollution. “Now it’s not just buildings, but floors within the building that could be annotated,” Hart says. The newest generation of maps can capture information such as mailboxes and lamp posts, which are too small to appear on existing city-scale virtual maps. They also can be used to simulate how a proposed building would affect available light in neighboring buildings, for example, or predict wind corridors or dead spots in cell coverage.

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Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M) researchers have developed a system that detects the name of drugs in biomedical texts and integrates them into medical databases as well as into a prototype system that recognizes and classifies drug interactions that could be potentially dangerous to patients. Currently, there are databases to check possible interactions between drugs administered to patients, but many of these databases are not updated often enough, according to the researchers. “The biomedical literature is the best system for staying up-to-date with respect to new interactions, but each year 300,000 articles are published just within the pharmacology domain, which is an avalanche of information overwhelming medical personnel,” says UC3M professor Isabel Sequra. The researchers have developed a system capable of automatically detecting the names of drugs in biomedical texts with 90 percent accuracy. “The system we describe permits identification of drug names and their classification within drug families in scientific texts,” Sequra says. The researchers also are developing a system for extracting interactions. “We have already developed two different prototypes, one based on the use of linguistic patterns and information and a second based on techniques of automatic learning,” says UC3M’s Paloma Martinez.

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Once primarily a place for outsourcing call centers and repetitive software development, Bangalore is now home to a thriving research and development (R&D) industry that is driving advances in chip and software design and innovative healthcare products, writes Saritha Rai. Google’s Map Maker, Intel’s Xeon processor, Microsoft’s Bing search engine, and Hewlett-Packard’s Dynamic Smart Cool Technology were all designed, at least in part, in Bangalore. Bangalore’s evolution into a mature global R&D center has taken place in only a few years, largely due to an ecosystem of inexpensive talent, maturing skills, and innovative ideas for new products and services. “There is a defined shift post-2007,” says Zinnov Management Consulting’s Praveen Bhadada, author of a recently released study titled “India R&D Talent Pool.” Companies are not just shifting research and development to India, they are also shifting R&D management to India. “By giving core R&D responsibilities to their India heads, companies like Cisco, General Electric, and IBM have pioneered a new global innovation model,” says Navi Radjou, executive director of the University of Cambridge’s Center for India & Global Business. Costs in Bangalore are similar to other global R&D centers such as Shanghai, the Ukraine, and Russia, according to Zinnov’s analysis. Bangalore does have some challenges, particularly a weak infrastructure. However, Radjou says that using Bangalore or Shanghai to shape Western businesses’ global identities is a smart strategy given that emerging markets will account for much of their future economic growth.

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The European Union (EU) has announced the finalization of the EURACE project, which used supercomputing technology to develop advanced financial models designed to help predict and prevent future financial disasters. The three-year EURACE project is based on agent technology known as Flexible Large-scale Agent Modeling Environment (FLAME). The EU says the software stimulates the interactions between different economic actors, such as households and companies, banks and borrowers, and employers and job seekers. “The results of this research project will complement traditional economic statistics and assumptions about how economic actors react by enabling better testing of a policy’s effects on people, while still on the drawing board,” says EU commissioner Viviane Reding. The EU believes that an agent-based approach to financial modeling could create realistic simulations that would be more useful for preventing future recessions. “Agent based modeling is one of the emergent branches of [artificial intelligence] which best demonstrates complex, social behavior of different communities living together in real-world scenarios,” according to the EU. “The ideology allows agents, representing individuals or groups, to be put into a simulated environment where their individual interactions can then be studied more closely.” The project’s FLAME agent technology was developed by the University of Sheffield and has been used in a variety of projects, including the Epitheliome Project for developing various models of skin.

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ACM’s SIGGRAPH 2009 conference in August featured an exhibit that enabled visitors to experience the various levels of vision and hearing of animals, such as the ultraviolet vision of birds or the ultrasonic hearing of whales. Computer scientists at Texas A&M University worked with the university’s fine arts expert Carol LaFayette on the virtual environment program, “I’m Not There.” Professor Fred Parke developed the system, which requires participants to don three-dimensional glasses and use a Wii controller to navigate through the immersive exhibit. He also is working on a liquid-crystal display version of the system. The virtual environment was enhanced by surround-sound recordings of animals in the wild and scenes set on Cocos Island, located southwest of Costa Rica. “The Viz lab is about the synthesis between art and science, so we inserted artistic elements into these scenes to make them more realistic and interesting,” LaFayette says. She believes science and natural history museums could use such technology to enhance the experience for visitors. “Think of all the exhibits that could come to life–and in a very green way,” she says.

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