Researchers from the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) presented the most recent developments in the school’s Learning Societies Lab at a recent symposium at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. ECS’ Mike Wald discussed new features for the lab’s Web-based Synote program, including the ability to synchronize live notes taken via Twitter with synchronized lecture recordings and transcripts created through IBM’s speech-recognition software. E.A. Draffan, also from the ECS Learning Societies Lab, gave a presentation on how people with disabilities will access Web 2.0 technologies as technology continues to evolve. Draffan’s lecture focused on the need to enhance the knowledge of a wider network of informal experts and academic staff to enable them to introduce disabled students to the many Web-based tools that are currently being developed. He says doing so would enable disabled students to further develop their skills and potentially become informal experts capable of sharing the strategies they have developed. “In the past, people used their assistive technologies mainly with desktop computer applications, now they are spending far more time online,” Draffan says. “They also are collaborating and communicating via social networks, blogs, and wikis, which are not always accessible; however, often with the support of friends and tutors, they find workarounds and go on to build their own strategies.”

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Software developed by the Heath-e-Child project is capable of comparing a variety of structured and unstructured data to help identify rare or life-threatening diseases in children and then model the potential progression of those diseases. The software can search and compare patient data from hospitals throughout Europe, allowing doctors to study how patients with similar data at other hospitals were treated and whether treatment was successful. The Health-e-Child system links anonymized databases of patient information from hospitals in Paris, Genoa, Rome, and London, and there are plans to extend the network to 25 hospitals. For unstructured data such as images, the project has developed tools that translate visual information into a machine-readable language. The project’s three-dimensional (3D) registration tool for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans and its MRI erosion-scoring system for juvenile idiomatic arthritis have been recognized as major advances. The project’s CaseReasoner tool enables doctors to search thousands of disease diagnoses, treatments, and outcomes to find similar cases. And the CardioWiz tool can be combined with MRI scan measurements to rapidly generate animated 3D models of a patient’s heart that can be used to simulate the effects of heart surgery or drug treatments.

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A key topic at this week’s SC09 supercomputing conference, which takes place Nov. 14-20 in Portland, Ore., is how to reach the exascale plateau in supercomputing performance. “There are serious exascale-class problems that just cannot be solved in any reasonable amount of time with the computers that we have today,” says Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility project director Buddy Bland. Today’s supercomputers are still well short of exascale performance. The world’s fastest system, Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Jaguar, reaches a peak performance of 2.3 petaflops. Bland says the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is holding workshops on building a system 1,000 times more powerful. The DOE, which is responsible for funding many of the world’s fastest systems, wants two machines to reach approximately 10 petaflops by 2011 to 2013, says Bland. However, the next major milestone currently receiving the most attention is the exaflop, or a million trillion calculations per second. Exaflop computing is expected to be achieved around 2018, according to predictions largely based on Moore’s Law. However, problems involved in reaching exaflop computing are far more complicated than advancements in chips. For example, Jaguar uses 7 megawatts of power, but an exascale system that uses CPU processing cores alone could take 2 gigawatts, says IBM’s Dave Turek. “That’s roughly the size of medium-sized nuclear power plant,” he says. “That’s an untenable proposition for the future.” Finding a way to reduce power consumption is key to developing an exascale computer. Turek says future systems also will have to use less memory per core and will require greater memory bandwidth.

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University of Cambridge researchers have developed a simple and affordable method for constructing virtual three-dimensional (3D) models, which should make 3D modeling more accessible. The new program requires only a basic Web camera in order for users to build 3D models of textured objects in real time. The system collects live video when an object is moved in front of the Webcam, and then reconstructs the object online. The software detects points on the object, uses them to estimate object structure from the motion of the camera or the object, and computes the Delaunay tetrahedralization of the points. The system records the points in a mesh of tetrahedra, which is where the object’s surface mesh is embedded. The invalid tetrahedra are removed to obtain the surface mesh based on a probabilistic carving algorithm and the object texture is applied to the 3D mesh in order to clean up the final reconstruction and produce a realistic model. The Cambridge team presented the system at the 20th British Machine Vision Conference in London.

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China has announced plans to hold a robot Olympics in 2010, in which humanoid robots will compete in 16 different events ranging from athletics to machine-related tasks such as cleaning. The organizers expect more than 100 universities from around the world to participate in the competition, which they believe will drive innovation and lead to the development of robots that are more flexible and helpful. The event will take place at the Harbin Institute of Technology, home of a robot research group that has built a successful team of soccer-playing humanoids. However, a specific date for the robot Olympics has not been set. China faces a crowded calendar for robot sports and other competitive events. The 2010 RoboGames are scheduled for April in California, and there is an annual competition for robots that can mix cocktails, light cigarettes, and chat with bar patrons called Roboexotica. The world cup for robots, which drew entries from 400 teams in 35 nations last year, will take place June 2010 in Singapore, and the Federation of International Robot-Soccer Associations runs a similar event.

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