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.
View Full Article
For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

A project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and led by University of Nottingham researchers is developing a new computerized approach to scheduling airport operations that is designed to reduce delays, speed up baggage handling, and decrease pollution. The project aims to computerize and coordinate the scheduling of take-offs, landings, gate assignments, and baggage handling. The end result will be a search engine capable of analyzing the billions of possible scheduling combinations to provide the controllers with the most efficient courses of action. Currently, these four areas are organized manually by staff members who make decisions based on observations, reports, and experience. The scheduling improvements will make flying easier for passengers and reduce pollution by minimizing the time planes spend on the ground with their engines running. The project will develop computational models for each of the four areas of operations and determine how to run those models in conjunction with each other. One of the critical issues is how long an airplane needs for preparation on the ground before it can take off. Preparation includes enough time for the safety briefing and warming the engines. Sending a plane to the runway before either of these steps has taken place will cause delays on the runway that could affect other flights.

View Full Article

For More Information:http://www.cpccci.com

University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill computer scientists and Boeing researchers are developing a new set of hierarchical and multi-resolution algorithms and techniques to simulate digital assemblies of large computer-aided design (CAD) structures such as a Boeing aircraft. The algorithms enabled the researchers to produce real-time programs to ray-trace large models on PC workstations. Efficient algorithms for proximity computations also have been developed for the purpose of object placement and spotting interferences among the CAD components. The ultimate aim of the UNC project is the development of digital manufacturing environments that include three-dimensional representations of parts and assembly tooling that can significantly enhance assembly, disassembly, and re-assembly processes for manufacturing and maintenance.
View Full Article

For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

The majority of countries with the most successful broadband deployments have opened up the networks of their main carriers to competing service providers, according to a draft report issued by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. The report, by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, analyzed findings from a variety of market-oriented democracies in an effort to understand what approaches are the most successful at ensuring that citizens have adequate high-speed Internet access. Most of the highest ranked countries use open access policies in which the incumbent carriers must allow competitors to lease capacity on their networks to offer their own services. In comparison, the United States established open access rules in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, but has backed away from implementing them early in this decade, according to the report. The study found that open-access policies were a major contributor to the success of many first-generation wired network transitions, and is now helping second-generation wired rollouts. Japan, South Korea, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom are among the countries that have used open-access rules to foster strong broadband markets. In most measurements of broadband success, the United States ranks in the middle of developed countries, according to the study’s analysis. The U.S. ranks 15th on broadband penetration per 100 people, and 19th in 3G wireless penetration. However, the U.S. ranks fifth in both median upload speed and in a broad measure of prices for low-speed broadband, and ninth in the number of Wi-Fi hotspots per 100,000 people.

View Full Article

For More Information:http://www.cpccci.com

Technological advancements in sensing technology makes it possible to take more accurate measurements of brain activity, something computer scientists and neuroscientists say could lead to the discovery of the complex neuronal networks in the brain that allow for simple, automatic movements such as reaching for a glass of water. Virginia Tech and General Motors Research are opening the Laboratory for Neuroinformatics for the purpose of creating algorithms that process the massive amounts of data neuroscientists collect from the brain. The lab will be co-directed by Virginia Tech computer science professor Naren Ramakrishnan and General Motors research scientist K.P. Unnikrishnan. “Neuroscientists are making the transition from studying neurons to studying networks–the sequences of firings and spikes of activity across big groups of neurons,” Ramakrishnan says. “What we are trying to do is analyze all this data and discover something about the network–the connections and relationships.” Unnikrishnan says the many possible applications of neuroscience-related research include analyzing data from cars and maintaining vehicle health. But even greater applications are possible, Unnikrishnan says. “Creation of brain-machine interfaces is the next frontier,” Unnikrishnan says. “Giving senses to people who have lost them–vision, touch, hearing, and motor–would be a contribution to humanity.”
Click Here to View Full Article
For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

The computer industry had an opportunity to learn about the technical details of Google’s infrastructure during LADIS 2009, ACM’s recent SIGOPS International Workshop on Large Scale Distributed Systems and Middleware. Jeff Dean, a Google engineer who was one of the keynote speakers, also talked about Spanner, a new storage and computation system for automating the management of services across multiple data centers. Spanner, which will have a scale of 1 million to 10 million servers in the future, would be capable of automatically allocating resources across “entire fleets of machines,” Dean says. The goal will be “automatic, dynamic, worldwide placement of data and computation to minimize latency or cost.” Spanner also would offer a cost management strategy for addressing regional differences in bandwidth and power costs. Google would have energy management opportunities because Spanner can seamlessly shift workloads between data centers. Automated capacity management also would enable Google to route around failures or data center downtime as well as plan more energy-efficient facilities.

View Full Article

For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

Defcon founder and organizer Jeff Moss, who was named to the U.S. Homeland Security Advisory Council in June, notes that there is a desire in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other agencies to augment the cybersecurity alert system as well as adopt Web 2.0 technologies. “It goes back to this theme I keep hearing from people there that they need to fully engage in the cyber area with distributing information,” he says. “They want to be more transparent and they want to communicate information faster to broader audiences in different ways. The hang-up seems to be, what are the best ways to do it?” Moss says that DHS has been authorized to hire as many as 1,000 cybersecurity employees over the next three years, but he does not think that specialists are available in such numbers. Moss says agencies’ fierce protection of their bureaucratic fiefdoms plays a part in the U.S. government’s inability to respond adequately to a cyberattack. He acknowledges that the position of cybersecurity czar has been marked by a lot of turnover, and he presents a theory that “the longer you go without a czar the more they realize that maybe they don’t need one, that what they envision what a czar doing, the role is changing.” Moss argues that the position should be one tasked with coordinating intelligence, civilians, and the military. “So it’s probably more important to get the right person and explain the position so they don’t end up with one of these ‘all the responsibilities and none of the authority’ situations, which is what it sounded like, [a] multiple reporting structure with little budget and little staff and no real authority,” he says.

View Full Article

For More Information:http://www.cpccci.com

The Perception-on-Purpose (POP) project is an effort by European researchers to develop technology enabling a robot to integrate visual and audio data to facilitate purposeful perception. “It is not that easy to decide what is foreground and what is background using sound alone, but by combining the two modalities–sound and vision–it becomes much easier,” says project coordinator Radu Horaud. “If you are able to locate 10 sound sources in 10 different directions, but if in one of these directions you see a face, then you can much more easily concentrate on that sound and throw out the other ones.” The researchers followed this strategy in their development of algorithms that allowed their robot, Popeye, to reliably identify speakers. “Most often, sound research is conducted in specialized labs, with arrays of microphones and a very controlled acoustic environment,” Horaud says. “But we integrated our two microphones and two cameras onto the head of our Popeye. The idea is to have an agent-centered cognitive system.” Horaud believes there is a link between multi-sensory perception and cognition, and that some modern artificial intelligence applications are constrained by their inability to learn from their environment.

View Full Article

For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

A scan of the Internet by Columbia University researchers searching for vulnerable embedded devices has found that nearly 21,000 routers, Webcams, and VoIP products are vulnerable to remote attack. They say there could be as many as 6 million vulnerable devices on the Internet. The scan also found that the devices’ administrative interfaces are viewable from anywhere on the Internet, and their owners have not changed the devices’ passwords from the manufacturer’s default. The study scanned networks belonging to the largest Internet service providers (ISPs) in North America, Europe, and Asia, and vulnerable devices were found in significant numbers in all parts of the world. Since starting the project last December, the researchers have scanned 130 million IP addresses and found nearly 300,000 devices whose administrative interfaces were remotely accessible from anywhere on the Internet. Devices with default passwords are most vulnerable, but others are theoretically vulnerable to brute-force password-cracking attacks. The researchers have provided ISPs with their findings, but Columbia professor Salvatore Stolfo says product manufacturers are the real culprits. He says that they need to hide their administrative interfaces by default and give customers clear instructions on how to alter the configuration to protect themselves. Stolfo also says that vendors should be more vocal in encouraging customers to change default passwords.

View Full Article

For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

Researchers in Barcelona are developing virtual reality spaces that incorporate touch-sensitive tiles and immersive animations. Pompeu Fabra University professor Paul Verschure says his research team has built an experience-induction machine as part of the PRESENCCIA project to understand how humans can exist in physical and virtual environments simultaneously. One of the project’s major challenges was creating a credible virtual environment, which required the researchers to understand how people’s brains construct a vision of the world. “Imagine what we see is sort of rapidly jumping about–that would not be a believable experience for us,” Verschure says. “So that means one thing we have really tried to engineer here also from a psychological perspective is how do I feed this continuity of expectations that our brain is generating about the world.” The researchers say the ultimate goal is to advance human-computer interaction beyond the traditional keyboard, screen, and mouse. “What we’re trying to do is to understand why people behave in a more or less natural way in a virtual reality,” says PRESENCCIA project coordinator Mel Slater. Petar Horki, a student at Austria’s Graz University of Technology, is using PRESENCCIA concepts to create a virtual reality system that uses mind control, allowing the user to simply think about an action to perform that action in the virtual world. “Actually, I’m not doing anything, I’m just imagining I’m doing a brisk foot movement, and by this imagination I can move at least in this virtual room,” Horki says.

View Full Article

For More Information:http://www.cpccci.com