Researchers from IBM’s Almaden Research Center and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have performed a computer simulation that matches the scale and complexity of a cat’s brain, while researchers from IBM and Stanford University say they have developed an algorithm for mapping the human brain in unprecedented detail. The researchers say these efforts could help build a computer that replicates the complexity of the human brain. In the first project, an IBM supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore Lab was used to model the movement of data through a structure with 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses, enabling researchers to observe how information “percolates” through a system similar to a feline cerebral cortex. The research is part of IBM project manager Dharmendra Modha’s efforts to design a new computer by first better understanding how the brain works. “The brain has awe-inspiring capabilities,” Modha says. “It can react or interact with complex, real-world environments, in a context-dependent way. And yet it consumes less power than a light bulb and it occupies less space than a two-liter bottle of soda.” Modha says a major difference between the brain and traditional computers is that current computer are designed on a model that differentiates between processing and storing data, which can lead to a lag in updating information. However, the brain can integrate and react to a constant stream of sights, sounds, and sensory information. Modha imagines a cognitive computer capable of analyzing a constant stream of information from global trading floors, banking institutions, and real estate markets to identify key trends and their consequences; or a computer capable of evaluating pollution using real-time sensors from around the world.

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Researchers at Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M) have developed a facial biometrics system based on individual models. UC3M study author David Delgado Gomez says the objective is to create a model for each person that highlights the most distinguishing features on each face. Delgado says one way to describe a person is through traits that other people do not have, and their new system aims to apply that approach to an algorithm. The researchers say the most complicated part is combining facial geometry and facial texture. “With only the geometric information, very low classifications are obtained, which is why we combine this information with that of facial texture to obtain a more robust model, and a statistical way of combining them occurred to us, which offered very good results,” Delgado says. The researchers have shown that when their system is used in a controlled environment it can achieve 95 percent accuracy. The biggest challenge to facial-recognition systems is lighting, which can change the color of a person’s face. Aging also is a challenge as people’s faces can become heavier, thinner, or more wrinkled.

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China has rocketed back into the top ranks of scientific research by being free from the social and legal hindrances common in the West and due to its investment of billions of dollars. Nearly every Chinese ministry boasts a program to gain a technological lead of some sort, and in May a Chinese supercomputer was named the second fastest machine in the world at an international conference in Germany. China also is only second to the United States in the number of research articles published in scientific and technical journals worldwide. Many top Chinese scientific institutes appear to be insulating themselves from bureaucratic interference, which has raised ethical concerns about the research they are conducting. Among the challenges China faces is a weak innovation framework and unrealistic bureaucrat-driven mandates to produce discoveries. Another troubling fact is China’s status as the leading source of “junk” patents, while plagiarism and doctored results abound. China’s growing competitiveness is causing U.S. experts to question the practice of opening research institutions to Chinese students. U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation officials also claim that China is running a large U.S.-based espionage operation to steal the country’s industrial, military, technological, and scientific secrets.
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A new system developed by researchers at Australian National University (ANU) uses quantum memory for light more efficiently than similar storage devices. The researchers used a technique they pioneered to stop and control light from a laser, which enabled them to manipulate electrons in a crystal cooled to -270 degrees Celsius. The level of efficiency and accuracy allows the quantum nature of light to be stored, manipulated, and recalled. “Light entering the crystal is slowed all the way to a stop, where it remains until we let it go again,” says lead researcher Morgan Hedges. “When we do let it go, we get out essentially everything that went in as a three-dimensional hologram, accurate right down to the last photon.” The inherent uncertainty in quantum mechanics means some of the information in this light will be lost the moment it is measured. The system is perfect for secure communication because the information could only be read once. The team plans to focus on improving storage times by experimenting with a technique that halted light in a crystal for over a second, which is more than 1,000 times longer than was previously possible.
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The emerging field of magnonics is attracting researchers because of its possible role in the development of transistorless logic circuits, and researchers are investigating how to use spin wave phenomena to make logic circuits. Unlike CMOS logic circuits, which use electric current to store and transfer data, magnonic logic circuits use spin waves propagating in magnetic waveguides. By avoiding electric currents, magnonic logic circuits have the potential to enable more efficient data transfer and enhanced logic functionality, including parallel data processing. Magnonic logic circuits can encode a bit of information through either the amplitude or the phase of the spin wave. Although the amplitude-encoding approach has benefits, including low power consumption due to the low energy of the spin wave signal, the phase-encoding approach is more promising, according to University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) researchers. “The greatest potential advantage of magnonic logic circuits is the ability to process information in parallel on different frequencies, which is not possible for CMOS-based logic,” says UCLA researcher Alexander Khitun.
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U.S. President Barack Obama today will sign a memorandum that makes 500 megahertz of wireless spectrum, currently controlled by the federal government and private companies, available for auction. The memorandum is part of an administration effort to nearly double the wireless communications spectrum available for commercial use over the next 10 years. Most of the spectrum would be designated for commercial use in mobile broadband and similar applications, and proceeds from the auction would help finance better communications systems for public safety agencies. About 45 percent of the spectrum to be auctioned will come from federal agencies that will be asked to give up allocations that they are not using or could share. The remaining spectrum will come from unused spectrum already scheduled for auction or from broadcasters who would be offered incentives to relinquish part of their airwaves. “The administration’s strong actions on wireless broadband will move us significantly toward sustainable economic success, robust investment, and global leadership in innovation,” says Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski.
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Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M) researchers working on the eMadrid project are studying how to use three-dimensional (3D) virtual worlds for teaching. Three-dimensional virtual worlds must include teaching elements such as a training program, with a sequence of activities for students to acquire knowledge, as well as a methodology to evaluate previously defined learning results, to become a learning platform, says UC3M professor Carlos Delgado Kloos. “The 3D learning environments are not only appropriate for transmission of knowledge, but also for teaching competencies, and if they also include augmented reality elements for the manipulation of a three-dimensional world with real physical elements, even better results are obtained, as the barrier of a fictional world immersion is reduced,” Kloos says. The eMadrid project is working to achieve these standards by collaborating with researchers from other universities, including Autonoma, Complutense, Politecnica, Rey Juan Carlos, and the National Distance Education University of Spain. The researchers are developing defined standards and best practices for implementing teaching environments in 3D virtual platforms.
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At the recent Usenix Annual Technical Conference, Georgia Institute of Technology researcher Vytautus Valancius described Transit Protocol, a system that would let cloud users customize the path their data takes as it travels through cloud computing platforms. Valancius says Transit Protocol enables users to set a path that matches the needs of a specific application. For example, he says Transit Protocol could let cloud providers connect to a variety of Internet service providers, and create a specially designed interface for customers to manage their access. Valancius says Transit protocol is currently being used to power several academic experiments at sites across the United States. “As cloud platforms mature to host increasingly complex and demanding applications, customers will want a greater degree of flexibility and control over these resources,” notes University of British Columbia professor Andrew Warfield.
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Inspired by the sandfish lizard, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are collaborating with Northwestern University’s Paul Umbanhowar to develop a snake-like robot that can swim through sand. When the sandfish lizard is submerged in sand, the animal tucks its limbs into its sides and moves forward by wiggling from side to side. The researchers created a computer model of the sandfish lizard that showed a snake-like robot with seven body segments that could travel through a granular medium such as sand. The researchers built a robot that is 35 centimeters long and features seven aluminum segments linked by six motors, which are covered in spandex to prevent the motors from becoming jammed. When the robot undulates its body at a frequency similar to the lizard, it can move forward at speeds of up to 0.3 body lengths per wave cycle. The team would have to add more jointed segments to match the 0.4 body lengths per cycle that a submerged lizard can achieve.
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The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center’s John Shalf describes parallel programming languages as tools designed to program systems with multiple processors and thus multiple concurrent instruction threads. He projects that all future computer speed upgrades will be derived from parallelism, as chips’ clock frequencies are no longer increasing. Shalf says that a program that runs in parallel can be created using a sequential programming language, and notes that some of the most commonly used parallel programming strategies exploit the syntax of existing sequential languages. He is concerned “that serial languages do not provide the necessary semantic guarantees about locality of effect that is necessary for efficient parallelism. Ornamenting the language to insert the semantics of such guarantees … is arduous, prone to error, and quite frankly not very intuitive.” Shalf expects a resurgence in implicit parallelism and constructs formulated from functional languages, and says the most important development looking ahead is the migration of parallelism notions from an academic problem to a mainstream challenge. “This means it is even more imperative that we train future computer scientists to solve problems using parallelism from the get-go,” he says.
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