Studies done at Microsoft Research are using electroencephalograph (EEG) measurements to read users’ minds in order to help tag online images. The researchers say the mind-reading technique is the first step toward a hybrid human-computer data analysis system. The manual process for tagging images is often tedious and repetitive, but with the new method of EEG tagging, workers may be able to perform other tasks during the tagging process. Computers can recognize shapes and movements very well, but they have a harder time with categorizing objects in human terms, says Microsoft Research’s Desney Tan. During testing, researchers could determine if the subject was looking at a face, an animal, or an inanimate object with good results. The researchers found that no improvement was seen if the viewer was given more than half a second to look at each image. This leads researchers to think images could be displayed at that speed with no loss of accuracy.

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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.

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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.

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European researchers have devised a new software development paradigm using an assembly line-style development process. “Think of this as a sandwich shop, where you have different products coming from a product line that shares ingredients, which customers can pick and choose,” says AMPLE project coordinator and Lancaster University professor Awais Rashid. The asset base features modular software elements that establish a Software Product Line (SPL), within which is managed the entire software lifecycle from design and development through deployment and maintenance. The AMPLE team created analyses tools that guide users on system development. Rashid says the results of the AMPLE tool analyses match those of human software experts, but the AMPLE software is capable of much faster assessment and can be used by non-experts. Other tools in the chain let companies generate their own modular software components, to put them together for a specific job, and to test and validate the resulting application. Another key element is the maintenance, repair, and modification of both the SPL and the software it creates.

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The neutron transport code UNIC being developed by a team of computer scientists and nuclear engineers at Argonne National Laboratory enables researchers to acquire a fine-grained model of a nuclear reactor core for the first time. “The UNIC code is intended to reduce the uncertainties and biases in reactor design calculations by progressively replacing existing multilevel averaging techniques with more direct solution methods based on explicit reactor geometries,” says Argonne scientist Andrew Siegel. The Argonne researchers have executed detailed simulations of the Zero Power Reactor experiments on as many as 163,840 processor cores of the Blue Gene/P and 222,912 processor cores of the Cray XT5 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, as well as on 294,912 processor cores of a Blue Gene/P at Germany’s Julich Supercomputing Center. UNIC has enabled researchers to successfully represent the details of the full reactor geometry as well as compare the results directly with the experimental data. The scientists say the code could play an essential role in the development of safe, affordable, and green nuclear reactors. UNIC gives researchers a better understanding of the behavior of existing reactor systems and also allows them to anticipate the behavior of many newly proposed systems with untested design characteristics.

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Researchers at IBM’s Zurich Research Laboratories have developed magnetic tape technology that can store 29.5 billion bits per square inch, which would allow a cartridge to store about 35 terabytes of data, more than 40 times the storage capacity of current cartridges and several times more than a hard disk of similar size. The researchers used a magnetic medium called barium ferrite, and, by working with Fujifilm, were able to orientate the barium ferrite magnetic particles so that their magnetic fields protrude perpendicularly from the tape, instead of lengthways. This arrangement allows more bits to be stored in a given area, and also strengthens the magnetic fields. Additionally, thinner tape can be used, allowing 12 percent more tape to be stored on a single spooled cartridge. Increasing the density of data on a tape makes it more difficult to reliably read information, which was already a problem due to electromagnetic interference and because the heads retain a certain amount of residual magnetism from readings. To solve these problems, the IBM researchers developed new signal processing algorithms that simultaneously process data and predict the effect that electromagnetic noise will have on subsequent readings.

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Researchers at Queen’s University are calling their new technology the future of board games. The technology, which looks like a set of white, cardboard hexagrams from the game board of Settlers of Catan, enables people to play electronic games in a traditional setting around a table, while enhancing game controls. Queen’s Human Media Lab (HML) professor Roel Vertegaal worked with graduate student Mike Rooke to develop the technology, which makes use of an overhead camera and a projector that allows designers to turn each piece of cardboard into a minicomputer capable of displaying video images. Vertegaal says such board games will become practical with the emergence of thin-film organic light-emitting diode screens. Meanwhile, Vertegaal also is working with HML student Eric Akaoka on research into DisplayObjects, which would allow any object to become a computer. “In the near future, a computer will have any shape or form, and iPhone-like computer displays will start appearing on any product,” he says. “These organic user interfaces will be embedded in real-world interactions.”

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University of Gothenburg professor Aarne Ranta is leading an effort to create a reliable translation tool that covers most of the European Union languages. The open source Multilingual On-Line Translation (MOLTO) project, which is funded by the European Union (EU) and includes three universities and two private companies, is different from other translation tools in that it begins with grammar rules, with wide-ranging coverage coming later, Ranta says. MOLTO uses a technique based on type theory to bridge natural languages. Type theory enables MOLTO to express each type in a language-impendent manner. “The purpose of the EU grant is to enable us to use the MOLTO technology to create a system that can be used for translation on the Internet,” Ranta says. Although similar technology already exists, MOLTO’s goal is to make the technology more user friendly for a larger number of users, he says.

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A consortium of research institutes has developed network-centric middleware for group communications and resource sharing across heterogeneous embedded systems (MORE), new middleware that is applicable to the entire spectrum of wireless standards. MORE was designed to make network creation quicker and easier, and also enables the efficiency of many types of machinery and systems to be constantly monitored. While other middleware platforms aim to simplify one area of wireless technology, MORE tries to unify all approaches, says project coordinator Stefan Michaelis. MORE is designed to deal with the limitations of embedded systems, such as wireless sensors. These sensors are often bogged down by Web services based on service-oriented architecture protocol (SOAP). MORE transcodes SOAP messages into purged binary messages, which Michaelis says greatly reduces the support data required for communication.

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A team at the University of Southampton is working on a toolbar that promises to make the Web more accessible. The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) TechDis toolbar is designed to read text aloud and check spelling. It also offers a dictionary, text enlargement, color, and font changes. Moreover, users do not need specially installed assistive technologies to use the JISC TechDis toolbar with Web services such as wikis, blogs, social networks, and Twitter. “The toolbar, which is quick and easy to install, will make Web sites a lot easier for people to use,” says toolbar developer Sebastian Skuse. “For example, a visually impaired user can switch any Web page into a high contrast mode, increase the text size, or have the page read to them.” The team will now pursue beta testing of the toolbar, which can be downloaded for free and works with any platform. Skuse says the team also is considering extending the toolbar for use on mobile devices.

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