Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s “Adaptive Use Musical Instruments for the Physically Challenged” program enables students with severe physical disabilities to make music by just moving their heads. The system uses a digital video camera to track a student’s head movements on a computer screen and then translates the movements into piano scales or drum beats. Zane Van Dusen, a RPI undergraduate student in computer science and electronic media arts and communication, developed the idea of using a digital video camera to track the user’s head. A cursor is digitally placed on a portion of the student’s head, usually the tip of the nose, to follow the user’s movements. As the cursor moves, sounds are created based on the user’s movements. Moving the head completely in one direction will create a scale climb on the piano or a quick series of drum beats or a drum roll. The project’s ultimate goal is to eventually enable students to compose their own pieces to help students learn the creative process and build communication skills. “The client or patient doesn’t have to be a musician to participate,” says the American Musical Therapy Association’s Al Bumanis. “The goal is not usually a performance, it’s increasing communication skills, understanding, relearning lost skills.”
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A coalition of seven academic institutions will use a $12.2 million National Institutes of Health grant to develop VIVOweb, a Facebook-style professional networking system for biomedical researchers across the United States. Participating institutions say VIVOweb will make it easier for scientists to find one another, ultimately enabling them to improve their ongoing studies and create long-term collaborative projects that could result in new discoveries. University of Florida professor Michael Conlon, the principal investigator on the project, says scientists often have difficulty finding each other, and currently the best way to connect with others performing similar research is through lists of publications. Dean Krafft, who is leading the project at Cornell University, says VIVOweb will use the Semantic Web to make information more available to scientists. The public also will be able to access the site, but some information will be available only to scientists. The open source software developed by Cornell for VIVOweb collects the facts a person is looking for and assembles a unique Web page just for that search. Participants expect to have VIVOweb connected across the country within two years, and eventually plan to connect scientists from around the world.

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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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