Researchers at the National Center for Scientific Research have devised an organic transistor that can emulate a synapse’s primary functionalities. The researchers say the breakthrough could lead to new generations of neuro-inspired computers capable of functions comparable to those of the human brain. The nanoparticle organic memory field-effect transistor (NOMFET) successfully mimics synapse plasticity. Gold nanoparticles are fixed in the transistor channel and coated with pentacene, and they have a memory effect that permits them to imitate the way a synapse operates during the transmission of action potentials between a pair of neurons. Thus the electronic element can evolve as a function of the system in which it is encapsulated. The NOMFET’s performance matches that of at least seven complementary metal-oxide semiconductor transistors that up to now have been needed to mimic plasticity. Neuro-inspired computers can address visual recognition and other challenges that are beyond the capabilities of silicon computers.

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An international team led by University of Sydney researchers have developed a multiple wavelength laser on a silicon chip that produces light for processing and transmitting information. The breakthrough has the potential to lead to more powerful and less expensive computers. “The on-chip light source will be key to enabling the simultaneous transmission of multiple data channels either on-chip or between chips in a single optical fiber, each at a different wavelength,” says Sydney professor David Moss. Electrical signals currently carry information over copper wires. “We know that metal is prone to ‘choking’ on the bandwidth bottleneck,” Moss says. The device consists of a laser on a chip, which can be integrated with silicon computer chips. The laser also could be used in telecommunications, high-precision broadband sensing and spectroscopy, metrology, molecular fingerprinting, optical clocks, and attosecond physics.

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Software developers and tech-savvy individuals from around the world are organizing to help with the Haiti relief effort. For example, Noel Dickover co-founded CrisisCommons to provide non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and others in Haiti with better information and situational awareness. “If we can improve situational awareness and information sharing, we can help NGOs have better performance across the board,” Dickover says. Projects already underway include the Haiti OpenStreetMap, a global positioning system-compatible street map of Haiti. Another project is the We Have, We Need Exchange program, an online marketplace for the exchange of resources and services geared toward NGOs in Haiti. Other projects include a timeline of events, a wiki hosted by National Public Radio, an English to Creole dictionary for iPhone and Android mobile devices, and a system to use Twitter messages to ask for or offer assistance. Other volunteer tech efforts include a collaborative effort between Ushaahidi, InSTEDD, and Thompson Reuters to launch a disaster information service using local SMS short code for people in Haiti to text their emergency needs.

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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 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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Researchers at the Chinese Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) have built a supercomputer using only home-grown microprocessors. The supercomputer, known as the Dawning 6000, will run Linux and will be completed by mid 2010 at the latest, says ICT’s Weiwu Hu. The Dawning 6000 is part of ICT’s Loongson family of computers, which all will use chips based on the MIPS instruction set. The new supercomputer uses Loongson 3 chips in clusters of up to 16 cores. “This is a very high-performance MIPS architecture where, when it’s run in a cluster configuration, it becomes very powerful,” says MIPS Technologies’ Art Swift. Some analysts estimate this configuration could require as few as 782 16-core chips. The main differences between the Loongson 3 chip and earlier versions is it includes hardware translation of x86 instructions and it uses multiple cores, each capable of processing commands independently. One component not included in the Loongson 3 is multithreading, which allows a single core to execute multiple instructions simultaneously, and is included in some Intel and Sun chips. The Loongson 3 could be used in everything from desktop computers to set-top boxes.

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The United States remains the world’s leader in science and technology, based on factors such as gross dollars spent, relative spending on research, research articles published, and patents granted, according to the National Science Board’s biennial report on science and engineering. The report says the U.S. accounted for nearly one third of the $1.1 trillion spent on research and development (R&D) worldwide in 2007. From 1998 to 2007, R&D spending grew between five and six percent annually in the United States, Japan, and the European Union. However, R&D spending in India, South Korea, and Taiwan grew an average of nine to 10 percent per year during that period, and Chinese spending grew by more than 20 percent per year. Out of approximately 760,000 research articles published in 2008, 25 percent were written by U.S. researchers. Chinese scientists published about eight percent of the research articles, up from one percent in 1988. U.S.-based inventors accounted for 49 percent of the patents granted in 2008, down from 55 percent in 1995.

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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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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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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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