ACM’s SIGGRAPH 2009 conference in August featured an exhibit that enabled visitors to experience the various levels of vision and hearing of animals, such as the ultraviolet vision of birds or the ultrasonic hearing of whales. Computer scientists at Texas A&M University worked with the university’s fine arts expert Carol LaFayette on the virtual environment program, “I’m Not There.” Professor Fred Parke developed the system, which requires participants to don three-dimensional glasses and use a Wii controller to navigate through the immersive exhibit. He also is working on a liquid-crystal display version of the system. The virtual environment was enhanced by surround-sound recordings of animals in the wild and scenes set on Cocos Island, located southwest of Costa Rica. “The Viz lab is about the synthesis between art and science, so we inserted artistic elements into these scenes to make them more realistic and interesting,” LaFayette says. She believes science and natural history museums could use such technology to enhance the experience for visitors. “Think of all the exhibits that could come to life–and in a very green way,” she says.

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Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (UPM) researchers have developed a model for three-dimensional (3D) virtual learning environments using an autonomous virtual tutor that detects collaboration. The model analyzes nonverbal communication relating to collaborative interaction that takes place while a task is completed. An avatar personifies the tutor in the learning process, which shows up in the material framework provided by virtual environments. The model proposes a schema that identifies what non-verbal communication signals are likely to be useful and how to measure and relate them to particular effective collaborative learning indicators. The tutor uses text messages to give advice to students as they are completing a task. The messages are activated when students have not satisfactorily attained the indicators of effective collaborative learning. Part of the research focused on developing guidelines for relating collaborative learning indicators to certain nonverbal communication signals. Additionally, the model can be adapted to monitor other types of activities based in virtual environments, such as training or meetings.
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The U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) released guidelines that would allow nearly 3 million overseas and military voters to cast votes over the Internet in November. The EAC plan worries cybersecurity experts, election officials, and voting integrity advocates. They note that email messages and voting Web sites are vulnerable to interception or hacking. Congress mandated in 2009 that the EAC develop guidelines for pilot programs to aid overseas voting, including online voting. Most states seek EAC certification of voting technology, and the commission’s Jeannie Layson says “the EAC hopes that the work we do in 2010 will assist states already running pilot programs to improve services for military and overseas voters.” The majority of the 33 states that have developed pilot programs for Internet voting will let voters send completed ballots as an email attachment, while faxes, which are another approved method for sending votes, are increasingly being sent on the Web due to the growing use of voice-over-Internet phone service. Critics say the EAC is circumventing the technical board that is supposed to review new regulations and also may be violating federal law by not allowing enough time for public comment on the guidelines.
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Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) computer scientists have developed V3D, a software suite that features tools for visualizing, analyzing, and measuring complex, three-dimensional (3D) biological and biomedical images. The free software promises to greatly accelerate scientists’ ability to assemble and manipulate extremely detailed images. The digital reconstruction tools are 17 times more reliable than those created using commercially available software, according to HHMI computer scientist Hanchuan Peng. The HHMI team wrote algorithms to accelerate the rendering of the images on the screen. V3D allows the user to drag and drop the images to be analyzed, and to pinpoint a location in a 3D image with a mouse click. “Since we have a very fast renderer for 3D images, we were able to design new approaches to manipulate very large images freely in real time,” Peng says.
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Robotics researchers recently have focused on multiple-robot systems that work together and react to each other, with the goal of one day performing dangerous or menial tasks that machines, in combination, might do better than humans. One way researchers are getting robots to work together is by designing all-robotic soccer teams. “When we started this, the main research question was … how do you get multiple robots to coordinate?” says Carnegie Mellon University professor Manuela Veloso. Researchers also are studying insects, such as ants, bees, and termites, that work together to accomplish complex goals such as building an intricate nest. “These collective behaviors are very powerful and arise from very simple individuals,” says Harvard University professor Radhika Nagpal. Nagpal is part of a project to create robotic bees that mimic those in nature. Rice University’s James McLurkin is developing a swarm of robots that can seek out the boundaries of an area, which could be useful in exploration.
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Cornell University (CU) professor Hakim Weatherspoon and IBM researchers are studying the causes of data distortions and are developing ways for cloud computing applications to deal with them. The research involves a testbed called the Cornell NLR Rings, which sends data on loops of up to 16,000 miles around the National LambdaRail high-speed fiber-optic research network. Weatherspoon and Cornell physics post-doctoral researcher Daniel Freedman developed an apparatus that uses a very precisely modulated laser to generate packets of optical signals and to analyze what comes back with sub-picosecond accuracy. Early testing found that transmission problems show up on the uncongested LambdaRail network, meaning they also may appear on private networks used by businesses and institutions. “I have discovered that contrary to the widely held supposition that such networks are largely stable, lossless, and jitter free, these networks can be rather unstable, prone to loss, and sources of significant jitter,” Weatherspoon says.
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Frank Moss, head of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), says there are real opportunities in developing technology for disabled or disadvantaged people, and believes they will translate into great commercial hits. For example, MIT’s Rosalind Picard is creating a system for people with autism that can tell from a person’s head movements and facial expressions if they are confused, interested, or disagreeing. The system then feeds the information to a display in the corner of a pair of glasses. “The idea is to supply autistic people with the cues they would otherwise miss,” says Moss. Meanwhile, MIT’s Hugh Herr has designed a supportive exoskeleton that enables a person to run with the same energy they would normally use to walk. And MIT research assistant John Moore has built an artificial intelligence system that collects information from a patient and creates a report for the doctor. The patient talks to an avatar, which uses natural language processing to interpret what the patient says.
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Peruvian and Belgian researchers have developed an open source mobile learning application that enables health-care workers to connect to the free learning platform Moodle with their iPhone or iPod. The application was tested by health-care workers engaged in 20 clinics throughout Peru. The three-month pilot program used multimedia, three-dimensional animations, group discussions, policy documents, and peer-reviewed literature. The researchers are now finalizing the code before making it available under a Create Commons GNU license. Once the application is completed, the researchers say that institutions, nongovernmental organizations, and companies will be able to use the code to develop their own mobile learning environments.
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IBM China Research Lab scientists have developed Wireless Network Cloud (WNC), a new architecture that shifts the signal-processing requirements of wireless networks from base stations into the cloud. The researchers say moving to the cloud will make it easier and less expensive to upgrade networks, and could lead to wireless networks that can provide better coverage by rapidly adapting to user demand. General-purpose data centers are used to carry out the signal processing entirely in software, which enables the network to be managed in a more centralized way, with the raw signals being relayed to and from multiple antennas, says IBM’s Yonghua Lin. The centralized approach also means operators can manage their networks more efficiently. “IBM’s concept is not totally new but rather a combination of familiar themes, such as software-defined radio, network equipment virtualization, and networks as software,” says Rutgers University professor Dipankar Raychaudhuri.
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Object recognition systems that deconstruct images into ever smaller elements should be much more efficient and may yield insights on brain behavior, and underlying such systems are new methods developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The researchers have developed a system that learns to recognize new objects by being “trained” with digital images of labeled objects. For each labeled item, the system first identifies the smallest elements, and then seeks instances in which these elements are interconnected into slightly more complex configurations. The system continues to search for instances in which shapes of ever increasing sophistication are linked together until it has put together a hierarchical catalog of increasingly complex components whose top layer is a model of the entire object. The system then sifts through its catalog from the top down, weeding out all redundancies. Memory is saved because different objects can have shapes in common, requiring only once instance of memory storage.
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