Clear and simple visualizations of biomechanical data could improve rehabilitation after a stroke, accelerate the recovery from joint replacements, and prevent older people from falling, according to United Kingdom researchers. University of Strathclyde professor Philip Rowe is leading an initiative to develop bespoke software for capturing biomechanical data and presenting it in a way that would assist health care professionals in their effort to communicate movement information to patients. Currently, movement information is only available in graphical, tabular, or numerical form. The software would work with Strathclyde’s specialist motion analysis system and portable motion sensors. “By using animation, we can enable patients to visualize a movement, and how it affects their body,” Rowe says.
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Tomorrow’s Internet-connected cars could be vulnerable to hackers in the way computers are today, warn researchers at the University of Washington (UW) and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). During a recent test, the researchers were able to remotely control a car’s braking and other functions. “We demonstrate the ability to adversarially control a wide range of automotive functions and completely ignore driver input–including disabling the brakes, selectively braking individual wheels on demand, stopping the engine, and so on,” the researchers write. The researchers were also able to insert malicious software into the car and then erase any evidence of tampering. “Taken together, ubiquitous computer control, distributed internal connectivity, and telematics interfaces increasingly combine to provide an application software platform for external network access,” write the researchers.
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Scientists at the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS) have redesigned an Audi TTS with computers and global positioning system (GPS) receivers so that the car can drive itself. The car will attempt to scale Pikes Peak without a driver at race speeds following a GPS trail from start to finish. “Our first goal is to go up Pikes Peak at speeds resembling race speeds, keep the car stable around corners, and have everything work the way we want it to,” says Stanford’s Chris Gerdes. The car has reached speeds of 130 miles per hour without a driver during test runs at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. It uses differential GPS, which corrects for interference in the atmosphere, and can locate the car’s position on Earth within about two centimeters. The car measures its speed and acceleration with wheel-speed sensors and an accelerometer, and also employs gyroscopes to control equilibrium and direction. “The computer puts all this information together and then compares it to a digital map to figure out how close the car is to the path that we want it to take up Pikes Peak,” Gerdes says.

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Rutgers University researchers have developed an algorithm to help find open parking spaces, using ultrasonic sensors, global positioning system (GPS) receivers, and cellular data networks. The goal is to create Web-based maps or additions to navigation systems that make parking availability data accessible to those looking for a parking space. The researchers, led by Rutgers professors Marco Gruteser and Wade Trappe, say that data could help alleviate traffic congestion and cut down on energy use. To implement their system, the researchers mounted ultrasonic distance sensors on the passenger-side doors of three cars, which over two months collected parking data in a limited urban area. They then created an algorithm that converted the ultrasonic data into information on available parking spaces. Combining that data with GPS data, the algorithm generated maps that were more than 90 percent accurate. To distinguish parked cars from other objects, such as trees or recycle bins, they measure the length and width of each object using the ultrasonic sensor readings. Gruteser says the parking availability information could be distributed over the Internet and used by drivers to decide whether to park on the street or use a garage.

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The Rugged Software Development Initiative (RSDI) was recently launched by security experts in an effort to ensure that the software writing process includes thinking about security from the very start. RSDI will encourage developers to create resilient software capable of withstanding attacks while performing its normal functions, says The 451 Group’s Joshua Corman, who helped developed the initiative along with OWASP chair Jeff Williams and the Monterey Group’s David Rice. They describe RSDI as a value system for writing secure software, as opposed to a compliance program, and they hope to incorporate the tenets of rugged code development into computer science programs at universities. Unlike other security initiatives, RSDI does not include any new frameworks for secure coding. Instead, Corman says it will serve as an “on-ramp” for secure software development. He envisions the initiative leading to scenarios such as programmers voluntarily pledging to be Rugged software developers or developing an Underwriters Laboratory label for measuring a software’s ruggedness.

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Insights into how human brains categorize objects–and their potential for human-computer interfaces as well as neuropsychiatry–have been drawn by members of Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU’s) Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology. Research from CMU neuroscientists Marcel Just and Vladimir Cherkassky and computer scientists Tom Mitchell and Sandesh Aryal signals that people represent all non-human objects in terms of three dimensions, defined by Just as relating to eating, shelter, and the way the object is employed. With fMRI, the scientists discovered that objects belonging to a specific dimension induced activity in a specific region of the brain. The researchers also learned that they could anticipate which parts of the brain would be triggered by new words and that they could determine how many objects were being thought about. Just says that scientists can “identify the quantity a person is thinking about, as long as [they] instantiate it as an object.” He says the research clears a path for further enhancements in direct communications between the human brain and computers. Additional augmentations to the technology could enable people to communicate with computers by thought.

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Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Architecture and Software Technology (FIRST) have developed FlashFind, a collection of search technologies optimized for use on mobile devices. FlashFind’s tools enable full-text searching on locally stored digital data and support a variety of mobile clients, including e-readers, mobile phones, navigation systems, smartphones, and media players. The researchers say FlashFind enables users to search very large datasets and does not require network access. Beyond search, FlashFind also features tools for indoor routing, navigation, map compression, and TPEG services. FIRST developed FlashFind as part of the Future Mobile Navigation Toolkit, but it also can be used separately.

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A consortium of European research institutions is working on a new, photonic computing model under the aegis of the PHOCUS project. The system envisioned by the project uses light to communicate, potentially raising energy efficiency far above that of current supercomputers. The reservoir computer concept is inspired by the rapid information processing architecture of the human brain, in which stimuli or inputs are fed into neural networks or reservoirs. Inputs remain detectable in the reservoir for a certain time, and this input memory, coupled with the emerging response of the reservoir, converts the input into a large number of dynamical states of the reservoir, producing a high-dimensional state space. The researchers say that photonic systems could be employed to comprehend and eventually imitate some of the brain’s functionalities. PHOCUS’ ultimate target is photonic deployment of reservoir computing, running at high data rates, as an alternative to supercomputers for operations that require reduced size and less power consumption.

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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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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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