The Web Scene » Researchers

Researchers Reveal New Robot: A Fish Called WANDA

sparky3887 — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 01:19:00 +0000

Scientists at Australia’s Intelligent Polymer Research Institute, the National Centre for Sensor Research at Dublin City University, and the Defense Science and Technology Organisation Maritime Platforms Division have developed the Wireless Aquatic Navigator for Detection and Analysis (WANDA), a robotic fish that contains a camera and can seek out and swim toward a particular object of interest. The researchers say WANDA’s real innovation is an active flexible joint tail fin that is activated through conducting polymer artificial muscles. Researcher Scott McGovern says the major advantage of the polymer materials is the ease with which it mimics the tail fin motion of a real fish. WANDA is more mobile and flexible than previous sensing systems, and its fish-like movements create better maneuverability than conventional propeller-driven devices. Conducting polymers also are more robust than the traditional materials used in similar devices. WANDA has been designed to continually swim and search for a pre-defined color and could be used to detect water quality and pollution levels in water catchments and dams. Existing systems detect pollution at certain points along the catchment, but WANDA could swim around the entire structure to provide a more thorough picture of the whole area. WANDA also is capable of inspecting water pipers that human divers cannot reach, or mapping out underwater areas.

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Ancient Cultures a Click Away

sparky3887 — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 02:56:32 +0000

European researchers working on the Mosaica project are developing portals that will enable users to virtually travel to both ancient and new destinations. “Mosaica was an opportunity to carve a niche in the semantic web for cultural diversity; to transfer young people’s inherent fascination for technology into a learning experience; and to galvanize communities around important topics like preserving cultural heritage,” says project leader Raphael Attias. “We’ve created a platform for playing and learning; with games as a hook for younger generations whose attention is harder to get–and keep–these days.” Mosaica’s goal is to bring the world into every classroom and every home. The project has developed a demo that features Jewish cultural heritage and has three main modes of use–explorative, guided, and collaborative. Users can explore Jewish heritage on their own time, take a guided tour or virtual expedition that provides them with prompts and recommendations on dynamically generated maps, or work together to share knowledge. Users can make notes on cultural objects, including free-text comments or semantically annotated comments using dynamic ontology creation, and contribute content such as photos. Students also can Mosaica to record their own virtual expeditions.

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THESEUS–Tool for Internet Services

sparky3887 — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 13:24:53 +0000

The Fraunhofer Institute’s THESEUS Project aims to improve the use and exploitation of digital knowledge through the use of semantic technologies that will be able to recognize the meaning of information content. “The society of the future will be even more knowledge-based than the present one,” says the Fraunhofer Institute’s Hans-Joachim Grallert. “For that reason it is not only necessary to create the appropriate infrastructure, but also to ensure that existing knowledge is suitably prepared and made recognizable.” Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institutes for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems are working on the digitalization of media types, including text, images, and sound recordings, and to make automatic semantic connections for this data. The Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) is developing technologies that will enable the best possible digitalization results, including algorithms for the restoration of text and video data. Searching video and photo archives has generally been a time-consuming process. In the future, metadata for multimedia content will automatically be generated, making searches far easier. Researchers are developing image-recognition systems that use colors or structures in an image to create metadata on the image’s content and enable computers to identify what is in an image, leading to more accurate searches. Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics researchers are working on a sub-project called Medico that will develop software and tools for the automatic statistic evaluation of medical image data, such as computed tomography images, which will enable the matching of image characteristics to the symptoms of disease and allow images from one patient to be compared to a database of images.

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A Tool to Verify Digital Records, Even as Technology Shifts

sparky3887 — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 17:43:01 +0000

New York Times (01/27/09) P. D3; Markoff, John

University of Washington researchers have released the first component of a public system that will provide authentication for an archive of video interviews with prosecutors and other members of the International Criminal Tribunal on the Rwandan genocide, along with the first portion of the Rwandan archive. The system will be available for others to digitally preserve and authenticate first-hand accounts of war crimes, atrocities, and genocide. The tools are needed because advancements in technology have made it possible to alter digital text, video, and audio in nearly undetectable ways. The researchers say the system means the authenticity of digital documents such as videos, transcripts of personal accounts, and court records can be indisputably proved for the first time. The researchers have created a publicly available digital fingerprint, known as a cryptographic hash mark, that will make it possible for anyone to determine that the documents are authentic and have not been tampered with. The digital hash concept was first conceived by IBM’s Hans Peter Luhn in the early 1950s, and the researchers are the first to attempt to simplify the application for nontechnical users and offer a complete system for long-term data preservation. Similar efforts to preserve a complete record of the World Wide Web and other documents led to computer scientist Brewster Kahle launching the Internet Archive in 1996. Another digital preservation effort was launched by Stanford University librarians in 2000. Their system, dubbed LOCKSS, for Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe, preserves journals by distributing copies of documents over the Internet to an international community of libraries.
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