#Manual control When you imagine the future of gesture-control interfaces, you might think of the popular science-fiction films inority Report (2002) or ron Man (2008).
or wireless gloves to seamlessly scroll through and manipulate visual data on a wall-sized, panoramic screen.
and control digital content across multiple screens, from any device, using gesture control. Overall, the major benefit in such a system lies in boosting productivity during meetings,
Mezzanine surrounds a conference room with multiple screens, as well as the rainsof the system (a small server) that controls and syncs everything.
Several Wii-like wands with six degrees of freedom, allow users to manipulate content such as text, photos, videos, maps, charts, spreadsheets,
and PDFS depending on certain gestures they make with the wand. That system is built on g-speak,
a type of operating system or a so-called patial operating environmentused by developers to create their own programs that run like Mezzanine.
and IBM, as well as government agencies and academic institutions, such as Harvard university Graduate school of Design. Architects and real estate firms are also using the system for structural designing.
That meant the team could make any projected surface a veritable computer screen, and the data could interact with,
Seeing this technology on the big screen inspired Underkoffler to refine his MIT technology, launch Oblong in 2006,
Having tens of millions of viewers seeing the technology on the big screen, however, offered a couple of surprising perks for Oblong,
Additionally, being part of a big-screen production helped Underkoffler and Oblong better explain their own technology to clients,
so theye instantly legible on screen is really close to the refinement you need to undertake
and leave a really compact core of user-interface ideas we have today. After years of writing custom projects for clients on g-speak,
ut we really hope to radically tilt the whole landscape of how we think about computers and user interface. n
if it ran on a server used to coordinate data from cellphones running a taxi-sharing app.
They found that even running on a single Linux box it could find optimal matchings for about 100000 trips in a tenth of a second
or lab bench but the team is also working on a portable version that is about the size of a small electronic tablet.
and devised Medeye a bedside medication-scanning system that uses computer vision to identify pills
Although the hardware is impressive much innovation is in Medeye s software which cross-references (and updates) the results in the patient s records.
because it s new for instance the system alerts the nurse who adds the information into the software for next time.
Companies sell medications with barcodes others sell software or barcode scanners. Hospitals have to make all these things work together
In a computer-vision class in the Computer science and Artificial intelligence Laboratory he saw that advances in 3-D object-recognition technology meant computers could learn objects based on various characteristics.
Everyone s starting companies says Reynisson a trained programmer who wrote early object-recognition code for the Medeye.
At the core of the startup is this belief that better information technology in hospitals can both increase efficiency
First they used their engram-labeling protocol to tag neurons associated with either a rewarding experience (for male mice socializing with a female mouse) or an unpleasant experience (a mild electrical shock.
They also devised a computer simulation that can predict a cell trajectory through the channel based on its size
#Unlocking the potential of simulation software With a method known as finite element analysis (FEA), engineers can generate 3-D digital models of large structures to simulate how theyl fare under stress, vibrations, heat,
and oil rigs these simulations require intensive computation done by powerful computers over many hours, costing engineering firms much time and money.
Now MIT spinout Akselos has developed novel software, based on years of research at the Institute, that uses precalculated supercomputer data for structural components like simulated egosto solve FEA models in seconds.
A simulation that could take hours with conventional FEA software for instance, could be done in seconds with Akselosplatform.
Hundreds of engineers in the mining, power-generation, and oil and gas industries are now using the Akselos software.
The startup is also providing software for an MITX course on structural engineering. With its technology, Akselos aims to make 3-D simulations more accessible worldwide to promote efficient engineering design,
says David Knezevic, Akseloschief technology officer, who co-founded the startup with former MIT postdoc Phuong Huynh
and alumnus Thomas Leurent SM01. ee trying to unlock the value of simulation software, since for many engineers current simulation software is far too slow
and labor-intensive, especially for large models, Knezevic says. igh-fidelity simulation enables more cost-effective designs, better use of energy and materials,
that used that technique to create a mobile app that displayed supercomputer simulations, in seconds, on a smartphone.
A supercomputer first presolved problems such as fluid flow around a spherical obstacle in a pipe that had known a form
Today Akselos software runs on a similar principle, but with new software, and cloud-based service.
A supercomputer precalculates individual components, such as, say, a simple tube or a complex mechanical part. nd this creates a big data footprint for each one of these components,
which we push to the cloud, Knezevic says. These components contain adjustable parameters, which enable users to vary properties,
After that, the software will reference the precomputed data to create a highly detailed 3-D simulation in seconds.
and created modified simulations within a few minutes. he software also allows people to model the machinery in its true state,
since with other software it not feasible to simulate large structures in full 3-D detail.
who is using the startup software albeit a limited version in her MITX class, 2. 01x (Elements of Structures).
Primarily, he hears that the software is allowing students to uild intuition for the physics of structures beyond
On Knezevic end, at the Boston office, it all about software development, tailoring features to customer needs a welcome challenge for the longtime researcher. n academia,
typically only you and a few colleagues use the software, he says. ut in a company you have people all over the world playing with it
and reuse it in photovoltaic panels that could go on producing power for decades. Amazingly because the perovskite photovoltaic material takes the form of a thin film just half a micrometer thick,
When the panels are retired eventually, the lead can simply be recycled into new solar panels. he process to encapsulate them will be the same as for polymer cells today,
Some companies are already gearing up for commercial production of perovskite photovoltaic panels, which could otherwise require new sources of lead.
This week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences researchers at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT report that they have delivered successfully small RNA therapies in a clinically relevant mouse model of lung cancer to slow
This mouse model reflects many of the hallmarks of human lung cancer and is used often in preclinical trials.
Researchers then compared mouse survival time among four treatment options:##no treatment; treatment with cisplatin a small-molecule standard-care chemotherapy drug;
We took the best mouse model for lung cancer we could find we found the best nanoparticle we could use
Photo courtesy of the researchersfull Screen As soon as researchers successfully demonstrated that this system could work in cells other than bacteria Niles started to think about using it to manipulate Plasmodium falciparum.
what s called a cyclic fold where you have a bunch of panels connected together in a cycle
But as Demaine explains in origami 180-degree folds are used generally to join panels together.
With 150-degree folds the panels won t quite touch but that s probably tolerable for many applications In the meantime Demaine is planning to revisit the theoretical analysis that was the basis of the researchers original folding algorithm to determine
To investigate the potential usefulness of CRISPR for creating mouse models of cancer the researchers first used it to knock out p53 and pten
Many models possiblethe researchers also used CRISPR to create a mouse model with an oncogene called beta catenin
Researchers at MIT, Microsoft, and Adobe have developed an algorithm that can reconstruct an audio signal by analyzing minute vibrations of objects depicted in video.
In one set of experiments, they were able to recover intelligible speech from the vibrations of a potato-chip bag photographed from 15 feet away through soundproof Glass in other experiments,
Michael Rubinstein of Microsoft Research, who did his Phd with Freeman; and Gautham Mysore of Adobe Research.
Reconstructing audio from video requires that the frequency of the video samples the number of frames of video captured per second be higher than the frequency of the audio signal.
Commodity hardware In other experiments however, they used an ordinary digital camera. Because of a quirk in the design of most camerassensors, the researchers were able to infer information about high-frequency vibrations even from video recorded at a standard 60 frames per second.
it less expensive to design the sensor hardware so that it reads off the measurements of one row of photodetectors at a time.
#Vision-correcting displays Researchers at the MIT Media Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley have developed a new display technology that automatically corrects for vision defects no glasses (or contact lenses) required.
The technique could lead to dashboard-mounted GPS displays that farsighted drivers can consult without putting their glasses on
The first spectacles were invented in the 13th century says Gordon Wetzstein a research scientist at the Media Lab and one of the display's co-creators.
We have a different solution that basically puts the glasses on the display rather than on your head.
Wetzstein and his colleagues describe their display in a paper they're presenting in August at Siggraph the premier graphics conference.
The display is a variation on a glasses-free 3-D technology also developed by the Camera Culture group.
Essentially the new display simulates an image at the correct focal distance somewhere between the display and the viewer's eye.
The difficulty with this approach is that simulating a single pixel in the virtual image requires multiple pixels of the physical display.
which light would arrive from the same image displayed on the screen. So the physical pixels projecting light to the right side of the pupil have to be offset to the left
The use of multiple on-screen pixels to simulate a single virtual pixel would drastically reduce the image resolution.
and colleagues solved in their 3-D displays which also had to project different images at different angles.
The MIT and Berkeley researchers were able to adapt that algorithm to the problem of vision correction so the new display incurs only a modest loss in resolution.
In the researchers prototype however display pixels do have to be masked from the parts of the pupil for which they re not intended.
That requires that a transparency patterned with an array of pinholes be laid over the screen blocking more than half the light it emits.
instead using two liquid-crystal displays (LCDS) in parallel. Carefully tailoring the images displayed on the LCDS to each other allows the system to mask perspectives
Wetzstein envisions that commercial versions of a vision-correcting screen would use the same technique.
Indeed he says the same screens could both display 3-D content and correct for vision defects all glasses-free.
MIT researchers explain how their vision-correcting display technology works. The key thing is they seem to have cracked the contrast problem Dainty adds.
Dainty believes that the most intriguing application of the technology is in dashboard displays. Most people over 50 55 quite probably see in the distance fine
whose advanced emotion-tracking software called Affdex is based on years of MIT Media Lab research.
We believe there s an opportunity to sit between any human-to-computer or human-to-human interaction point capture data
In using Affdex Affectiva recruits participants to watch advertisements in front of their computer webcams tablets and smartphones.
or confusion and pushes the data to a cloud server where Affdex aggregates the results from all the facial videos (sometimes hundreds)
Importantly the software looks for hooking the viewers in the first third of an advertisement by noting increased attention
But if a smirk subtle asymmetric lip curls separate from smiles comes at a moment when information appears on the screen it may indicate skepticism or doubt.
As a Phd student at Cambridge university in the early 2000s el Kaliouby began developing facial-coding software.
if you showed the computer an expression of a person that s somewhat surprised or subtly shocked it wouldn t recognize it el Kaliouby says.
-and with a big push by Frank Moss then the Media Lab s director they soon ditched the wearable prototype to build a cloud-based version of the software founding Affectiva in 2009.
Kaliouby says training its software s algorithms to discern expressions from all different face types and skin colors.
and can avoid tracking any other movement on screen. One of Affectiva s long-term goals is to usher in a mood-aware Internet to improve users experiences.
Sometime in the future this could mean computer games that adapt in difficulty and other game variables based on user reaction.
For this the software indicates for instance if a student is bored frustrated or focused which is especially valuable for prerecorded lectures el Kaliouby says.
#Making the cut Diode lasers used in laser pointers barcode scanners DVD players and other low-power applications are perhaps the most efficient compact and low-cost lasers available.
At the core of the Terablade is a power-scaling technique known as wavelength beam combining (WBC
a 3-foot cube that comes with multiple laser engines a control computer power supplies and an output head for welding
Celebrating its 10th anniversary this month the Broad Institute is today home to a community of more than 2000 members including physicians biologists chemists computer scientists engineers staff and representatives of many other disciplines.
Now this wireless electricity (or Witricity) technology licensed through the researchers startup Witricity Corp.#is coming to mobile devices electric vehicles and potentially a host of other applications.
But it could also lead to benefits such as smaller batteries and less hardware which would lower costs for manufacturers and consumers.
Last month Witricity signed a licensing agreement with Intel to integrate Witricity technology into computing devices powered by Intel.
At present Witricity technology#charges devices#at around 6 to 12 inches with roughly 95 percent efficiency#12 watts for mobile devices and up to 6. 6 kilowatts for cars.
Courtesy of Witricity Corp. Full Screen The Witricity technology can charge an electric car with the vehicle parked about a foot above the transmitting pad.
Courtesy of Witricity Corp. Full Screen Stronger couplingsimilar wireless charging technologies have been around for some time. For instance traditional induction charging
An expectationthese days Gruzen sees wireless charging as analogous to the evolution of a similar technology Wifi that he witnessed in the early 2000s as senior vice president of global notebook business at Hewlett packard.
At the time Wifi capabilities were implemented rarely into laptops; this didn t change#until companies began bringing Wireless internet access into hotel lobbies libraries airports and other public places.
It could be encrypted an server in the cloud but it could also be a computer in a locked box under your desk.
Any cellphone app online service or big data research team that wants to use your data has to query your data store
and Samuel Wang a software engineer at Foursquare who was a graduate student in the Department of Electrical engineering
The result of this screen, Jaws, retained its red-light sensitivity but had a much stronger photocurrent enough to shut down neural activity. his exemplifies how the genomic diversity of the natural world can yield powerful reagents that can be of use in biology and neuroscience,
the researchers were able to shut down neuronal activity in the mouse brain with a light source outside the animal head.
Roska and Busskamp tested the Jaws protein in the mouse retina and found that it more closely resembled the eye natural opsins
where the ability to adjust the texture of panels to minimize drag at different speeds could increase fuel efficiency,
#Researchers unveil experimental 36-core chip The more cores or processing units a computer chip has,
the bigger the problem of communication between cores becomes. For years, Li-Shiuan Peh, the Singapore Research Professor of Electrical engineering and Computer science at MIT, has argued that the massively multicore chips of the future will need to resemble little Internets,
where each core has associated an router, and data travels between cores in packets of fixed size.
This week, at the International Symposium on Computer architecture, Peh group unveiled a 36-core chip that features just such a etwork-on-Chip in addition to implementing many of the group earlier ideas
it also solves one of the problems that has bedeviled previous attempts to design networks-on-chip:
maintaining cache coherence, or ensuring that coreslocally stored copies of globally accessible data remain up to date.
In today chips, all the cores typically somewhere between two and six are connected by a single wire,
. When two cores need to communicate, theye granted exclusive access to the bus. But that approach won work as the core count mounts:
Cores will spend all their time waiting for the bus to free up, rather than performing computations.
In a network-on-chip, each core is connected only to those immediately adjacent to it. ou can reach your neighbors really quickly,
Every core on a chip has its own cache a local, high-speed memory bank in which it stores frequently used data.
if another core needs the data before it been shipped? Most chips address this question with a protocol called noopy,
When a core needs a particular chunk of data, it broadcasts a request to all the other cores,
If all the cores share a bus, then when one of them receives a data request,
Similarly, when the requesting core gets data back, it knows that it the most recent version of the data.
and packets will frequently arrive at different cores in different sequences. The implicit ordering that the snoopy protocol relies on breaks down.
All they can do is declare that their associated cores have sent requests for data over the main network.
Groups of declarations reach the routers associated with the cores at discrete intervals intervals corresponding to the time it takes to pass from one end of the shadow network to another.
and by which other cores. The requests themselves may still take a while to arrive,
During each interval, the chip 36 cores are given different, hierarchical priorities. Say, for instance, that during one interval,
both core 1 and core 10 issue requests, but core 1 has a higher priority.
Core 32 router may receive core 10 request well before it receives core 1 . But it will hold it until it passed along 1. This hierarchical ordering simulates the chronological ordering of requests sent over a bus,
so the snoopy protocol still works. The hierarchy is shuffled during every interval, however, to ensure that in the long run,
all the cores receive equal weight. Cache coherence in multicore chips s a big problem, and it one that gets larger all the time,
Daya intends to load them with a version of the Linux operating system, modified to run on 36 cores,
and evaluate the performance of real applications, to determine the accuracy of the group theoretical projections.
At that point, she plans to release the blueprints for the chip, written in the hardware description language Verilog,
That distortion can be detected by force-resistive sensors via a carefully designed mechanical system (similar to the sensors used in computer trackpads),
Remote access to a Web server would be controlled much the way it is now through passwords and encryption.
But every time the server transmitted a piece of sensitive data it would also send a description of the restrictions on the data s use.
And it would log the transaction using only the URI somewhere in a network of encrypted special-purpose servers.
It would be up to software developers to adhere to its specifications when designing their systems. But HTTPA compliance could become a selling point for companies offering services that handle private data.
On every HTTP request the server should say OK here are the usage restrictions for this resource and log the transaction in the network of special-purpose servers.
The network of servers is where the heavy lifting happens. When the data owner requests an audit the servers work through the chain of derivations identifying all the people who have accessed the data and what they ve done with it.
Seneviratne uses a technology known as distributed hash tables the technology at the heart of peer-to-peer networks like Bittorrent to distribute the transaction logs among the servers.
Redundant storage of the same data on multiple servers serves two purposes: First it ensures that
if some servers go down data will remain accessible. And second it provides a way to determine
whether anyone has tried to tamper with the transaction logs for a particular data item such as to delete the record of an illicit use.
A server whose logs differ from those of its peers would be easy to ferret out.
Seneviratne used 300 servers on Planetlab to store the transaction logs; in experiments the system efficiently tracked down data stored across the network
In practice audit servers could be maintained by a grassroots network much like the servers that host Bittorrent files or log Bitcoin transactions s
That why KGS aims to ake buildings betterwith cloud-based software, called Clockworks, that collects existing data on a building equipment specifically in HVAC (heating, ventilation,
The software then translates the data into graphs, metrics, and text that explain monetary losses, where it available for building managers, equipment manufacturers,
Phd 0. The software is now operating in more than 300 buildings across nine countries, collecting more than 2 billion data points monthly.
Last month, MIT commissioned the software for more than 60 of its own buildings, monitoring more than 7, 000 pieces of equipment over 10 million square feet.
Previously, in a yearlong trial for one MIT building, the software saved MIT $286, 000. Benefits, however, extend beyond financial savings,
The software can also help buildings earn additional incentives by participating in utility programs. e have major opportunities in some utility territories,
which is a finer level of granularity than meter-level analytics software that may extract,
But it also helps the software produce rapid, intelligent analytics such as accurate graphs, metrics, and text that spell out problems clearly.
it helps the software to rapidly equate data with monetary losses. hen we identify that there a fault with the right data,
KGS Buildingsfoundation The KGS cofounders met as participants in the MIT entry for the 2007 Solar Decathlon an annual competition where college teams build small-scale, solar-powered homes to display at the National Mall
Throughout 2010, they began trialing software at several locations, including MIT. They found guidance among the seasoned entrepreneurs at MIT Venture Mentoring Service learning to fail fast,
and advancing its software into other applications. About 180 new buildings were added to Clockworks in the past year;
by the end of 2014, KGS projects it could deploy its software to 800 buildings. arger companies are starting to catch on,
#The incredible shrinking power brick While laptops continue to shrink in size and weight, the ower bricksthat charge them remain heavy and bulky.
and Justin Burkhart SM 0 FINSIX has developed the world smallest laptop adapter, called the Dart.
The 65-watt Dart can power most laptops, smartphones, and tablets. By November, FINSIX aims to deliver its first shipment of around 4, 500 Darts to Kickstarter backers and other customers.
flat-screen TVS, gaming consoles, laptops, electric bikes, and air conditioners, while reducing the cost of manufacturing.
the company started focusing on laptop adapters. In traditional adapters, an array of switches flip to one state and take in AC voltage from a wall outlet,
In that analogy, the bucket is the adapter that collects the water (electricity) from a full tank (outlet) and dumps it into an empty tank (laptop battery.
which can then be recombined using a computer algorithm to recreate the 3-D structure. f you have one light-emitting molecule in your sample,
#Glasses-free 3-D projector Over the past three years, researchers in the Camera Culture group at the MIT Media Lab have refined steadily a design for a glasses-free, multiperspective, 3-D video screen,
which are like tiny liquid-crystal displays (LCDS) positioned between the light source and the lens. Patterns of light and dark on the first modulator effectively turn it into a bank of slightly angled light emitters that is,
The screen combines two lenticular lenses the type of striated transparent sheets used to create crude 3-D effects in,
Exploiting redundancy For every frame of video, each modulator displays six different patterns which together produce eight different viewing angles:
But like the researchersprototype monitors, the projector takes advantage of the fact that, as you move around an object,
but by tailoring their algorithm to the architecture of the graphics processing units designed for video games,
One of the problems with LCD screens is that they don enable rue black A little light always leaks through even the darkest regions of the display. ormally you have contrast of,
and project through it and use this software algorithm, and you end up with a 4k image.
is the prototype screen. here is this invariant of optical systems that says that if you take the area of the plane
We couldn figure out a way around that. hey came up with a screen that instead of stretching the image
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