the progress in micro fabrication technology has revolutionized the world in such fields as computing, signal processing,
For the past several years, Masoud Agah, an associate professor In virginia Tech's Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer engineering
reduced analysis times using temperature and flow programming, as well as fast detection response times suitable for high-speed gas chromatography."
and are enabling new technologies like flexible displays in mobile phone, wearable electronics, and the Internet of things (Iots).
#Shape changing display could spell the end for the 2d graph Imagine your computer screen could change shape.
Imagine if that screen could spring to life at the touch of a fingertip, translating numbers and trends into shapes
Researchers have developed a 3d prototype display which brings data to life in just this way sounding the death knell for the two dimensional bar chart.
Human computer interaction specialists at Lancaster University have built a device which translates data into a three dimensional display.
The interactive grid of 100 moving columns enables people to understand and interpret data at a glance.
The 3d display is radically different to interacting with data on a flat screen. A month's sales figures for example spring to life
Lancaster hosts a world-leading Human computer interaction research lab, developing the kind of shape changing displays which could one day make it into our homes, offices and perhaps even our mobile phones.
The group, led by Dr Jason Alexander will present some of their work to one of the world's leading human computer interaction conferences CHI 2015 in April.
Dr Alexander believes this type of technology, which enables people to quickly identify patterns and absorb large amounts of information,
But for these shape-changing displays to be effective, researchers and developers first need to understand how people interact with them.
This tactile platform allows us to use those inherent skills to examine datasets normally confined to flat 2d displays."
"Our challenge was to produce a design that allows users to quickly comprehend large datasets
if every pixel on your screen could move? Imagine the possibilities. Our lab works to develop new devices that merge the physical and digital worlds
or underperforming panels is very lowust 0. 1%per year according to new data of 50,000 systems analyzed by the Energy department's National Renewable energy Laboratory (NREL).
whether the panels are to be mounted directly on a roof or on open racks. Quality management of the manufacturing process.
Rigorous quality management will help assure that panels manufactured on one day of the month will be the same quality as those manufactured on any other day of the month.
and less than 1%each year had hardware problems. Inverter failures and fuse failures were reported more commonly than panel failure.
Despite hurricanes hail, shading, vandalism, and hookup delays, approximately 85%of all systems each year produced 90%or more of the electricity predicted,
The microfluidic chip was designed by Autocad software and manufactured from a widely used silicon-based organic polymer known as PDMS.
#Tablet for 2 waiting at an Olive Garden near you soon Olive Garden, owned by Florida's Darden Restaurants Inc,
. started using Ziosk tablets in some of its restaurants last year. The chain said Tuesday that locations using the devices have experienced faster dining times and increased tip percentages for wait staff.
and we're excited to give our guests the ability to customize their visit by leveraging the technology of Ziosk's tabletop tablets,"Dave George,
Tablets have made appearances in airports, where travelers can have delivered food to where they sit, but are limited still in the traditional restaurant scene.
Ziosk tablets are in use at Chili's restaurants and are in the process of launching nationwide at Red Robin.
In 2012 it was paused for an extensive upgrade. The new upgraded and supercharged LHC restarts at almost twice the energy
so a computerized ATLAS hardware"trigger system"grabs the data, makes a fast evaluation, decides if it might hold something of interest to physicists,
"This trigger hardware system makes measurements but they are very crude, fast and primitive.""To further pare down the data,
a custom-designed software program culls even more data from each nanosecond grab, reducing 40 million events down to 200.
helped develop software to monitor the performance of the trigger systems'thousands of computer processors."
"The software program has to be accurate in deciding which 200 to keep. We must be very careful that it's the right 200 the 200 that might tell us more about the Higgs boson, for example.
"The ATLAS computers are part of CERN's computing center, which stores more than 30 petabytes of data from the LHC experiments every year, the equivalent of 1. 2 million Blu-ray discs.
"SMU's Maneframe supercomputer plays a key role in helping physicists from the Large hadron collider experiments.
One of the fastest academic supercomputers in the nation, it allows physicists at SMU and around the world to sift through the flood of data,
and Professor Lennart Lindfors, of Astrazeneca, Sweden, have mapped out'in diagram format the actual movements made by chemical molecules on their breeding journey using computer simulations.
T. C. Chang Professor of Computer science at Columbia Engineering, has invented a prototype video camera that is the first to be fully self-poweredt can produce an image each second, indefinitely, of a well-lit indoor scene.
who directs the Computer Vision Laboratory at Columbia Engineering. He notes that in the last year alone,
Digital imaging is expected to enable many emerging fields including wearable devices, sensor networks, smart environments, personalized medicine,
such as a phone or a watch. Nayar notes that the image sensor could use a rechargeable battery and charge it via its harvesting capability:"
What the EU says Google is doing wrong The European union slapped Google Inc. with antitrust charges Wednesday,
saying it is abusing its dominance in Web search to promote its own products Here are the major allegations:
The EU says Google is unfairly favoring its own comparison-shopping service in general search results.
a coffee mug would find Google Shopping results for mugs displayed at the top of the search page,
The EU says part of the reason for competing sites'low rankings is applied that Google different parameters to comparison-shopping services,
The EU pointed out that a previous Google shopping site called Froogle did not use a favorable system
The current Google Shopping product which allegedly uses the favorable system, is experiencing higher growth.
Also under investigation is Google's smartphone operating system, Android. The EU is looking in whether the company is giving smartphone makers unfair incentives for preinstalling Google's applications,
such as the Chrome Web browser and Youtube. The EU is also continuing a formal investigation into concerns that Google copies rivals Web content and places undue restrictions on advertisers a
#Using composite material samples, NRL scientists predict aspects of F/A-18 performance The U s. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has built a robot to pull, bend,
and twist samples of the composite materials used to build F/A-18s and other aircraft.
and wing panel composite skin abnormalities, engineers have had to do extensive analysis to develop repairs.""So the need for certifying a new material comes in,
A custom-developed machine vision system, with four cameras, captures digital images of what's happening in real-time.
the scientists use custom-developed full field measurement algorithms Michopoulos'group has patented now to"take those digital images
Computations from robot data predict how materials behave in aircraft A snapped composite specimen is one thing;
'Instead of asking me an engineering and mathematics question, he is asking me this question. So then I knew I had to stay. e
Professor Shu Kobayashi's group at the Graduate school of Science has developed highly active immobilized catalysts (heterogeneous catalysts)
and demonstrated simple and highly efficient synthesis of (R)- and (S)- rolipram by an eight-step continuous flow reaction using multiple column reactors containing the immobilized catalysts.
Professor Kobayashi's application of flow chemistry techniques to the production of fine chemicals using heterogeneous catalysts has resulted in simple method to synthesize (R)
and without purification of products from catalysts. Professor Kobayashi says"This new technology can be applied to not only other gamma aminobutyric-acids acids and medicines but also various chemicals such as flavors, agricultural chemicals,
She and her team then devised special binary codes to encode individual RNAS, and labeling and imaging schemes to decode these RNA codes.
and act as easily accessed landing sites for fluorescently labeled"readout probes"that are applied to the cells in subsequent rounds.
Those fluorescent spots are translated to the first bit of the binary code: any RNAS that fluoresce at this step are assigned a 1,
Although 16 rounds of imaging could yield more than 60,000 unique binary codes, the team used only a special subset of these codes to encode their RNAS.
"By applying information theory to the problem, Singer says, Zhuang has gotten around limits to how many fluorescent labels can be discriminated as discrete colors."
#New software analyses the effect of climate change on buildings from the cloud Large Spanish construction companies have begun to use a simulation software package,
and Technology at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (CIT UPC) have developed the first-ever software to analyse the entire life of a building,
Certain details regarding the technology have been published in the journal Advances in Engineering Software. Even before its commercialization, Spanish construction groups such as Acciona and VIA had used already it in some of their projects.
"Another of the software's most original features is the ability to simulate models to show how global warming may affect construction.
The algorithms that are implemented currently in the system are some of the heuristic classics uch as hill-climbing, simulated annealing, NSGA-II,
Pau Fonseca indicates that the software consists of a core made up of a motor referred to as SDLPS that enables simulations to be carried out from complete representations of the models using languages such as SDL
"This core can be executed in a computer or be combined in a distributed way in a cluster, speeding up the extraction of results"."
enabling a user who is not familiar with simulation to customise the model and execute it in a distributed way,
Furthermore, the software integrates"key factors such as the price of materials, and their transportation, assembly and disassembly so the construction company can calculate the total cost of the building."
The technology, using a large screen to enhance the sense of reality and interactive avatars, synchronises the different realities so they all coordinate as one.
The project also involves Essex computer science alumnus Victor Zamudio whose Mexican company Fortito produced the intelligent home prototype Buzzbox used in the experiment.
engineering and mathematics (STEM) in almost 300 locations across Mexico. The trial was also key in showing that distance was no longer a barrier to STEM laboratory work.
In one new software tool, we have applied expertise in advanced algorithm development, knowledge on genetics and principles of genome architecture."
Germany and Canada have built a miniature particle accelerator that uses terahertz radiation instead of radio waves to create pulses of high-energy electrons.
and some physicists are keen on using the radiation in much the same way that radio waves
which causes them to emit intense flashes of X-ray light. Currently, access to large-scale FELS is limited,
#Lasers burn holes in quantum security systems A new way to hack quantum-cryptography systems has been unveiled by physicists in Canada.
and this latest disruption comes as quantum-cryptography experts have modified already their systems to make them immune to other eavesdropping techniques.
when two people exchange a cryptographic key. This secret key then allows them to exchange information using conventional communications.
receivers and other hardware used to implement it. According to Vadim Makarov of the University of Waterloo and colleagues, many scientists assume that
Faking states In the case of free-space cryptography Makarov and colleagues showed that they could enable a"faked-state attack".
says this idea of actively damaging QKD components was"not previously on the radar screen"of scientists working on quantum-communication technologies.
the development of QKD is"always a cat and mouse game
#China Stocks Extend Slide Amid Warning of Severe Trade Pressure Shanghai/Beijing: Chinese stock markets tumbled for a second straight day on Wednesday as investors crowded the exits,
"said Davish Jain, chairman of the Soybean Processors Association of India.""Our oilseed and edible oil production will not rise
#E-commerce Players Betting Big on Offline Presence Many e-commerce players have started foraying into physical retail space
some e-tailers are setting up shops offline. According to property consultant JLL India, Pepperfry is the latest to go'hybrid'.
"A significant share of our customers still prefer to buy offline and consider online website as a research tool.
The bigger ticket items are bought generally offline.""Therefore, in the race to provide a complete solution,
such phenomenon of online players going offline should stay, "said Vikas Bhasin, CFO, Pine Labs, an integrated payment solutions company."
"A larger portion of the Indian society is dominated middle class. This clientele is very skeptical about what,
For this strong bastion of middle class milieu, offline models like retailer shops have mushroomed all over, "said R P Yadav, CMD, Genius Consultants.
and offline models of e-commerce, "said Dinesh Gulati, Director, Indiamart. According to Tripti Lochan, CEO of VML, a leading digital marketing agency,"pureplay online retail will continue to live as not every e-commerce player has need either the
One of our apps is built specifically to help users visualise our sofas in their home with augment reality."
#Dell to Acquire EMC in $67 Billion Record Tech Deal Computer maker Dell Inc said on Monday it had agreed to buy data storage company EMC Corp in a $67 billion record technology
"Dell wants to become the old IBM Corp, a one-stop shop for corporate clients.
and will also give EMC shareholders a special stock that tracks the share price in virtual software provider VMWARE Inc."The combination of Dell
While IBM Corp, Cisco systems Inc and Hewlett-packard Co could theoretically be potential suitors for EMC,
Download the PDF presentation here. Massimiliano Zecca holds a Ph d. in Biomedical Robotics from the Scuola Superiore Santnna
It aims for the peaceful use of artificial intelligence and draws a firm line against collaboration with any organisation ven partially funded by military means within the last five years. t is only fitting that a research centre in Iceland should field such a policy a nation without a standing army
#Watch flying machines weave a rope bridge you can walk on Using quadrocopters and some rope, researchers have woven together a bridge strong enough to walk across.
The arena is equipped with a motion capture system that provides vehicle position and attitude measurements for the small custom quadrocopters.
An offboard computer runs the algorithms and sends commands out to the#ying machines via a customized wireless infrastructure.
and secured into place by the quadrocopters, which are equipped each with a motorized spool that allows them to control the tension of the rope.
and torques exerted on the quadrocopter by the rope during deployment, and takes this into account
in order to ensure that the quadrocopters behave as desired 5. The researchers then walk across the bridge to demonstrate its load-bearing ability.
On a flat lattice, atoms can easily move around from site to site. However, in a tilted lattice, the atoms would have to work against gravity.
However, these molecules can also cause collateral damage to healthy tissue around the infection site:
or site of damage in the structure of DNA, called 5-chlorocytosine (5clc) in the inflamed tissues of mice infected with the pathogen Helicobacter hepaticus.
the researchers first placed the 5clc lesion at a specific site within the genome of a bacterial virus. They then replicated the virus within the cell.
when triggered by infection, fires hypochlorous acid at the site, damaging cytosines in the DNA of the surrounding healthy tissue.
This research outcome potentially allows for great flexibility in the design and optimization of electronic and optoelectronic devices like solar panels and telecommunication lasers.
If you pry open one of today ubiquitous high-tech devices whether a cellphone, a laptop,
the technology now used in everything from cellphones to electric cars. The electrolyte in such batteries typically a liquid organic solvent whose function is to transport charged particles from one of a battery two electrodes to the other during charging
Such batteries provide a 20 to 30 percent improvement in power density with a corresponding increase in how long a battery of a given size could power a phone, a computer,
The results were published in the August 14, 2015 edition of The Astrophysical Journal. PDF Copy of the Study:
Applications of these devices include advanced microscopes, displays, sensors, and cameras that can be mass-produced using the same techniques used to manufacture computer microchips. hese flat lenses will help us to make more compact and robust imaging assemblies,
said Mahmood Bagheri, a microdevices engineer at JPL and co-author of a new Nature Nanotechnology study describing the devices. urrently,
Manipulating the polarization of light is essential for the operation of advanced microscopes, cameras and displays;
the control of polarization also enables simple gadgets such as 3-D glasses and polarized sunglasses. f you think of a modern microscope,
In a modern, multicore chip, every core or processor has its own small memory cache, where it stores frequently used data.
With Intel set to release a 72-core high-performance chip in the near future, that a more than hypothetical advantage.
an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and first author on the new paper. fter this write happens,
the Edwin Sibley Webster Professor in MIT Department of Electrical engineering and Computer science realized was that the physical-time order of distributed computations doesn really matter,
says Christopher Hughes, a principal engineer at Intel Labs, ut at least to my knowledge, they tend to use physical time.
Simultaneously, the cost of 3-D printers has fallen sufficiently to make them household consumer items.
Now a team of MIT researchers has opened up a new frontier in 3-D printing:
Like other 3-D printers now on the market, the device can print designs created in a computer-assisted design program,
producing a finished product with little human intervention. In the present version molten glass is loaded into a hopper in the top of the device after being gathered from a conventional glassblowing kiln.
far higher than the temperatures used for other 3-D printing. The stream of glowing molten glass from the nozzle resembles honey as it coils onto a platform,
Klein says the printing system is an example of multidisciplinary work facilitated by MIT flexible departmental boundaries in this case
the lab assembled three-dimensional computer models of illared graphene nanostructures, akin to the boron nitride structures modeled in a previous study to analyze heat transfer between layers. his time we were interested in a comprehensive understanding of the elastic and inelastic properties
Rice university, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National institutes of health and IBM-shared University Research Award supported the research.
The researchers used the NSF-supported DAVINCI supercomputer administered by Rice Ken Kennedy Institute for Information technology n
and metamaterials offers tantalizing future prospects for technologies such as high resolution optical microscopes and superfast optical computers.
At the macroscale, among other applications, invisibility cloaks could prove useful for 3d displays. This research was funded by the DOE Office of Science a
and metamaterials offers tantalizing future prospects for technologies such as high resolution optical microscopes and superfast optical computers.
At the macroscale, among other applications, invisibility cloaks could prove useful for 3d displays. This research was funded by the DOE Office of Science i
and re-scan it repeating the process until the desired spatial resolution is achieved before combining the data from each scan using a computer algorithm.
Using mouse models, the researchers tested their sunblock against direct ultraviolet rays and their ability to cause sunburn.
and the second strategy is to develop new algorithms to reconstruct the brain tissue data in a more automated way.
The research group already recruited large populations of students to help determine the connectome of a part of the mouse retina
y using machine learning algorithms, we were able to develop a way to automatically classify brain tissue containing all the synapses.
e were amazed that the new algorithm actually works extremely well for retinal and cortical data.
write, watch television or even recognize a face. ARMD is due to the degeneration of the macula,
and monitors to locate other vehicles on the road enables the Inspiration Trucks to remain in their lane,
As Peter Stone, a University of Texas computer scientist put it, efore it became clear that the technical issues could be addressed,
Follow@smartccouncil on Twitter. Related articlesercedes-Benz F 015 Luxury in Motion Research Vehicle World premiere (video) Mercedes-benz rolling out a lineup of city-friendly hybrid EVS c
Once the upgrade is complete management staff will have only one main system to learn. The project will integrate a new outage management system with a distribution management system
Itron adaptive technology automatically routes data over the best communications system--radio frequency or power line carrier--at the time for the data and the requirements of the application.
###Kevin Ebi is a staff writer and social media coordinator for the Council. Follow@smartccouncil on Twitter.
Get the Smart cities Readiness Guide Ready to upgrade your electrical grid? Get your free copy of the Smart cities Readiness Guide,
The researchers believe that these nanoscale memory devices promise a future of artificial intelligence network that could enable a so-called bionic brain.
#A Computer That Can Sniff out Septic Shock Dr. David Hagar treats dozens of patients each day at the intensive care unit at John Hopkins Hospital in Maryland.
A group of computer scientists at John Hopkins University partnered with Hagar, and created an algorithm that can predict septic shock
and give clinicians more time to treat someone at risk. Septic shock, which is the third level of sepsis,
The computer system sifted through a dataset of over 16,000 patient electronic health records, which includes a historical profile of blood pressure, heart rate,
The algorithm combined 27 of the most common measurements used to diagnose septic shock and generated a targeted real-time warning score,
explains the study lead computer engineer, Suchi Saria. Part of the difficulty is that there may be systematic bias in the medical information recorded.
These cases hurt the algorithm performance. Current computerized clinical decision support (CDS) models that utilize electronic health records do not account for this kind of censored information.
Saria and her team address this problem by modifying pattern recognition algorithms so the computer can avoid mistaking high-risk patients for low-risk ones.
This computer system can be tailored to many different medical conditions including acute lung injury, pneumonia, and post-rehabilitation illnesses like neuropathy. e are at a very exciting time,
and now our algorithms are reaching a point where they can be a real aid to clinicians. t
#See through Walls by the Glow of Your Wi-fi It used to be that a bad guy besieged by police could just shoot out the lights and hide in the dark.
tomorrow thugs may also have to worry about the soft radio glow of wireless routers and mobile communications towers.
Researchers at University college London (UCL) have devised a system for detecting the Doppler shifts of ubiquitous Wi-fi
The UCL technique uses only passive radiationrom Wi-fi routers (using emissions in any of the IEEE 802.11 b, g, n, ac), ambient GSM and LTE mobile signals,
a reference channel, receiving the baseline signal from the Wi-fi access point or other RF source,
Tan and company built their igh Doppler resolution passive Wi-fi radaron two multi-frequency, software-defined, FPGA-based transceivers (National Instrumentsusrp,
or Universal Software Radio Peripheral. The system compares the reference and surveillance signals, interprets the very small frequency shifts,
so and developed computer models demonstrating that combining graphene with lithium might do the trick. Lithium, they predicted,
In a research paper available on arxiv, the researchers demonstrated in physical experiments that the computer models were indeed correct in their predictions.
#A Driving App That Crowdsources the Weather It a cold day in winter and youe driving on dry pavement when your dashboard flashes a warning:
Up until now, Inrix had gathered basic data from hundreds of millions of moving objects throughout the worldostly cell phones
Those companies, in turn, typically made it available through smartphone apps or dashboard consoles. The new service, called INRIX Road Weather, adds data gleaned from the actions of the caror instance,
Graphene has long been pursued as a potential replacement for indium tin oxide (ITO) as a transparent electrode material for displays.
Graphene has long been pursued as a potential replacement for indium tin oxide (ITO) as a transparent electrode material for displays.
and have widespread rooftop, mobile, and spaceborne applications. They added that kirigami systems might also be phased useful for array radar and optical beam steering.
Right now, Fraunhofer is putting the film on small panels that can be glued to the inside of a car door,
#3-D Printing Software Turns Heart Scans into Surgical Models A new 3-D printing system can transform medical scans of a patient heart into a physical models that help
The efficient system relies on a computer algorithm that requires just a pinch of human guidance to figure out a patient heart structure from MRI scans.
The new software developed by MIT and the Boston Children Hospital, can correctly identify an individual heart anatomical structures by following the lead of a human expert who interprets a small patch equivalent to just one-ninth of the area of each cross section, according to an MIT press release.
and allowing the computer algorithm to infer the rest of the patient heart structure across the rest of the MRI scan 200 cross sections.
The software results were in agreement with human experts interpreting all 200 cross sections 90 percent of the time.
said Polina Golland, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and leader of the project,
But the new software from a team led by Danielle Pace, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, managed to create a fairly accurate digital 3-D model of each patient heart in just an hour.
The 3-D printing process takes several additional hours. The researchers plan to report on their system at the International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention in October.
They hope to improve the software accuracy by examining patches that appear in several MRI cross sections.
Seven cardiac surgeons at Boston Children Hospital will also test the usefulness of 3-D printed heart models in a clinical study this fall.
either be based on physical 3-D printed models or virtual 3-D models, with the models based on either human expertise or the computer software.
But separate clinical trials aim to test how a personalized computer model for each individual patient could improve medical care,
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