Synopsis: Ict:

#This smartphone case is 3x harder than steel Yale university Posted by Jim Shelton-Yale on September 5 2014a new smartphone case is lightweight thin harder than steel

Smartphone cases were a natural but challenging next step. t s obvious. The important properties in a cell phone case are hardness

and weightschroers says. He and his team produce the cases by blow-molding BMG sheets into brass molds to precise specifications.

which constitutes a huge advance in making smartphones more waterproof. With the right manufacturing partner Schroers says he could scale up production by late 2015.

and alerting users by sending out a wireless signal. ressure changes and temperature fluctuations happen around us all the time in the environment

which could provide another source of energy for certain applicationssays Shwetak Patel associate professor of computer science and engineering and of electrical engineering at the University of Washington.

A number of battery-free technologies exist that are powered by solar and ambient radio frequency waves.

and radio waves can t always penetrate such as inside walls or bridges and below ground where there might be at least small temperature fluctuations.

With our web page and source code others can download and build their own power harvesters. dditional researchers from University of Washington

The team will present its research at the Association for Computing Machinery s International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous computing this month in Seattle.

The Intel Science and Technology Center for Pervasive Computing at the University of Washington and the Sloan Foundation supported the work.

and the prototype was created in the clean room at the IBM Research Centre in Ruschlikon Switzerland.

or the study the research team trained animals (Rhesus macaques) to use a brain-computer interface (BCI) similar to ones that have shown recent promise in clinical trials for assisting quadriplegics

and directed the recordings into a computer which translated the activity into movement of a cursor on

the computer screen. This technique allowed the team to specify the activity patterns that would move the cursor.

The test subjects goal was to move the cursor to targets on the screen which required them to generate the patterns of neural activity that the experimenters had requested.

Byron M. Yu assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and biomedical engineering at Carnegie mellon believes this work demonstrates the utility of BCI for basic scientific studies that will eventually impact people s lives. hese findings could be the basis

Unlike other water splitters that use precious-metal catalysts the electrodes in the Stanford device are made of inexpensive and abundant nickel

professor at Stanford university. his is the first time anyone has used non-precious metal catalysts to split water at a voltage that low.

But scientists have yet to develop an affordable active water splitter with catalysts capable of working at industrial scales. t s been a constant pursuit for decades to make low-cost electrocatalysts with high activity

Demille and his colleagues built their own apparatus in a basement lab. It is an elaborate multilevel tangle of wires computers electrical components tabletop mirrors and a cryogenic refrigeration unit.

In developing countries keeping track of a baby s vaccine schedule on paper is largely ineffective says Anil Jain professor of computer science

They used an optical fingerprint reader to scan the thumbs and index fingers of babies and toddlers.

but we have shown its feasibilityjain says. e will continue to work on refining the fingerprint matching software

or mobile devices to harvest solar energy without obscuring the view. Past efforts to create similar materials have been disappointing with inefficient energy production

The technology is featured in the journal Advanced Optical Materials. t opens a lot of area to deploy solar energy in a nonintrusive waylunt says. t can be used on tall buildings with lots of windows or any kind of mobile device that demands high aesthetic quality like a phone or e reader.

#Algorithms could adjust screens to your vision University of California Berkeley Original Studyposted by Sarah Yang-Berkeley on August 15 2014.

Researchers are developing vision-correcting displays for computer monitors that would let people see text and images clearly without their glasses or contact lenses.

The technology could potentially help hundreds of millions of people who currently need corrective lenses to use their smartphones tablets and computers.

More importantly the displays could one day aid people with more complex visual problems known as high order aberrations

which cannot be corrected by eyeglasses says Brian Barsky professor of computer science and vision science and affiliate professor of optometry at University of California Berkeley. e now live in a world where displays are ubiquitous

and being able to interact with displays is taken for grantedsays Barsky who is leading this project. eople with higher order aberrations often have irregularities in the shape of the cornea

and this irregular shape makes it very difficult to have a contact lens that will Fit in some cases this can be a barrier to holding certain jobs

because many workers need to look at a screen as part of their work. he UC Berkeley researchers

and Ramesh Raskar colleagues at the Massachusetts institute of technology to develop their latest prototype of a vision-correcting display.

The setup adds a printed pinhole screen sandwiched between two layers of clear plastic to an ipod display to enhance image sharpness.

A paper on their findings is available in ACM Transaction on Graphics. he significance of this project is that instead of relying on optics to correct your vision we use computationsays lead author Fu-Chung Huang who worked on this project as part of his computer science Phd dissertation at UC

and it is non-intrusive. he algorithm which was developed at UC Berkeley works by adjusting the intensity of each direction of light that emanates from a single pixel in an image based upon a user s specific visual impairment.

In a process called deconvolution the light passes through the pinhole array in such a way that the user will perceive a sharp image. ur technique distorts the image such that

when the intended user looks at the screen the image will appear sharp to that particular viewersays Barsky. ut

if someone else were to look at the image it would look bad. n the experiment the researchers displayed images that appeared blurred to a camera which was set to simulate a person who is farsighted.

This latest approach improves upon earlier versions of vision-correcting displays that resulted in low-contrast images.

The new display combines light field display optics with novel algorithms. Huang now a software engineer at Microsoft corp. in Seattle notes that the research prototype could easily be developed into a thin screen protector

and that continued improvements in eye-tracking technology would make it easier for the displays to adapt to the position of the user s head position. n the future we also hope to extend this application to multi-way correction on a shared display

so users with different visual problems can view the same screen and see a sharp imagesays Huang.

The National Science Foundation helped support this work t

#Copper foam could make extra CO2 useful Brown University rightoriginal Studyposted by Kevin Stacey-Brown on August 14 2014a catalyst made from a foamy form of copper has vastly different electrochemical

properties from catalysts made with smooth copper in reactions involving carbon dioxide according to the new study.

if you roughen the surface of planar copper it would create more active sites for reactions with CO2. opper foam

The artificially generated faces were synthesized computer based on previous research showing that cues such as higher inner eyebrows

and computer-generated faces and rated how trustworthy or untrustworthy they appeared. As previous studies have shown subjects strongly agreed on the level of trustworthiness conveyed by each given face.

or NIR-IIA involves injectingâ water-soluble carbon nanotubes into a live mouse s bloodstream. The researchers then shine a near-infrared laser over the rodent s skull.

Fan is developing the sensor with Zhaohui Zhong an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and Girish Kulkarni a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering.

if we need to see individual cells within a large volume of tissue#within a mouse kidney for example

and put all of the images back together with a computer. t s a very time-consuming process and it is error prone especially

#Wi-fi backscatter could make Internet of things real A new method uses radio frequency signals as a power source

and reuses existing Wi-fi infrastructure to provide internet connectivity to battery-free devices. Called Wi-fi backscatter this technology is the first that can connect battery-free devices to Wi-fi infrastructure.

Imagine a world in which your wristwatch or other wearable device communicates directly with your online profiles storing information about your daily activities where you can best access it all without requiring batteries.

and connect these devices to the internet has kept this from taking off. f Internet of things devices are going to take off we must provide connectivity to the potentially billions of battery-free devices that will be embedded in everyday objectssays Shyam Gollakota an assistant professor of computer science

and engineering at the University of Washington. e now have the ability to enable Wi-fi connectivity for devices

what Wi-fi typically requires. he researchers will publish their results at the Association for Computing Machinery s Special interest Group on Data communication s annual conference this month in Chicago.

or cords by harnessing energy from existing radio TV and wireless signals in the air. This work takes that a step further by connecting each individual device to the internet

which previously wasn t possible. The challenge in providing Wi-fi connectivity to these devices is that conventional low-power Wi-fi consumes three to four orders of magnitude more power than can be harvested in these wireless signals.

The researchers instead developed an ultra-low power tag prototype with an antenna and circuitry that can talk to Wi-fi-enabled laptops or smartphones while consuming negligible power.

These tags work by essentially ookingfor Wi-fi signals moving between the router and a laptop or smartphone.

They encode data by either reflecting or not reflecting the Wi-fi router s signals slightly changing the wireless signal.

Wi-fi-enabled devices like laptops and smartphones would detect these minute changes and receive data from the tag.

In this way your smart watch could download emails or offload your workout data onto a Google spreadsheet. ou might think how could this possibly work

when you have a low-power device making such a tiny change in the wireless signal?

But the point is if you re looking for specific patterns you can find it among all the other Wi-fi reflections in an environmentsays coauthor Joshua Smith an associate professor of computer science and engineering and of electrical engineering.

The Wi-fi backscatter tag has communicated with a Wi-fi device at rates of 1 kilobit per second with about 2 meters between the devices.

They plan to extend the range to about 20 meters and have filed patents on the technology.

The University of Washington Commercialization Gap Fund the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Washington Research Foundation the National Science Foundation and the University of Washington supported the work.

Source: University of Washington You are free to share this article under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivs 3. 0 Unported license

#Algorithm edits boring bits out of Gopro videos Carnegie mellon University Posted by Byron Spice-Carnegie mellon on August 5 2014.

It's easy to capture video with smartphones Gopro cameras and Google glass but viewing it can get boring.

or Google glass for example and quickly upload thumbnail trailers to social media. The summarization process avoids generating costly internet data charges and tedious manual editing on long videos.

This application along with the surveillance camera auto-summarization is now being developed for the retail market by Panoptus Inc. a startup founded by the inventors of Livelight.

and can do so on a conventional laptop. With a more powerful backend computing facility production time can be shortened to mere minutes according to the researchers.

Eric P. Xing professor of machine learning and Bin Zhao a Phd student in the machine learning department presented their work on June 26 at the Computer Vision

and Pattern Recognition Conference in Columbus Ohio. he algorithm never looks backsays Zhao whose research specialty is computer vision.

Rather as the algorithm processes the video it compiles a dictionary of its content. The algorithm then uses the learned dictionary to decide in a very efficient way

if a newly seen segment is similar to previously observed events such as routine traffic on a highway.

Segments thus identified as trivial recurrences or eventless are excluded from the summary. Novel sequences not appearing in the learned dictionary such as an erratic car

or a traffic accident would be included in the summary. Though Livelight can produce these summaries automatically users can also participating in compiling the summary.

In that instance Zhao says Livelight provides a ranked list of novel sequences for a human editor to consider for the final video.

The ability to detect unusual behaviors amidst long stretches of tedious video could also be a boon to security firms that monitor and review surveillance camera video.

Google, the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research and the Air force Office of Scientific research supported the work r

That progressively opens a band gap beginning at about 3 percent tension according to the computations. The team created a phase diagram to illustrate the relationship of the band gap to strain and temperature.

The researchers used the Data analysis and Visualization Cyberinfrastructure (DAVINCI) supercomputer supported by the NSF and administered by Rice s Ken Kennedy Institute for Information technology.

Source: Rice Universityyou are free to share this article under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivs 3. 0 Unported license m

#Crows beat test that stumps little kids University of California Santa barbara right Original Studyposted by Andrea Estrada-UCSB on July 25 2014 In Aesop s fable about the crow

US Attorney general Eric holder Jr. was quoted recently in news reports as having xtreme extreme concernabout Yemeni bomb makers joining forces with Syrian militants to develop these hard-to-detect explosives which can be hidden in cell phones and mobile devices.

likely because computers don make judgments or look down on people the way another human might.

which will appear in Computers in Human Behavior, researchers recruited 239 adults through Craigslist. The participants,

The mere belief that participants were interacting with only a computer made them more open and honest, researchers found,

director of virtual humans research and a professor of computer science. he virtual character delivered on both these fronts and that is

#Vibrating glove could teach you Braille A new wireless computing glove can help people learn to read

Audio cues let the users know the Braille letters produced by typing that sequence. Afterwards, everyone tried to type the phrase one time, without the cues or vibrations, on a keyboard.

Participants played a game for 30 minutes and were told to ignore the gloves. Half of the participants felt repeated vibrations and heard the cues,

No one in the study had typed previously on a Braille keyboard or knew the language. The study also didn include screens or visual feedback,

so participants never saw what they typed. They had no indication of their accuracy throughout the study. he only learning they received was guided by the haptic interface,

The Braille studies will be presented in Seattle this September at the 18th International Symposium on Wearable computers (ISWC.

and enable the economic production of gas resources with higher carbon dioxide content that would be too costly to recover using current carbon capture technologies says James Tour professor of mechanical engineering and nanoengineering and of computer science at Rice university.

and outputs of this process but a microscopic quantum mechanical description of how the light excites the electrons is lacking.

and optical communications that are the basis for the internet and cable TV. The optical and electronic properties of metals cause excitons to last no longer than approximately 100 attoseconds (0. 1 quadrillionth of a second.

They connected their system to a computer and demonstrated that they could use it to scan

Vanderbilt University rightoriginal Studyposted by David Salisbury-VU on May 22 2014imagine a future in which plugs and external power sources no longer limit our electrical gadgets.

This possibility is one of the reasons for the current interest in building the capacity to store electrical energy directly into a wide range of products such as a laptop

today computers are ridiculously slow and take about 40,000 times more power to run. rom a pure energy perspective,

Their strategy was to enable certain synapses to share hardware circuits. The result was called a device Neurogrid.

It about the size of an ipad and can simulate many more neurons and synapses than other brain mimicking devices using only about the power it takes to run a tablet computer.

But it still a power hog compared to the brain. he human brain, with 80,000 times more neurons than Neurogrid, consumes only three times as much power,

which aims to simulate a human brain on a supercomputer. By contrast the US BRAIN Projecthort for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologiesas taken a tool-building approach by challenging scientists to develop new kinds of tools that can read out the activity of thousands

Zooming from the big picture, Boahen article focuses on two projects comparable to Neurogrid that attempt to model brain functions in silicon and/or software.

IBM OLDEN GATECHIP One of these efforts is IBM Synapse Projecthort for Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics.

with IBM on track to greatly increase the numbers of neurons in the system. HICANN CHIP FOR BRAIN SIMULATORS Heidelberg University Brainscales project has the ambitious goal of developing analog chips to mimic the behaviors of neurons and synapses.

with a roadmap to greatly expand that hardware base. Each of these research teams has made different technical choices,

such as whether to dedicate each hardware circuit to modeling a single neural element (e g.,, a single synapse) or several (e g.,

, by activating the hardware circuit twice to model the effect of two active synapses. These choices have resulted in different trade-offs in terms of capability and performance.

With that cheaper hardware and compiler software to make it easy to configure, these neuromorphic systems could find numerous applications.

and their collaborators, offers the possibility that such devices may soon be as small as a typical smartphone.

professor of electrical and computer engineering and a professor of bioengineering. ethane is emitted by natural sources, such as wetlands,

and that excites the quartz tuning fork. he tuning fork is a piezoelectric element, so when the wave causes it to vibrate,

Extended outlook: more clouds. The scrutinized planet which is known as GJ1214B is classified as a super-Earth type planet

which monitors two thousand red dwarf stars for transiting planets. The planet was targeted next for follow-up observations to characterize its atmosphere.

According to study author Larry Young of the department of psychiatry at Emory University this is the first study to demonstrate that variation in the oxytocin receptor gene influences face recognition skills.

because these families are known to show a wide range of variability in facial recognition skills. Two-thirds of the families were from the United kingdom and the remainder from Finland.

This suggests an ancient conservation in genetic and neural architectures involved in social information processing that transcends the sensory modalities used from mouse to man.

Skuse credits Youngâ#previous research that found mice with a mutated oxytocin receptor failed to recognize mice they previously encountered. his led us to pursue more information about facial recognition and the implications for disorders in

computers go for good enough Purdue University rightoriginal Studyposted by Emil Venere-Purdue on December 23 2013computers capable of pproximate computingcould potentially double efficiency

Researchers are developing computers that could perform calculations good enough for certain tasks that don t require perfect accuracy. he need for approximate computing is driven by two factors:

a fundamental shift in the nature of computing workloads and the need for new sources of efficiencysays Anand Raghunathan a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University. omputers were designed first to be precise calculators that solved

However the demand for computing today is driven by very different applications. obile and embedded devices need to process richer media

and having more natural user interfaces. On the other hand there is an explosion in digital data searched interpreted and mined by data centers. growing number of applications are designed to tolerate oisyreal-world inputs

and use statistical or probabilistic types of computations. he nature of these computations is different from the traditional computations where you need a precise answersays Srimat Chakradhar department head for Computing systems Architecture at NEC Laboratories America

but you are not trying to be perfect. owever today s computers are designed to compute precise results even

Approximate computing could endow computers with a capability similar to the human brain s ability to scale the degree of accuracy needed for a given task.

but computer software and hardware are not like that. They often compute to the same level of accuracy all the time. urdue researchers have developed a range of hardware techniques to demonstrate approximate computing showing a potential for improvements in energy efficiency.

Recently the researchers have shown how to apply approximate computing to programmable processors which are ubiquitous in computers servers

and consumer electronics. n order to have a broad impact we need to be able to apply this technology to programmable processorssays Kaushik Roy professor of electrical

and computer engineering at Purdue. nd now we have shown how to design a programmable processor to perform approximate computing. he researchers achieved this milestone by altering the nstruction setwhich is the interface between software

and hardware. uality fieldsadded to the instruction set allow the software to tell the hardware the level of accuracy needed for a given task.

They have created a prototype programmable processor called Quora based on this approach. ou are able to program for quality

and that s the real hallmark of this worksays lead author doctoral student Swagath Venkataramani. he hardware can use the quality fields

and perform energy-efficient computing and what we have seen is that we can easily double energy efficiency. n other recent work led by former doctoral student Vinay K. Chippa the Purdue team fabricated an approximate cceleratorfor recognition

and data mining. e have an actual hardware platform a silicon chip that we ve had fabricated which is an approximate processor for recognition

and data miningraghunathan says. pproximate computing is far closer to reality than we thought even a few years ago. he National Science Foundation partially funded the project.

and computer memory. Cellulose could come from a variety of biological sources including trees plants algae ocean-dwelling organisms called tunicates

and bacteria that create a protective web of cellulose. ith this in mind cellulose nanomaterials are inherently renewable sustainable biodegradable and carbon-neutral like the sources from

or of cars driving by to power your smartphone. That s the concept researchers at the Georgia Institute of technology are developing using

##or even rain falling. e are able to deliver small amounts of portable power for today s mobile

Their latest paper published in the journal ACS Nano described harvesting energy from the touch pad of a laptop computer.

The generators can be made from nearly transparent polymers allowing their use in touch pads and screens.

The Rice university lab of chemist James Tour in collaboration with Lockheed martin developed the compound to protect marine and airborne radars with a robust coating that is also transparent to radio frequencies.

and metallic elements must be installed far from the source of radio signals to keep from interfering. t s very hard to deice these alumina domestour says. t takes a lot of power to heat them

because they re very poor conductors. nter graphene the single-atom-thick sheet of carbon that both conducts electricity and because it s so thin allows radio frequencies to pass unhindered.

Further experiments found them to be nearly invisible to radio frequencies. Tour says the availability of nanoribbons is no longer an issue

#3d printed loudspeaker plays Obama speech The first 3d printed consumer electronic is a loudspeaker that comes out of the printer ready to use.

Lipson says he hopes this simple demonstration is just the ip of the iceberg. 3d printing technology could be moving from printing passive parts toward printing active integrated systems he adds.

Most printers cannot efficiently handle multiple materials. It s also difficult to find mutually compatible materialsâ##for example conductive copper

and plastic coming out of the same printer require different temperatures and curing times. In the case of the speaker Kiran used one of the lab s Fab@Homes a customizable research printer originally developed by Lipson

and former graduate student and lab member Evan Malone that allows scientists to tinker with different cartridges control software and other parameters.

For the conductor Kiran used a silver ink. For the magnet he employed the help of Samanvaya Srivastava graduate student in chemical

hat hath God wrought. reating a market for printed electronic devices Lipson says could be like introducing color printers after only black and white had existed. t opens up a whole new space that makes the old look primitive. ource:

#New transistors offer high output at low voltage A new type of transistor could pave the way for fast computing devices that would use very low energy including smart sensor networks and implanted medical devices.

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