Information Technology

Carnegie Mellon University robotics researcher Vladimir Brajovic has developed a tool that automatically improves the appearance of darkened or underexposed photographs by digitally adding light to dark areas.

The Shadow Illuminator, funded through a $350,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, was developed originally to help robots see better. Using principles based on the physics of how optical images are formed, Shadow Illuminator imitates the vision processes that take place in

In an innovative study, researchers at North Carolina State University have designed a way to control the movement of microscopic droplets of liquid freely floating across centimeter-sized chips packed with electrodes. The discovery allows the performance of new types of chemical experiments on the microscale.

The breakthrough came as the researchers – Dr. Orlin D. Velev, assistant professor of chemical engineering, and two NC State doctoral students, Brian Prevo and Ketan Bhatt – learned h

In the past, museum guides carried a clipboard and waved a flag to help straggling tourists find the group. In the future – thanks to technology developed at the University of Toronto – talking robotic guides carrying a customized microchip and four-way speakers could lead tourists from exhibit to exhibit.

“This is a very unique solution to navigating,” says lead researcher Professor Parham Aarabi of U of T’s Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “Using a

In the ongoing quest to create computing devices that are both incredibly small and incredibly powerful, scientists – envisioning a future beyond the limits of traditional semiconductors – have been working to use molecules for information storage and processing.

Until now, researchers were skeptical that such molecular devices could survive the rigors of real-world manufacturing and use, which involve high temperatures and up to one trillion operational cycles. But scientists at the Univer

Walt Scacchi of the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues are conducting formal studies of the informal world of open-source software development, in which a distributed community of developers produces software source code that is freely available to share, study, modify and redistribute. They’re finding that, in many ways, open-source development can be faster, better and cheaper than the “textbook” software engineering often used in corporate settings.

In a series of

CAD software improves breast ultrasound, digital mammograms

New computerized systems that give doctors a “second pair of eyes” for looking at mammograms and other breast scans are showing great promise for detecting breast cancer, distinguishing it from benign problems without a biopsy, and tracking changes in a woman’s breast over time.

The systems, all developed at the University of Michigan Health System, are in various stages of readiness for clinical use. But UMHS