Information Technology

It’s an all-too-common experience – the perfect photograph ruined by the demonic glow of the “red-eye” effect. Now, a researcher at the University of Toronto has developed a method that can automatically remove those unsightly scarlet spots from digital images.

“The technique will offer consumers a convenient, automatic tool for eliminating red-eye in digital photographs,” says Professor Konstantinos Plataniotis of the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Finnish Miotec has increased smartcard security through biometrics, which uses physical characteristics, such as fingerprint, retinal patterns, or voice to identify an individual.

Biometric technology uses physical characteristics, such as fingerprint, retinal patterns, or voice to identify an individual. In traditional biometric technology, the biometric information was stored in databases or readers. Not only was this exposing the secure information to hacking, but was considered a violati

Forget the robot child in the movie “AI.” Vanderbilt researchers Nilanjan Sarkar and Craig Smith have a less romantic but more practical idea in mind.

“We are not trying to give a robot emotions. We are trying to make robots that are sensitive to our emotions,” says Smith, associate professor of psychology and human development.

Their vision, which is to create a kind of robot Friday, a personal assistant who can accurately sense the moods of its human bosses and respond appropriate

For every warm-blooded human who has ever taken an online poll or signed up for free web-based email, there are legions of computer-automated Internet robots, or “bots,” trying to do the same thing.

A clever security system designed to stop these bot programs – which contribute to the Internet equivalent of computer-generated telemarketing calls – has now been cracked by a pair of computer scientists from the University of California, Berkeley.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon Unive

’Hot laps’ to become yesterday’s problem

Laptops make laps hot, as users of mobile lightweight computers sometimes learn dramatically. (If you’re not easily shocked, go to http://www.reuters.com). And things could get worse: upcoming chips may produce 100 watts per square centimeter — the heat generated by a light bulb — creating the effect of an unpleasantly localized dry sauna. (Current chip emanations are in the 50 watts/cm2 range.)

Evacuating heat i

New software that responds to written questions by retrieving digital images has potentially broad application, ranging from helping radiologists compare mammograms to streamlining museum curators’ archiving of artwork, say the Penn State researchers who developed the technology.

Dr. James Z. Wang, assistant professor in Penn State’s School of Information Sciences and Technology and principal investigator, says the Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures (ALIP) system first build