Howard Bowman and Colin Johnson of the Computing Laboratory at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UKC) have been awarded a grant of £150,000 from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to construct computational models of human attention. The research will be undertaken in collaboration with the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, one of the UK’s leading centres for research into human attention.
We live in environments in w
A project between academia and industry is aiming to spark a world electronics revolution by producing faster, cheaper and more reliable microchips.
The University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, has joined forces with Amtel, on North Tyneside in the North East of England, to create ‘strained silicon’ microchips, which involves adding a material called germanium to the traditional silicon used in semiconductor manufacturing.
Atmel, whose silicon chips find applications in such diverse
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
Researchers at the University of Leeds have rescued the BBC Domesday Project, preserving it for future generations. The CAMiLEON Project has developed software that emulates the obsolete BBC computer and videodisc player on which the original system ran.
The BBC Domesday project was conceived by the BBC to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the 1086 Domesday book. It formed a social snapshot of life in the UK during the mid eighties. Information was recorded on two virtually indestructible i
The Basque company Contec, specialised in connectivity and security tasks in Internet accesses, has just presented a range of VPN e-Link solutions.
e-Link solutions provide several capacities of connectivity, security and interconnection between the head offices of one or more companies. These solutions guarantee the possibility to keep connected all head offices, representative offices or stores located in different geographical places of a company. That way, they can share all resources a
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA) and the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) jointly announced organizational changes which aim to strengthen research relationships throughout Europe to better support Web technology development.
The change of W3C European Host from INRIA to ERCIM will take place on 1 January 2003. The change allows W3C to better leverage research relationships througho
Ancient artists used a technique called stippling – in which pictures are created by painting or carving a series of tiny dots – to produce drawings on cave walls and utensils thousands of years ago.
Now engineers at Purdue University have created a new kind of computer-imaging software that uses stippling to quickly produce complex pictures of internal organs and other renderings. The method is 10 times faster than some conventional methods and could provide a tool for medical professionals
Internet traffic jams may become history if ESA succeeds in developing new technology to see nearby Earth-sized planets. Why? In looking for new ways to detect planets ESA is thinking that, instead of bulky mirrors and lenses in space, one can build miniaturised optical systems that fit onto a microchip. Such ‘integrated optics’ would also allow earthly computer networks to use high-speed routing of data streams as a natural spin-off.
Data moving around the Internet are like road traffic in
Indiana University information technology experts working with others from the state’s leading educational institutions presented several new tools in high-performance computing, networks and visualization this week to colleagues at the international Supercomputing2002 conference. Among the tools demonstrated were a system that can track the physical location of wireless devices and a powerful mapping application.
The contributions of IU and its Research in Indiana (http://www.research-
A Northumbria University lecturer has helped devise a scheme to use music to catch computer bugs.
Dr Paul Vickers from Northumbria and Professor James Alty from Loughborough University’s Department of Computer Science have come up with an idea that would see features of computer programming languages being given short, musical themes. All similar instructions would be given related tunes so that any bug would be easily identified within the system.
“To ensure the musicality
When they make their first public demonstration of tele-immersion at this week’s Super Computing 2002 conference in Baltimore, computer scientists will also attain another first: a “network computer” that processes data at a location far removed from either input or output.
While the tele-immersion system will gather and display information in side-by-side booths at the Baltimore Convention Center, actual data processing will occur some 250 miles away at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing C
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