Wednesday, 18. November 2009, 09:04:25
cognitive computing, Computer, cortical simulation, supercomputer
Computers capable of mimicking the human brain's power and efficiency could be just 10 years off, according to a leading researcher at IBM.
According to the researcher, Dharmendra Modha, the manager of IBM's cognitive computing initiative, scientists from his company and some of the world's most prestigious universities have already managed to simulate the computing complexity of the feline cortex, a feat that could augur a day not too far off when it will be possible to ramp up to what the human brain can accomplish.
Last year, IBM and five universities were awarded a DARPA contract to work on a cognitive computing project aimed at eventually achieving that goal. Just a year later, Modha said, his team, working in conjunction with the universities' scientists, have achieved two major milestones.
The first was a real-time cortical simulation that achieved more than 1 billion spiking neurons, as well as 10 trillion individual learning synapses. According to Modha, that exceeds what a cat's cortex is capable of.
Source:http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10400362-52.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Tuesday, 17. November 2009, 09:26:20
spintronics, tansistors, semiconductors, electronics
For decades, the transistors inside radios, televisions and other everyday electronic items have transmitted data by controlling the movement of the charge of an electron. Scientists have since discovered that transistors that function by controlling an electron’s spin instead of its charge would use less energy, generate less heat and operate at higher speeds. This has resulted in a new field of research — spin electronics or spintronics — that offers one of the most promising paradigms for the development of novel devices for use in the post-CMOS (complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor) era.
"Until now, scientists have attempted to develop spin transistors by incorporating local ferromagnets into device architectures. This results in significant design complexities, especially in view of the rising demand for smaller and smaller transistors," says Philippe Debray, research professor in the Department of Physics in the McMicken College of Arts & Sciences. "A far better and practical way to manipulate the orientation of an electron’s spin would be by using purely electrical means, like the switching on and off of an electrical voltage. This will be spintronics without ferromagnetism or all-electric spintronics, the holy grail of semiconductor spintronics."
Source:
http://www.uc.edu/news/NR.aspx?id=10872
Monday, 16. November 2009, 08:21:53
server, storage, computing
I just saw a story about the NSA gearing up a datacenter to potentially hold a yottabyte of surveillance data. The whole surveillance angle itself is pretty interesting, but what caught my attention was the concept of the yottabyte. The yottabyte is 1024 bytes. That is three levels above the petabyte, which itself is a million gigabytes.
Lets first build up to the yottabyte in today’s standards. A one page Microsoft Word document is anywhere from 50 to 100 kilobytes (KB). A picture from your camera is typically anywhere from 0.5 to 3 megabytes (MB) and a song you might download from Itunes is usually about 3 or 4 megabytes (MB). Moving up the ladder, popular consumer devices such as iphones, ipods, and digital cameras hold anywhere from 1 to 100 gigabytes (GB) of storage capacity. The top of the line hard drives that you can buy at Best Buy are now 2 terabytes.
Assuming Google has 1 million servers each with 1 terabyte of storage (a size Google has already reached or likely will reach in the next year) we can estimate that Google has leap frogged the petabyte and now boasts a total worldwide storage capacity of roughly 1 exabyte. The storage capacity of the approximately 1 billion personal computers worldwide in 2009 with an average storage capacity of perhaps 250 gigabytes (GB) of storage each is not even half a zettabyte!
Source;http://singularityhub.com/2009/11/03/enter-the-yottabyte-one-billion-petabytes/
Wednesday, 11. November 2009, 09:39:53
generation, renewable energy, power, sustainable
Researchers at Novotech, Inc. of Acton, Massachusetts and two Massachusetts universities are developing a method to channel heat from asphalt and other paving materials into usable power. In addition to the power directly generated by the asphalt, this process would also lower the rate of buckling in the pavement and reduce the "urban heat island" effect generated when the heat from the pavement warms the nearby air. This should lower air conditioning use in urban areas, reducing the power needs for the area.
Asphalt is potentially an excellent source of energy because, unlike traditional solar panels, the pavement remains hot (and thus continues to generate energy) well after the sun sets. However, capturing the heat from the asphalt is not straightforward. Asphalt is an insulator so it tends to retain its heat. Novotech founder Michael Hulen and Worcester Institute of Technology professor Rajib Mallick have been experimenting with placing copper pipes wrapped in graphite or other strong conductors about an inch below the surface of the pavement. They have also looked into using series of heat sinks similar to those used in some residential floorboard heating systems.
Source:
http://thefutureofthings.com/news/8238/generating-power-from-pavement.html
Tuesday, 10. November 2009, 10:03:06
superconductor, electronics, electric field
The thinnest superconductor yet is a layer of copper oxide material less than a nanometre thick. The feat suggests a new possible route to faster electronic components.
Making superconductors super-skinny raises the prospect of being able to switch them on and off using electric fields, says Ivan Bozovic at Brookhaven National Laboratories in Upton, New York. That could allow them to be used in electronics, not just for carrying current from place to place.
"Static electric fields cannot penetrate more than 1 nanometre into good conductors," explains Bozovic, whose team carried out the new study. So a very thin superconductor indeed is needed to use electric fields in this way.
Source:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18076-slim-warm-superconductors-promise-faster-electronics.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news
Monday, 9. November 2009, 11:32:45
UI, User Interface, computing, gesture
...
It's a good time to be communicating with computers. No longer are we constrained by the mouse and keyboard--touch screens and gesture-based controllers are becoming increasingly common.
Now, researchers at Microsoft, the University of Washington in Seattle, and the University of Toronto in Canada have come up with another way to interact with computers: a muscle-controlled interface that allows for hands-free, gestural interaction.
A band of electrodes attach to a person's forearm and read electrical activity from different arm muscles. These signals are then correlated to specific hand gestures, such as touching a finger and thumb together, or gripping an object tighter than normal. The researchers envision using the technology to change songs in an MP3 player while running or to play a game like Guitar Hero without the usual plastic controller.
Source:
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23813/?a=f
Friday, 6. November 2009, 09:18:40
User Interface, UI, gesture, control
...
In some households, fighting over the TV remote is a raging nightly battle. In mine it’s more of a cold war detente. Either way, by the end of next year Hitachi (NYSE: HIT) may take the conflict to a whole new level. Working with Canesta and GestureTek, the Japanese electronics giant has created a line of television sets that will be able to recognize a viewer’s hand gestures. Instead of a remote control, you can just wave your hand in the right way to change channels or volume. Check out the video after the break to see Hitachi’s demonstration at CES from earlier this year.
From tablet PCs to iPhones, designers are giving us new ways to interact with our electronic devices. The future of the human-computer interface is likely to be much more tactile and intuitive than our current dependence on keyboard, mouse or remote control. With gesture controlled television, Hitachi and its partners aren’t just removing the necessity of a remote, they’re blurring the lines between the real world and the digital one.
Source:
http://singularityhub.com/2009/10/29/new-hitachi-tv-controlled-by-gestures-video/
Thursday, 5. November 2009, 09:19:43
User Interface, Cloud, voice recognition, UI
...
According to Microsoft this week, "voice is the new touch." Never mind that we've been hearing the "voice recognition will change the world" mantra for more than a decade now; this time, it's the real deal! And the company might be right, thanks in part to the peculiar power of the cloud.
With the launch of Windows 7, Microsoft is again talking up its voice recognition efforts, which extend from operating systems to cars to mobile phones. The company has certainly been hammering away at the technology for quite some time; limited versions have been included in Office for years, and a full speech recognition package was built into Vista. Bill Gates has also been predicting the rise of voice communication for a decade.
But Microsoft does have something important: a crack speech-recognition team with access to cloud-based voice recognition servers. It acquired TellMe in 2007, and the Speech at Microsoft group now controls the TellMe voice platform, which manages more than six million calls per month.
Source:
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/10/voice-recognition-gets-cloudy-will-soon-rival-humans.ars
Wednesday, 4. November 2009, 12:30:50
User Interface, multitouch, mouse, UI
...
Last week Apple released the Magic Mouse, a new computer mouse with a "multitouch" interface that responds to movement of fingertips across its surface in addition to conventional click-and-drag actions. Archrival Microsoft isn't ready to launch a competing product just yet, but the company does have plans for its own multitouch mice. Earlier this month, researchers presented five prototypes at the User Interface Software and Technology in Victoria, British Columbia, and their work won the symposium's best paper award.
With a multitouch mouse, a user can, for example, browse through a virtual stack of digital photos by flicking a finger across the mouse's surface, rotate an image by stroking the mouse, or zoom in on a picture by drawing an arrowhead with a fingertip.
Source:
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23805/?a=f
Tuesday, 3. November 2009, 09:06:31
automatic, Software, Computer, error correction
Software vulnerabilities that take days or weeks to fix may one day be a thing of the past. A team of researchers have presented new software, called ClearView, that automatically patches errors in deployed software in a matter of minutes.
As Technology Review reports, ClearView works without assistance from humans and without access to a program’s underlying source code. Instead, it monitors the behavior of a binary: the form the program takes in order to execute instructions on a computer’s hardware.
A paper, Automatically Patching Errors in Deployed Software, published by the Association for Computing Machinery, explains how ClearView works as five sequential steps.
Source:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=1879&tag=col1;post-1879
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