Showing posts with label Research Projects. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Research Projects. Show all posts

Monday 17 October 2011

Skinput: Appropriating the Body as an Input Surface


To download the research article on Skinput  Click Here

We present Skinput, a technology that appropriates the human body for acoustic transmission, allowing the skin to be used as an input surface. In particular, we resolve the location of finger taps on the arm and hand by analyzing mechanical vibrations that propagate through the body. We collect these signals using a novel array of sensors worn as an armband. This approach provides an always available, naturally portable, and on-body finger input system. We assess the capabilities, accuracy and limitations of our technique through a two-part, twenty-participant user study. To further illustrate the utility of our approach, we conclude with several proof-of-concept applications we developed.

Project Team

Chris Harrison

Dan Morris

Desney Tan

In Chris Harrison's ideal world, mobile phones would be the size of matchbooks. They'd have full-size keyboards. They'd browse the Web. They'd play videos.


And, most importantly, you'd never have to touch them.

Sound like too much to ask? Maybe not.

Harrison, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University and a former intern at Microsoft Research, has developed a working prototype of a system called Skinput that does just that, essentially by turning a person's hand and forearm into a keyboard and screen.

"People don't love the iPhone keyboard. They use them. But they don't love them," Harrison said in a interview at the recent Computer-Human Interaction conference. "If you could make the iPhone keyboard as big as an arm -- that would be huge."

Using Skinput, a person could tap their thumb and middle finger together to answer a call; touch their forearm to go to the next track on a music player; or flick the center of their palm to select a menu item.

All of these sign-language-like movements, which are customizable, would control a gadget in a person's pocket through a Bluetooth connection.

When fitted with a pico-projector, the Skinput system could display an image of a digital keyboard on a person's forearm. So, using Skinput, someone could send text messages by tapping his or her arm in certain places -- without pulling the phone out of a pocket or purse.
"You could pretty much do a lot of what you do on your iPhone," said Harrison, who says Skinput "is [like having] your iPhone on your palm."

The system, which has been under development for eight months, won't be commercially available for two to seven years, said Dan Morris, a Microsoft researcher who is working with Harrison on Skinput.

Before that can happen, Skinput's sensors need to get more accurate, he said. In a 13-person trial in Seattle, Washington, Skinput was found to be 96 percent accurate. But that test only used five buttons. The system would have to improve for people to make use of a full keyboard, which would be the "holy grail," Morris said.

"The accuracy is good, but it's not quite consumer-level yet," he said.

Skinput is one of a number of prototypes, ideas and near-products aiming to make computing more natural.

These devices seek to move beyond the mouse and physical keyboard, letting people communicate with their gadgets by gesturing, using sign language or, in the case of Skinput, tapping on their hands, fingers and forearms.

The arm as an instrument

Understanding how Skinput works makes it seem all the more futuristic.
The system turns a person's arm and hand into a wiggling, pulsating instrument, full of vibrations that can be picked up and translated.

Skinput users wear an armband -- the prototype version is made of an elbow brace -- that's lined with 10 sensors. These sensors look like tiny diving boards with dumbbells on one end, and they pick up inaudible sounds that range in frequency from 25 to 78 hertz.

When a Skinput user taps a thumb and middle finger together, the impact sends ripples down the skin and through the bones in the person's arm. "They sort of start resonating -- like guitar strings," Harrison said. The diving-board receivers read the sound waves to figure out what gesture the person made, and then relay that information to a phone.

Skinput can tell whether a person tapped a middle finger or an index finger, because the two moves sound slightly different to the springy receivers.

The system takes one or two minutes to learn the sounds of a particular person's arm, Morris said, and then it can be used however the user likes.

Trial and error

When they started working on Skinput, Morris and Harrison weren't sure if it would be possible to turn the human arm into a virtual keypad. The pair tried clipping sensors to the ends of peoples' fingers and other strange configurations that made users feel like cyborgs.
"We spent a lot of nights in the lab tapping on our arms and wondering if this would ever happen," Harrison said.

But the most profound achievement of Skinput is proving that the human body can be used as a sensor, he said.

Morris believes Skinput will make computing accessible to people in a way that never would have been possible before.

With Skinput, "literally, computing is always available," he said.

A person might walk toward their home, Harrison said, tap their palm to unlock the door and then tap some virtual buttons on their arms to turn on the TV and start flipping through channels.

"It's almost like magic," he said.

To download the research article on Skinput  Click Here

Video


Friday 14 October 2011

Top 10 Futuristic Concept Laptops

To have the gadgets with top specs is mostly people’s choice but to have a laptop with the most unusual features is the craze. This list of futuristic cool concept laptops has the ideal and unrealistic designs that can totally blow your mind. The list we have here have the laptops that are highly functional, reliable and fantastically designed. Let us see


10. Anna Lopez รข€™ concept is especially designed for usage in cars or the people who are dedicated to mobile work. It is really lightweight with full screen keyboard and transparent display.

anna lopez concept Top 10 Futuristic Concept Laptops

9. This is designed by HP and the pictures describe its whole design for sure.

hp laptop concept 1 Top 10 Futuristic Concept Laptops

8. V12 design by Canova, which is a dual touch screen laptop with 2 display screens. It is designed especially for graphic editors.

canova dual touch screen laptop 2 Top 10 Futuristic Concept Laptops

7. CEATEC by Fujitsu has a touch keypad with backlight display and 5.1 surround sound system with music keys. This 20 inches gadget is also called DJ laptop.

fujitsu dj laptop Top 10 Futuristic Concept Laptops

6. Flexi PDA Concept Laptops  comes with a flexible display and it is also waterproof.

flexi pda concept 2 Top 10 Futuristic Concept Laptops

5. This Frog Design laptop is called Gelfrog and is as light as a newspaper. It also projects amatching pattern on its surface to be scanned by people.

gelfrog concept 2 Top 10 Futuristic Concept Laptops

4. This PC laptop concept by Fujitsu is a papers display type which is flexible and lightweight and looks like an office folder.

fujitsu fab pc concept Top 10 Futuristic Concept Laptops

3. Itel Ziba Design Concept laptop, This 17.7 inches laptop which weighs 2.25 pounds is totally awesome!

intel mobile metro notebook ziba design laptop concept Top 10 Futuristic Concept Laptops

2. Compenion prototype has OLED touch screen display and has a slider design. It also supports multi touch screen

compenion concept 2 Top 10 Futuristic Concept Laptops

1. This one is a Vaio Zoo, Holographic Concept notebook and is completely transparent and has touch screen keyboard. It is thin, lightweight and totally cool.

vaio zoom holographic concept 2 Top 10 Futuristic Concept Laptops

'Robot Biologist' Solves Complex Problem from Scratch


First it was chess. Then it was Jeopardy. Now computers are at it again, but this time they are trying to automate the scientific process itself.


An interdisciplinary team of scientists at Vanderbilt University, Cornell University and CFD Research Corporation, Inc., has taken a major step toward this goal by demonstrating that a computer can analyze raw experimental data from a biological system and derive the basic mathematical equations that describe the way the system operates. According to the researchers, it is one of the most complex scientific modeling problems that a computer has solved completely from scratch.
The paper that describes this accomplishment is published in the October issue of the journal Physical Biology and is currently available online.

The work was a collaboration between John P. Wikswo, the Gordon A. Cain University Professor at Vanderbilt, Michael Schmidt and Hod Lipson at the Creative Machines Lab at Cornell University and Jerry Jenkins and Ravishankar Vallabhajosyula at CFDRC in Huntsville, Ala.

The "brains" of the system, which Wikswo has christened the Automated Biology Explorer (ABE), is a unique piece of software called Eureqa developed at Cornell and released in 2009. Schmidt and Lipson originally created Eureqa to design robots without going through the normal trial and error stage that is both slow and expensive. After it succeeded, they realized it could also be applied to solving science problems.

One of Eureqa's initial achievements was identifying the basic laws of motion by analyzing the motion of a double pendulum. What took Sir Isaac Newton years to discover, Eureqa did in a few hours when running on a personal computer.

In 2006, Wikswo heard Lipson lecture about his research. "I had a 'eureka moment' of my own when I realized the system Hod had developed could be used to solve biological problems and even control them," Wikswo said. So he started talking to Lipson immediately after the lecture and they began a collaboration to adapt Eureqa to analyze biological problems.

"Biology is the area where the gap between theory and data is growing the most rapidly," said Lipson. "So it is the area in greatest need of automation."

Software passes test

The biological system that the researchers used to test ABE is glycolysis, the primary process that produces energy in a living cell. Specifically, they focused on the manner in which yeast cells control fluctuations in the chemical compounds produced by the process.

The researchers chose this specific system, called glycolytic oscillations, to perform a virtual test of the software because it is one of the most extensively studied biological control systems. Jenkins and Vallabhajosyula used one of the process' detailed mathematical models to generate a data set corresponding to the measurements a scientist would make under various conditions. To increase the realism of the test, the researchers salted the data with a 10 percent random error. When they fed the data into Eureqa, it derived a series of equations that were nearly identical to the known equations.

"What's really amazing is that it produced these equations a priori," said Vallabhajosyula. "The only thing the software knew in advance was addition, subtraction, multiplication and division."

Beyond Adam

The ability to generate mathematical equations from scratch is what sets ABE apart from Adam, the robot scientist developed by Ross King and his colleagues at the University of Wales at Aberystwyth. Adam runs yeast genetics experiments and made international headlines two years ago by making a novel scientific discovery without direct human input. King fed Adam with a model of yeast metabolism and a database of genes and proteins involved in metabolism in other species. He also linked the computer to a remote-controlled genetics laboratory. This allowed the computer to generate hypotheses, then design and conduct actual experiments to test them.

"It's a classic paper," Wikswo said.
In order to give ABE the ability to run experiments like Adam, Wikswo's group is currently developing "laboratory-on-a-chip" technology that can be controlled by Eureqa. This will allow ABE to design and perform a wide variety of basic biology experiments. Their initial effort is focused on developing a microfluidics device that can test cell metabolism.

"Generally, the way that scientists design experiments is to vary one factor at a time while keeping the other factors constant, but, in many cases, the most effective way to test a biological system may be to tweak a large number of different factors at the same time and see what happens. ABE will let us do that," Wikswo said.

The project was funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative.


Posted by : Faran Ali

Sunday 9 October 2011

Nokia's nanotech Morph goes on display, signals melting devices in our future

Why is Nokia always trying to outdo everyone with its fancy-schmancy concepts and designs? Why can't they just get in line and keep it simple? We may never know the answer to those questions, but what we do know is that the company is presenting a new concept device called the Morph that would be right at home... in the year 3000. The unit is included in the MoMA's "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibition catalog, and boasts the ability to stretch and flex to almost any shape a user could think of. The nanotechnology-based device would deliver transparent electronics, self-cleaning surfaces, and the malleability to transform into any number of configurations. Of course, the actual technology required to put this together is years or even decades away, though Nokia expects to see some of these innovations making their way into high-end products within seven years.




Army Exoskeleton Suit Gives Man Superhuman Strength

Super hero movies are all the rage these days.  Take a look at the swollen coffers of Marvel and DC and it will be apparent.  With such a vested interest in the super-human, it seems only natural that it would be brought to real life.  No, there has not been a revolutionary breakthrough in gene therapy (X-Men style), and nobody is as diesel as Batman, but the researchers over at Raytheon’s recent acquisition, Sarcos Lab, have set their sights on super-strength with the design of their XOS exoskeleton.  Capable of lifting over 200 pounds without the operator breaking a sweat, this DARPA funded meld of man and machine will make any Iron Man fanboy plotz.

We have featured other exoskeletons here on the Hub, but this one takes the cake.  The super-suit is being designed for the U.S. Army, where the plan is to turn soldiers into workhorses.  They would be able to lift hundreds of pounds of ammunition and cargo without feeling the slightest bit of strain, making the fast unloading of precious cargo take significantly less time.  The system is run by a computer that receives input from six pressure sensors located on the exoskeleton.  With that input, the computer can then determine which action the user is trying to do and tell the suit to mimic the action before the human actually exerts any force.  The user only feels the weight of his or her arms and not that of the object being lifted.
Currently, the suit is limited in terms of mobility because power and hydraulic pressure come from an external source.  The researchers at Sarcos have yet to develop a portable power source for the suit, but that is on the shortlist of improvements for future designs.  The first step for the researchers was to create an effortless shadowing system and, now that it has been accomplished, they are now moving onto the power problem.  Take a look at the video below to see the XOS suit work its magic.  It’s a few years old but, because of the classified nature of this project, there’s not much footage out there.

Capable of lifting 200 pounds, but still gentle to the touch.
Work has already begun on reducing energy consumption so that the device may be powered by a battery pack for up to a days worth of continuous use.  The hydraulic valves that act as the suit’s muscles have been redesigned so that they only require energy when in operation, an improvement in hydraulic function that researchers at Sarcos claim they had to innovate themselves.  While much of the information regarding the project is classified, it is known that military trials of the suit are set to begin sometime this year, if they haven’t already.  While the power situation does not seem to have been worked out just yet, the first uses for the suit will probably be for stationary manual labor.

Such a marvel (pun certainly intended) of engineering and robotics has been a long time coming.  The project began in 2000 and has gone through four evolutions of the suit.  The pace at which this project progressed to the point where superhuman strength is an effortless feat can give credence to the thought that the future is not far off.  Perhaps it may be a few years before these suits are seen on the battlefield, but it is impressive enough to hear somebody say that they gave up on lifting a 200-pound weight after 500 repetitions not because they were tired but because they were bored.

We live in an age of constant progress where man’s mastery of the human body and the world around it has shown that there really are no limitations.  Well, maybe time travel could get a little sticky with all the paradoxes and such, but science fiction and fantasy are fast becoming reality.  This idea began as a children’s story when it first debuted over 45 years ago as Iron Man and nobody but the most die-hard comic book fans ever though that a mechanized suit would possibly exist.  These comic book writers are effectively predicting the future.  Perhaps it is time to switch religions to the Church of Marvel?

Friday 7 October 2011

Welcome to the Large Hadron Collider

Tunnelling to the beginning of time

The LHC (Large Hadron Collider) is an international project, in which the UK has a leading role. This site includes the latest news from the project, accessible explanations of how the LHC works, how it is funded, who works there and what benefits it brings us. You can access a wide range of resources for the public, journalists and teachers and students, there are also many links to other sources of information.

The LHC is asking some Big Questions about the universe we live in

1) How did our universe come to be the way it is?

The Universe started with a Big Bang – but we don’t fully understand how or why it developed the way it did. The LHC will let us see how matter behaved a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers have some ideas of what to expect – but also expect the unexpected!

2) What kind of Universe do we live in?

Many physicists think the Universe has more dimensions than the four (space and time) we are aware of. Will the LHC bring us evidence of new dimensions?
Gravity does not fit comfortably into the current descriptions of forces used by physicists. It is also very much weaker than the other forces. One explanation for this may be that our Universe is part of a larger multi dimensional reality and that gravity can leak into other dimensions, making it appear weaker. The LHC may allow us to see evidence of these extra dimensions - for example, the production of mini-black holes which blink into and out of existence in a tiny fraction of a second.

3) What happened in the Big Bang?

What was the Universe made of before the matter we see around us formed? The LHC will recreate, on a micro scale, conditions that existed during the first billionth of a second of the Big Bang.

At the earliest moments of the Big Bang, the Universe consisted of a searingly hot soup of fundamental particles - quarks, leptons and the force carriers. As the Universe cooled to 1000 billion degrees, the quarks and gluons (carriers of the strong force) combined into composite particles like protons and neutrons. The LHC will collide lead nuclei so that they release their constituent quarks in a fleeting ‘Little Bang’. This will take us back to the time before these particles formed, re-creating the conditions early in the evolution of the universe, when quarks and gluons were free to mix without combining. The debris detected will provide important information about this very early state of matter.

4) Where is the antimatter?

The Big Bang created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, but we only see matter now. What happened to the antimatter?
Every fundamental matter particle has an antimatter partner with equal but opposite properties such as electric charge (for example, the negative electron has a positive antimatter partner called the positron). Equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created in the Big Bang, but antimatter then disappeared. So what happened to it? Experiments have already shown that some matter particles decay at different rates from their anti-particles, which could explain this. One of the LHC experiments will study these subtle differences between matter and antimatter particles.

5) Why do particles have mass?

Why do some particles have mass while others don’t? What makes this difference? If the LHC reveal particles predicted by theory it will help us understand this.
Particles of light (known as photons) have no mass. Matter particles (such as electrons and quarks) do – and we’re not sure why. British physicist, Peter Higgs, proposed the existence of a field (the Higg’s Field), which pervades the entire Universe and interacts with some particles and this gives them mass. If the theory is right then the field should reveal itself as a particle (the Higg’s particle). The Higg’s particle is too heavy to be made in existing accelerators, but the high energies of the LHC should enable us to produce and detect it.

6) What is our Universe made of?

Ninety-six percent of our Universe is missing! Much of the missing matter is stuff researchers have called ‘dark matter’. Can the LHC find out what it is made of?
The theory of ‘supersymmetry’ suggests that all known particles have, as yet undetected, ‘superpartners’. If they exist, the LHC should find them. These ‘supersymmetric’ particles may help explain one mystery of the Universe – missing matter. Astronomers detect the gravitational effects of large amounts of matter that can’t be seen and so is called ‘Dark Matter’. One possible explanation of dark matter is that it consists of supersymmetric particles.

Wednesday 5 October 2011

A guide to the best HAARP conspiracy theories

A military-funded project called the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), located on remote tundra in Alaska, jumps off the horizon just past mile marker 11 on the Glenn Highway. The program's main facility sits behind a barbed wire fence that stretches as far as the eye can see. What grabs the imagination of most, though, are the couple hundred oversized antennas, described by legions of journalists and conspiracy theorists, including Noah Schactman of Wired: "180 silver poles rising from the ground, each a foot thick, 72 feet tall, and spaced precisely 80 feet apart ... Geometric patterns form and reform in every direction, Athenian in their symmetry. It looks like a bionic forest."
Those fanged metal structures have made the sleepy, rural Alaska village of Gakona, population 200, a lightning rod for controversy. Like many federally-funded projects in the Last Frontier, HAARP saw its financial peak when former Alaska U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens was at the height of his power in the mid-2000s. Theories abound about what goes on inside HAARP, which was founded in 1990 to conduct research on the ionosphere, an upper level of the atmosphere interesting to scientists for its importance in shortwave radio communication and because it's a place where plasma forms naturally.

Ask the Air Force what they're doing in Gakona these days and a spokesman stationed in New Mexico will tell you to find out yourself during HAARP's open house. They usually hold those every couple years during the summer. Even though all the research is unclassified, the Air Force doesn't offer much else in the way of explaining what's going on, except to point out their noble interest in studying Earth's atmosphere to further scientific knowledge and maybe improve homeland security along the way.
On a theoretical level, the HAARP website notes that federal scientists are working to unlock the mysteries to other natural phenomena that have captivated humans for millennia. They're studying lightning, aurora borealis and the like. They've even learned how to induce both of those on a limited scale, according to a statement included on a Navy defense budget. HAARP also exists, the project's website notes, to learn more about shortwave radio communications and its application in global positioning systems, among other things. Maybe HAARP was used to search for Saddam's WMD. Maybe it's utilized to gather intel on Iran's underground nuclear facilities. Who knows?
Plenty of other theories have been explored about what exactly Uncle Sam is up to way out in the middle of nowhere, Alaska. Here are a few of the best conspiracy theories in a nutshell.

How HAARP Works

HAARP is an Ionospheric heater. It changes the shape of the ionosphere, allowing for beamed energy to be concentrated on a known spot. It has been speculated that this system can manipulate weather, cause earthquakes, act as a "Death Ray" delivering large amounts of energy to a small location, and put on groovy light shows.


Earthquakes

Could HAARP antennas be generating earthquakes? Eric Dubay, a conspiracy blogger and American ex-pat that lives in Thailand, is part of the crowd that believes the U.S. used HAARP to cause the 8.9-magnitude earthquake that rocked northern Japan in March 2011, leading to the devastating Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear meltdown.
The gist of the argument from Dubay and others is that waves generated by HAARP antennas are focused on a specific part of the ionosphere with enough force to make the entire thing buckle into space; the ionosphere snaps back toward the ground with enough precision to cause a massive earthquake that devastates a strategic target that furthers American economic and defense interests.
Others claim the U.S., for bizarre reasons mostly unsubstantiated, caused the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti. The best guess anyone has come up with is that Haiti was the perfect place for a test run of sorts, which is among 13 reasons included in a post on Godlike Productions that argues the U.S. should be suspected for causing the quake in Port au Prince. A column by another conspiracy theorist on UFO-Blogger.com goes a step further in trying to predict what will be hit next: "Most likely the next target will be the New Madrid fault line in the South- Midwestern United States."
Kansans can rest easy, though: Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani nuclear physicist, tears the earthquake theory to shreds in response to an Islamist group that blamed HAARP for devastating floods in Punjab.



Hurricanes

There's a storied tradition of blaming devastating hurricanes on HAARP. That trend hit a fever pitch in 2005: first it was Katrina, then Rita, then Wilma.
Interestingly, HAARP saw its funding peak that same year at $49.3 million. But why would the U.S. government want to inflict devastation on its own citizens? And how exactly would scientists in Alaska generate Atlantic hurricanes with shortwave radio communication? And what ... well, really, what else needs to be said?
"This is absolute hogwash," Stanford professor Umran Inan told Popular Science. "There's absolutely nothing we can do to disturb the earth's [weather] systems. Even though the power HAARP radiates is very large, it's miniscule compared with the power of a lightning flash -- and there are 50 to 100 lightning flashes every second. HAARP's intensity is very small."


Mind Control

Of all the conspiracies floating around about HAARP, this is perhaps the most entertaining, and scientifically farfetched.
The government is using the shortwave radio communication generated in Gakona, so the story goes, to control the minds of unsuspecting Americans.What conspiracy theorists believe the Feds are trying to control is hazy. A good place to try and get a grip on this one is at the conspiracy website HAARP.net or watch Jesse Ventura's rendition when you have a few minutes. Then go ahead and read Popular Science's rebuttal.


 

Beyond the conspiracies

What makes HAARP susceptible to conspiracy criticism is simple. The facility doesn't open its doors in the same way as other federally-funded research facilities around the country, and it doesn't go to great efforts to explain the importance of its research to the public.
If you want to visit Oak Ridge National Laboratories (a Manhattan Project-era facility with exponentially greater funding but also a heavy focus on top-secret nuclear technology) you can show up to the visitor center for a public tour or schedule something more in-depth without much hassle. You can do the same at Los Alamos -- another bastion of the Manhattan Project -- in New Mexico. At both of those facilities, journalists can access unclassified research and talk directly to researchers and scientists.
None of that is possible at HAARP, though never expressly stated, probably in part because of the tinfoil-hatters that might storm Gakona if allowed visits of any kind. When the movement for more information is spearheaded by Jesse Ventura and TruTV, it's easy enough to laugh and let the real research continue away from the public eye. But the closed-shop tendencies could prove the facility's undoing as budget hawks, like the "super" bipartisan group in Congress assigned to dig up trillions of dollars in savings over the next decade, are eager to score political points.
What's to keep HAARP from ending up on the chopping block? Perhaps opening the project up to public scrutiny might keep those federal dollars flowing to Alaska.