Wi-Fi Sees Through Walls

Researchers in UC Santa Barbara have proposed a new foundation that can enable high-quality imaging of still objects with only WiFi signals. Their method uses the Geometrical Theory of Diffraction and the corresponding Keller cones to trace edges of the objects. The technique has also enabled, for the first time, imaging, or reading, the English alphabet through walls with WiFi, a task deemed too difficult for WiFi due to the complex details of the letters.

The team proposed a Keller cone-based imaging projection kernel. This kernel is implicitly a function of the edge orientations, a relationship that is then exploited to infer the existence/orientation of the edges via hypothesis testing over a small set of possible edge orientations. If existence of an edge is determined, the edge orientation that best matches the resulting Keller cone-based signature is chosen for a given point that they are interested in imaging.

More information:

https://news.ucsb.edu/2023/021198/wifi-can-read-through-walls

Microsoft Turns Phones into PCs

Microsoft is bringing a full version of Windows 10, complete with desktop app support, to ARM chipsets. The software giant demonstrated Windows 10 running on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 chip, complete with HD video playback, Adobe Photoshop support, and Microsoft Office. Microsoft expects ARM-based laptops to be the first to adopt this new version of Windows 10. Traditional x86 desktop apps will be emulated, making the experience seamless to the end user. Laptops might be the first, but it’s easy to realize that this means Microsoft is about to turn a phone into a real PC.

Microsoft surprised everyone with Continuum for phones last year, a feature of Windows 10 that lets phones turn into a PC. Continuum makes use of Qualcomm chipsets and Windows 10’s new universal apps to scale from a phone screen up to a monitor and includes features that make it feel like a full-blown PC. While it might look like a PC, you can’t currently run apps like Chrome or Photoshop, and it’s reliant on developers creating universal apps. Microsoft is making Continuum a lot more powerful next year, thanks to desktop apps.

More information:

http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/8/13881930/microsoft-turn-a-phone-into-a-pc-arm-continuum

World's Oldest Computer from 60BC Predicted Future

The world's first computer, which is about 2,000 years old, wasn't just used by ancient Greeks to chart the movement of the sun, moon and planets - it was also a fortune telling device, say researchers. The 2,000-year-old astronomical calculator, the Antikythera Mechanism, is a system of intricate bronze gears dating to around 60 BC, used by ancient Greeks to track solar and lunar eclipses. It was retrieved from a shipwreck discovered off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901, but a decades-long study has only now announced new results. While researchers had previously focused on its internal mechanisms, the study is now attempting to decode minute inscriptions on the remaining fragments of its outer surfaces.

Its ancient engineers may have also given in to a less scientific urge - man's perpetual curiosity about what the future holds. Researchers say the device was probably made on the island of Rhodes and do not think it was unique. It's only unique in the sense that it is the only one ever found. Slight variations in the inscriptions point to at least two people being involved in that, and there could have been more people making its gears. More than a dozen pieces of classical literature, stretched over a period from about 300 BC to 500 AD, make references to devices such as that found at Antikythera. The calculator could add, multiply, divide and subtract. It was also able to align the number of lunar months with years and display where the sun and the moon were in the zodiac.

More information:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/06/13/worlds-oldest-computer-from-60bc-predicted-future-new-study-says/?WT.mc_id=tmgoff_soc_spf_fb-sf28553198

Computers of the Future

Computing experts at Sandia National Laboratories have launched an effort to help discover what computers of the future might look like, from next-generation supercomputers to systems that learn on their own — new machines that do more while using less energy. For decades, the computer industry operated under Moore’s Law, named for Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore, who in 1965 postulated it was economically feasible to improve the density, speed and power of integrated circuits exponentially over time. But speed has plateaued, the energy required to run systems is rising sharply and industry can’t indefinitely continue to cram more transistors onto chips.

The plateauing of Moore’s Law is driving up energy costs for modern scientific computers to the point that, if current trends hold, more powerful future supercomputers would become impractical due to enormous energy consumption. Solving that conundrum will require new computer architecture that reduces energy costs, which are principally associated with moving data, Leland said. Eventually, computing also will need new technology that uses less energy at the transistor device-level. Sandia is well positioned to work on future computing technology due to its broad and long history in supercomputers, from architecture to algorithms to applications.

More information:

https://share.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/beyond_moore/#.U4iaRy_GL9g

Leaner Fourier Transforms

The fast Fourier transform (FFT), one of the most important algorithms of the 20th century, revolutionized signal processing. The algorithm allowed computers to quickly perform Fourier transforms (fundamental operations that separate signals into their individual frequencies) leading to developments in audio and video engineering and digital data compression. But ever since its development in the 1960s, computer scientists have been searching for an algorithm to better it.

Last year MIT researchers did just that, unveiling an algorithm that in some circumstances can perform Fourier transforms hundreds of times more quickly than the FFT. Recently, researchers within the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), have gone a step further, significantly reducing the number of samples that must be taken from a given signal in order to perform a Fourier transform operation.

More information:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/leaner-fourier-transforms-1211.html

Contact Lens Computer

For those who find Google Glass indiscreet, electronic contact lenses that outfit the user’s cornea with a display may one day provide an alternative. Built by researchers at several institutions, including two research arms of Samsung, the lenses use new nanomaterials to solve some of the problems that have made contact-lens displays less than practical. A group led by researchers at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, mounted a light-emitting diode on an off-the-shelf soft contact lens, using a material the researchers developed: a transparent, highly conductive, and stretchy mix of graphene and silver nanowires. The researchers tested these lenses in rabbits—whose eyes are similar in size to humans’—and found no ill effects after five hours. The animals didn’t rub their eyes or grow bloodshot, and the electronics kept working. 

 

They found that sandwiching silver nanowires between sheets of graphene yielded a composite with much lower electrical resistance than either material alone. The industry standard for a transparent conductor is a resistance of 50 ohms per square or less. Their material has a resistance of about 33 ohms per square. The material also transmits 94 percent of visible light, and it stretches. The researchers make these conductive sheets by depositing liquid solutions of the nanomaterials on a spinning surface, such as a contact lens, at low temperatures. Working with researchers at Samsung, they coated a contact lens with the stretchy conductor, and then placed a light-emitting diode on it. Although it would be an exaggeration to call this a display, since there is just one pixel, its possible this kind of material will be a necessary component in future contact-lens displays.

More information:

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/515666/contact-lens-computer-like-google-glass-without-the-glasses/

SiSi

Technology that translates spoken or written words into British Sign Language (BSL) has been developed by researchers at IBM. In particular a software system, called SiSi (Say It Sign It), was created by a group of students in the UK. SiSi brings together a number of computer technologies. A speech recognition module converts the spoken word into text, which SiSi then interprets into gestures that are used to animate an avatar which signs in BSL. The main of SiSi is to enable deaf people to have simultaneous sign language interpretations of meetings and presentations based on speech recognition to animate a digital character or avatar.

IBM says its technology will allow for interpretation in situations where a human interpreter is not available. It could also be used to provide automatic signing for television, radio and telephone calls. It is worth-mentioning that the concept has already gained the approval of the Royal National Institute for Deaf people (RNID). The students used two signing avatars developed by the University of East Anglia. One of them signs in BSL and the other uses Sign Supported English - a more direct translation using conventional syntax and grammar.

More information:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=RarMKnjqzZU

http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/ticker/article.aspx?symbol=US:IBM&feed=MW&date=20070913&id=7464419

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6993326.stm

Nobel Foundation

The Nobel Foundation is a private institution established in 1900 based on the will of Alfred Nobel and manages the assets made available through the will for the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature and Peace.

The Nobel prize announcements for this year have been finalised for Medicine, Physics and Chemistry and we are still awaiting for the rest awards.

More information:

http://nobelprize.org/

University Guide 2006

The Sunday Times perform every year an unofficial assessment of UK universities called 'University Guide'. This year's ‘University Guide 2006' can be found at:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,8403,00.html

The assessment contains of useful information for academics, researchers and students such as league tables (including research and teaching) as well brief summaries of university profiles.