Researchers from the IBM Almaden Research Lab and the University of Nevada have used the BlueGene L supercomputer to model half a virtual mickey mouse brain.

8 million neurons, up to 6,300 synapses or connections with other nerve fibers: a challenge for simulation.

Researchers explain that such a modeling initiative puts tremendous constraints on computation, communication and memory capacity of any computing platform. The BlueGene L supercomputer was used to run the complex simulation for 10 seconds at a speed that was 10 times slower than real life. Useless but impressive...


Source: BBC News, last week.
For those who do not know:
- A supercomputer is a computer that leads the world in terms of processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation, at the time of its introduction. The term "Super Computing" was first used by New York World newspaper in 1920 to refer to large custom-built tabulators IBM made for Columbia University. According to this website, BlueGene L is still number 1 but Baker is coming its way...
- Chemical synapses are specialized junctions through which the cells of the nervous system signal to each other and to non-neuronal cells such as those in muscles or glands. Chemical synapses allow the neurons of the central nervous system to form interconnected neural circuits. They are thus crucial to the biological computations that underlie perception and thought. They provide the means through which the nervous system connects to and controls the other systems of the body. A chemical synapse between a motor neuron and a muscle cell is called a neuromuscular junction; this type of synapse is well-understood.

Computer scientists from UCB (University of California, Berkeley) have developed a "respectful camera" a new type of video surveillance that covers a person's face with an oval for privacy but that can remove the oval for an investigation!

Well, the technology is still in the research phase, as it's only possible to cover someone's face if that person is wearing a marker such as a green vest or a yellow hat (!!). Anyway, this idea seems to be a good compromise between privacy advocates and those concerned about security.

The researchers use a statistical classification approach called adaptive boosting (or AdaBoost) to teach the system to identify the marker in a visually complicated environment, and added a tracker to compensate for the subject's velocity and other interframe information. During the tests, the marker has been correctly identified 96% of the time ... so 4% of our face on the screen with a yellow hat! Which can seem quite useless but it's just the beginning, the researchers expect much more progress... And Ken Goldberg, the big boss, think to use a less conspicuous marker, like a button...


Source: TechnologyReview, wednesday.

For those who do not know: Boosting is a machine learning meta-algorithm for performing supervised learning. Boosting occurs in stages, by incrementally adding to the current learned function. At every stage, a weak learner (i.e., one that has an accuracy only slightly greater than chance) is trained with the data. The output of the weak learner is then added to the learned function, with some strength (proportional to how accurate the weak learner is). Then, the data is reweighted: examples that the current learned function gets wrong are "boosted" in importance, so that future weak learners will attempt to fix the errors. There are several different boosting algorithms, depending on the exact mathematical form of the strength and weight. AdaBoost is a popular and the historically most significant boosting algorithms, whereas more recent algorithms such as LPBoost and TotalBoost have replaced AdaBoost because they converge much faster and produce sparser hypothesis weightings. Most boosting algorithms fit into the AnyBoost framework, which shows that boosting performs gradient descent in function space...

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have developed Face Alive Icons, a software that can manipulate the picture of someone's face to show a range of emotions. Associated to an instant messenger like Skype or Windows Live Messenger, the smileys allow to change the chatter's face!

Once the user has uploaded a picture of himself with a neutral expression, he can warp the facial features by typing in common text symbols in his conversation ;)
Indeed, the picture is not sent with every smiley but a profile is stored the recipient device. This profile consists of a decomposition of the original photo. Every time the user sends an emoticon, the face is reassembled on the recipient's device in such a way as to show the appropriate expression.

To create the software, Li developed computational models for each type of expression using a learning program that analyzes the expressions stored in a database to identify features unique to each one.

At the moment, Face Alive Icons has been only incorporated into an application used for distance learning but we hope to use it also one day. More especially as Xin Li now works for Google. So what ? Google Talk ?


Source: TechnologyReview, tuesday.

Intel Research Berkeley is a research lab owned by Intel that cooperates on research projects with the University of California at Berkeley. Recently, a lab's team demonstrated a Wi-Fi system that can send a wireless signal over 60 miles !

It is regular Wi-Fi hardware but with modified software. It uses standard access point, lightly modified, but the antennas use new directional technology. The signal goes from a point and goes to another one, without going everywhere as the normal Wi-Fi does.

And what is it for? This is being developed for use in countries with poor communications infrastructures. One such antennae in a remote village, for example, could receive a signal and send it through various towers to fiber links, which would provide villagers with an Internet connection.

The Wi-Fi antennas would cost about 700 dollars, compared with WiMax towers that cost about 15,000 to 20,000 dollars. And since Wi-Fi spectrum is not regulated by local telecoms, it could be used without the government permission. Tests are now running in Pakistan and soon in Uganda.


Source: News.com, tuesday.
For those who do not know: WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) is described by the WiMAX forum as being "a standards-based technology enabling the delivery of last mile wireless broadband access as an alternative to cable and DSL."

All researchers are not good people. Sometimes, they can be awful mysoginists with an obvious lack of tact.

The today's proof: the Australian Hatice Gunes and Massimo Piccardi who are now looking for commercial partners to distribute a software designed to quickly analyze a photograph of a women's face and immediately produce a beauty rating between 1 and 10.

According to those people, potential applications exist in the entertainment industry, cosmetic industry, virtual media, and plastic surgery. Piccardi is especially excited about the idea of having doctors who his technology to ensure that modifications for plastic surgery patients improve their attractiveness. Better than worst... The beauty quotient of the software is based on 14 facial measurements, 13 related ratios, and images of supermodels, actresses, and more than 200 other women.

It remind us that, in Augustus, two esearchers of Tel Aviv in Israel developed the "digital beautification" algorithm.

Source: SMH.com, last week.

Employees of Microsoft do not have only wrong ideas. Hotmail, Live Search, copy-paste of Word, the greediness of Vista, all right ... but some Microsoft researchers are working on a system that could allow simple speakers to send a sound to a particular place of the room ... but not elsewhere!

An array of speakers that output the same sound whith very short delays so that the sound waves overlap: the sound is cancelled out in some parts of the space while growing louder in others.

Ok, this technology isn't new: it's called beamforming and we can read expériences from 10 years ago, but only in ultrasound and radar. Having the same result with music or speech is much more complicated since since the range of frequencies is much bigger.

Ivan Tashev, the project's leader, explains that additional peripherals could track a person's movements so his virtual headphones could follow them in real time. Better than bluetooth! The most complicated part of beamforming is calibrating the system for specific speakers and rooms, since all speakers have slight variations that can potentially cause large distortions. Or reflection on walls or windows. Anyway, the team expects to do it in 3 years and 212 boxes of aspirines.

Cebit is the world's largest computer expo, it happens now in Hanover and then, sonner or later, we're gonna talk about it.

This year, German researchers have (finally!) developed a peer-to-peer network that vehicles could use to pass along information concerning road conditions.

Cars would be fitted with more and more sensors: GPS, TPEG, proximity,... Starting from there, detected information concerning traffic jam or an object on the road would travel from a car to another behind them and be displayed on a dashboard screen, a mobile device or played over headphones. If a car knew its tires were slipping, it could alert the vehicles around it to the presence of a slippery substance on a digital map.

Source: BBC News, saturday.
For those who do not know:
- CeBIT (Centrum der Büro- und Informationstechnik; German for "Centre of Office and Information technology") is held each spring on the fairground in Hanover, Germany, and is a barometer of the state of the art in information technology. With an exhibition area of roughly 450,000 m² and up to 700,000 visitors, it had more than 6,200 exhibitors from around 70 countries all over the world. The 2007 expo dates are 15 March to 21 March.
- A peer-to-peer system is a distributed system whose component nodes participate in similar roles, and are therefore peers to each other. Peer-to-peer can be viewed as decentralized network architecture. In contrast, a client-server architecture implies a sharp distinction between the clients which request and consume services, and servers which provide services. aEven though the nodes have similar roles, there may still be some structure to the peer-to-peer system, and it usually possesses some degree of self-organization where each node finds its peers and helps maintain the system structure. This makes a peer-to-peer network node more complex than a client in client-server system. The main benefits of peer-to-peer system are scalability, fault-tolerance, and the lack of resource bottlenecks in servers. Recently, the concept has achieved recognition in the general public in the context of peer-to-peer file sharing which is one application of peer-to-peer networks.