Ralph Lauren, the fashion house best known for its preppy collared shirts featuring a mallet-wielding rider on a polo pony, is adding a biometric shirt to its offerings. The Polo Tech shirt uses biometric sensors to collect data about the wearer’s motions and direction of movement. It debuted at the US Open tennis tournament, which just began. Some of the ball boys will wear the shirt, which was developed with the assistance of OMsignal, which developed the biometric technology for the shirt. The shirt, made from an antimicrobial smart fabric with sensors embedded in it, will collect data, including heart rate and respiration, based on the wearer’s movements. It transmits he information to a cloud-based system, which will analyze the data and report its findings. Although designers such as Diane Von Fürstenberg and Tory Burch are collaborating with technology firms – Google and FitBit, respectively -- to make wearable accessories fashionable, observers say this move by a mainstream brand like Ralph Lauren on a smart garment and its use at a major sporting event could signal the greater acceptance of wearable technology. (ZD Net)(Mashable)
Friday, September 19, 2014
Thursday, November 7, 2013
Study: Individuals Increasingly Push Back against Technology
University of Washington researchers have identified a trend in which a growing number of people want to resist constant connectivity with technology and disengage from the online world. They examined personal blogs and websites, popular media sources, and academic conferences and journals to determine the motivation for what they call pushback. The researchers originally speculated the trend would be driven by frustration with devices, as well as the cost of obtaining new technologies and discomfort with having to learn new technologies. However, they found it was the result of users’ feeling that technology was not meeting their needs and expressed emotional dissatisfaction, even anger. Others expressed political, religious, or moral concerns – such as wanting to adhere to “beliefs that encourage selfless behavior and face-to-face interaction with others” --, as well as the desire to better control their time and energy. The researchers found people reducing technology use are taking steps such as limiting online activities, reverting to voice-only phones, or, in a few cases, going offline completely. They will present their findings at the iConference in Berlin in March 2014. (SlashDot)(University of Washington)(S. Morrison and R. Gomez, “Pushback: the growth of expressions of resistance to constant online connectivity.”)
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Huawei, BT Test New Broadband-over Copper Technology
Telecommunications companies Huawei and BT are testing a combination of two technologies that promise to provide faster broadband speeds over existing copper-based telephone infrastructure. They are working with G.FAST, a fiber to the distribution point technology designed to replace fiber to the curb technology. It is faster than DSL, offering data rates up to 1 Gbit per second over copper wiring over distances up to 250 meters. The G.FAST standard is designed to eliminate the need to install fiber between the service distribution point and the user’s home. BT is holding its G.FAST trial for potential implementation in the UK on its own network at its R&D facility. The British government’s Broadband Delivery UK initiative has a goal of 99 percent broadband coverage in the country by 2018. (SlashDot)(Tech Week Europe)
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Pending US Immigration Legislation Would Increase Visas for Technology Workers
A comprehensive proposed US immigration bill would raise the ceiling for H-1B visas, used in part to let domestic companies hire technology professionals from other countries. The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013 would raise the ceiling from 65,000 to 110,000 and eventually perhaps 180,000. In addition, the bill would require the US Labor Department to create a website to which employers must post job openings at least 30 calendar days before hiring an H-1B applicant for the position. This is designed to make sure companies try to fill openings with US citizens or legal residents first. In the past, H-1B visas have been controversial. US technology firms say the limit should be raised so that they can hire the best available employees to fill openings for which they can’t find domestic workers. Organizations representing US engineers have contended that companies want to hire lower-paid workers from outside the country. The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013 would also exempt people with doctorates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics from employment-based permanent-resident visa limits, enabling more of them to live and work in the US. Supporters say they want to see the legislation passed by June of this year. (SlashDot)(Computerworld)(CBSNews)
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Search technology that can gauge opinion and predict the future
'Do a search for the word "climate" on Google or another search engine and what you will get back is basically a list of results featuring that word: there's no categorisation, no specific order, no context. Current search engines do not take into account the dimensions of diversity: factors such as when the information was published, if there is a bias toward one opinion or another inherent in the content and structure, who published it and when,' explains Fausto Giunchiglia, a professor of computer science at the University of Trento in Italy.
But can search technology be made to identify and embrace diversity? Can a search engine tell you, for example, how public opinion about climate change has changed over the last decade? Or how hot the weather will be a century from now, by aggregating current and past estimates from different sources?
It seems that it can, thanks to a pioneering combination of modern science and a decades-old classification method, brought together by European researchers in the LivingKnowledge (1) project. Supported by EUR 4.8 million in funding from the European Commission, the LivingKnowledge team, coordinated by Prof. Giunchiglia, adopted a multidisciplinary approach to developing new search technology, drawing on fields as diverse as computer science, social science, semiotics and library science.
Indeed, the so-called father of library science, Sirkali Ramamrita Ranganathan, an Indian librarian, served as a source of inspiration for the researchers. In the 1920s and 1930s, Ranganathan developed the first major analytico-synthetic, or faceted, classification system. Using this approach, objects -- books, in the case of Ranganathan; web and database content, in the case of the LivingKnowlege team -- are assigned multiple characteristics and attributes (facets), enabling the classification to be ordered in multiple ways, rather than in a single, predetermined, taxonomic order. Using the system, an article about the effects on agriculture of climate change written in Norway in 1990 might be classified as 'Geography; Climate; Climate change; Agriculture; Research; Norway; 1990.'
In order to understand the classification system better and implement it in search engine technology, the LivingKnowledge researchers turned to the Indian Statistical Institute, a project partner, which uses faceted classification on a daily basis.
'Using their knowledge we were able to turn Ranganathan's pseudo-algorithm into a computer algorithm and the computer scientists were able to use it to mine data from the web, extract its meaning and context, assign facets to it, and use these to structure the information based on the dimensions of diversity,' Prof. Giunchiglia says.
Researchers at the University of Pavia in Italy, another partner, drew on their expertise in extracting meaning from web content -- not just from text and multimedia content, but also from the way the information is structured and laid out -- in order to infer bias and opinions, adding another facet to the data.
'We are able to identify the bias of authors on a certain subject and whether their opinions are positive or negative,' the LivingKnowledge coordinator says. 'Facts are facts, but any information about an event, or on any subject, is often surrounded by opinions and bias.'
From libraries of the 1930s to space travel in 2034...
The technology was implemented in a testbed, now available as open source software, and used for trials based around two intriguing application scenarios.
Working with Austrian social research institute SORA, the team used the LivingKnowledge system to identify social trends and monitor public opinion in both quantitative and qualitative terms. Used for media content analysis, the system could help a company understand the impact of a new advertising campaign, showing how it has affected brand recognition over time and which social groups have been most receptive. Alternatively, a government might use the system to gauge public opinion about a new policy, or a politician could use it to respond in the most publicly acceptable way to a rival candidate's claims.
With Barcelona Media, a non-profit research foundation supported by Yahoo!, and with the Netherlands-based Internet Memory Foundation, the LivingKnowledge team looked not only at current and past trends, but extrapolated them and drew on forecasts extracted from existing data to try to predict the future. Their Future Predictor application is able to make searches based on questions such as 'What will oil prices be in 2050?' or 'How much will global temperatures rise over the next 100 years?' and find relevant information and forecasts from today's web. For example, a search for the year 2034 turns up 'space travel' as the most relevant topic indexed in today's news.
'More immediately, this application scenario provides functionality for detecting trends even before these trends become apparent in daily events -- based on integrated search and navigation capabilities for finding diverse, multi-dimensional information depending on content, bias and time,' Prof. Giunchiglia explains.
Several of the project partners have plans to implement the technology commercially, and the project coordinator intends to set up a non-profit foundation to build on the LivingKnowledge results at a time when demand for this sort of technology is only likely to increase.
As Prof. Giunchiglia points out, Google fundamentally changed the world by providing everyone with access to much of the world's information, but it did it for people: currently only humans can understand the meaning of all that data, so much so that information overload is a common problem. As we move into a 'big data' age in which information about everything and anything is available at the touch of a button, the meaning of that information needs to be understandable not just by humans but also by machines, so quantity must come combined with quality. The LivingKnowledge approach addresses that problem.
'When we started the project, no one was talking about big data. Now everyone is and there is increasing interest in this sort of technology,' Prof. Giunchiglia says. 'The future will be all about big data -- we can't say whether it will be good or bad, but it will certainly be different.'
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by CORDIS Features, formerly ICT Results.
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Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Identifying dolphins with technology
"Researchers photograph dolphins in their natural surroundings and compare new dorsal fin photographs against a catalogue of previously identified dolphins," explains Kelly Debure, professor of computer science at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. "These catalogs are often organized into categories based on either distinct fin shape or location of predominant damage. The manual photo-identification process, although effective, is extremely time consuming and visually stressful, particularly with large collections of known dolphins."
It was time to bring dolphin identification into the digital age.
Debure, along with Eckerd students, developed DARWIN, or Digital Analysis and Recognition of Whale Images on a Network, a computer program that simplifies photo-identification of bottlenose dolphins by applying computer vision and signal processing techniques to automate much of the tedious manual photo-id process.
"DARWIN is a software system which has been developed to support the creation of reliable and intuitive image database queries using fin outlines," she says. "It effectively performs registration of image data to compensate for the fact that the photographs are taken from different angles and distances and compares digital images of new dorsal fins with a database of previously identified fins."
The software uses an automated process to create a tracing of the fin outline, which is then used to formulate a sketch-based query of the database. The system utilizes a variety of image processing and computer vision algorithms to perform the matching process that identifies those previously cataloged fins which most closely resemble the unknown fin. The program ranks catalog fin images from "most like" to "least like" the new unknown fin image and presents images for side by side comparison.
DARWIN is used by researchers at several academic institutions and by Eckerd College's own Dolphin Project, a team of students who conduct population surveys of the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus). Initiated in 1993, the project has trained dozens of students to take and analyze scientific data on dolphin populations to better understand their population dynamics and ecology in Tampa Bay. Such information can be used to help conserve dolphin populations.
The DARWIN software is free and available for download. Over 20 years, Debure and Eckerd students have continued to refine the software and are adapting the software's algorithms to make it appropriate for identification of other species.
"Although it was originally developed for use with bottlenose dolphins, it has been used by research groups on related species such as fin whales, indo-pacific humpback dolphins, spinner dolphins, and basking sharks," she says.
With this technological help, researchers can spend more time doing their job.
"Answering the question, "Which dolphin is that?" is not that scientifically interesting," says Debure. "With DARWIN, researchers can spend less time identifying animals and more time doing the real science."
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Dick Jones Communications, via Newswise.
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Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Like an orchestra without a conductor: Technology achieves synchronicity by itself
Orchestras, just like mobile telephone networks, rely on central agents that are responsible for the coordination effort. Both might experience errors: If the conductor or the mobile phone base stations are out of action for any reason, musicians and mobile phones come to a standstill. Self-organising systems offer a solution to this problem. Rather than transmitting mobile phone signals using base stations, the application allows individual mobile phones to forward signals to other mobile phones in their vicinity.
However, this collaboration of devices can only work, if their signals are synchronised. Matching models and computer simulations have been existing for many years. But only now has it been mathematically proven beyond any doubt, that such a system always synchronizes. The essential parts of the algorithm will be published in the New Journal of Physics at the end of July. Additionally, the authors, Johannes Klinglmayr and Christian Bettstetter of the Alpen-Adria-Universität, as well as Christoph Kirst and Marc Timme from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, have filed a corresponding patent applications.
Using the example of church bells, Johannes Klinglmayr illustrates the method: "Imagine, that none of the sacristans has a watch, and there is no central location, that dictates the time. The set of rules that we have developed would nevertheless allow all the bells to chime simultaneously." Thanks to the newly developed method, an incremental adjustment of the time setting takes place at each location in reaction to the signals received. Consequently, after a number of chimes, all church bells sound in synchrony. The essential innovative aspect of this invention is that the method guarantees synchronicity, regardless of the time at the initial church watches. Synchrony is achieved even though some signals are not received or not heard. According to Marc Timme, the idea can be applied in a wide variety of technologies: „Groups of robots could work together to solve problems at distributed locations, making use of this ability to synchronize each other and thus coordinate."
The findings resulted from a collaboration between the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt (Institute of Networked and Embedded Systems, Lakeside Labs) and the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization Göttingen (Network Dynamics Group).
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt | Graz | Wien, via AlphaGalileo.
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Journal Reference:
Johannes Klinglmayr, Christoph Kirst, Christian Bettstetter, Marc Timme. Guaranteeing global synchronization in networks with stochastic interactions. New Journal of Physics, 2012; 14 (7): 073031 DOI: 10.1088/1367-2630/14/7/073031Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
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Wednesday, July 4, 2012
Sensing technology: Motherboard monitoring inspired by the immune system
Now Haruki Shida, Takeshi Okamoto and Yoshiteru Ishida at Toyohashi University of Technology have drawn inspiration from biological immune systems to develop a new model for detecting abnormal operation of network components more accurately.
Their model mimics biological immune systems where cells test each other to protect against disease. In the immunity-based diagnostic model, the sensors for the individual components are also linked for mutual testing. An algorithm determines the credibility of each sensor from comparisons of output from other sensors in the network.
The researchers tested the approach in a simulation of a mother board where they monitored the temperature, voltage and fan speed of the central processing unit and core. The immunity-based diagnostic model identified abnormal nodes more accurately than isolated sensors.
The researchers also developed a hybrid network combining isolated and immunity-based sensing. Here the immunity-based diagnostic model used a correlation-based network, which removes connections between sensors that have weakly correlated output. Compared with the fully connected network, the hybrid model further improved the accuracy of the tests.
The work will contribute to identifying abnormal component behaviour to avoid system failure.
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Saturday, June 9, 2012
Gaming technology for calculating floods
Three-dimensional simulations of natural phenomena such as tsunamis and floods require tremendous computing capacity -- and even then, clear-cut answers are slow to emerge. But now researchers at SINTEF ICT in Oslo have developed methods that cut that waiting time substantially. The key lies in using computer graphics cards.
Learning from computer games
Advances in computer game technology depicting graphics-heavy virtual worlds has led to the development of sophisticated graphics cards.
"Previously, only the computer's main processor was used to run calculations. This required many computers to carry out the type of calculations we work with," says Jens Olav Nygaard of SINTEF ICT. "Now we use the computers' graphics cards as well. These can process more calculations simultaneously -- so we extract far higher capacity from each computer."
Mr Nygaard headed a project that received funding under the Research Council of Norway's Research Programme on Core Competence and Growth in ICT (VERDIKT).
Faster than a Mississippi flood
During a research stay at the National Center for Computational Hydroscience and Engineering at the University of Mississippi, two doctoral research fellows in the project developed a code that speeds up the simulation of shallow-water waves several hundredfold.
"The simulation is the first of its kind that can be run faster than the flooding along the Mississippi River actually occurs," explains Mr Nygaard. "If a dam breaks and we enter this into the simulation program, we can calculate how the water will flow, including water levels, faster than it occurs in reality. Based on the simulation we can determine which areas may need to be evacuated."
"To speed things up we have developed a code to get the most from the computer's graphics card. The calculations require us to enter data that describes the terrain in advance."
Many application areas
The simulations can also be used for flood-prone areas where other conditions such as landslides may cause flooding. All that is required is the input of a different data set. It is also conceivable that terrain data can be collected from other sources such as Google Earth.
The method could also streamline the visualisation of petroleum reservoirs based on data collected from the seabed. This is another application area that requires processing of massive amounts of data.
"We still need powerful computers," says Mr Nygaard, "but with our technology the simulation process goes much faster than before."
Lower-cost, easier on the environment
The new computing methods are not only fast, they are also cheaper.
"When the graphics card is used to run many parallel calculations simultaneously, there is less heat build-up in the hardware. So less energy is required compared to calculations run serially on the main processor. This makes the method both cheaper and more environment-friendly," concludes Mr Nygaard.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by The Research Council of Norway, via AlphaGalileo. The original article was written by Norunn K. Torheim/Thomas Keilman; translation by Darren McKellep/Carol B. Eckmann.
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