The Future of Meetings

The BrainGate™ Co. is a privately-held firm focused on the advancement of the BrainGate™ Neural Interface System.  The Company owns the Intellectual property of the BrainGate™ system as well as new technology being developed by the BrainGate company.  In addition, the Company also owns  the intellectual property of Cyberkinetics which it purchased in April 2009. 

Why do we still use a keyboard and mouse to interact with digital information? This mode of human-computer interaction, invented more than 40 years ago, severely constrains our ability to access and interact naturally with digital content. Computer systems lack the contextual knowledge to offer relevant information when and where we need it. Further, traditional screen-based interfaces divert our attention in mobile and social situations. They are designed for a single user, and not well suited to accommodate collaborative activities.

Southampton is one of the leading centres in Europe for the study of archaeology, with world class research and teaching ranging from human origins to the modern world, and with field projects across the globe. We have an international reputation for the quality of our teaching and research.

'Augmented Reality' on Smartphones Brings Teaching Down to Earth

Chronicle of Higher Education (06/20/10) Li, Sophia

A panel at EmTech@MIT will discuss future directions in augmented reality (AR). Over the past year, the technology has reached the mainstream, with applications released for cell phones equipped with sophisticated positioning sensors. So far, most are geared towards tourism and navigation.

Integration of health monitoring tools into textiles brings the benefits of safety and comfort to the users. Instrumented clothes will provide remote monitoring of vitals signs, diagnostics to improve early illness detection and metabolic disorder and benefits to the reduction on medical social costs to the citizen. Ambulatory healthcare, isolated people, convalescent people and patients with chronic diseases are addressed.

Over the past decade, as many as 10,000 of the rarest and most important medieval manuscripts have been scanned into digital formats that could be studied on the Internet, but finding these documents online can be extremely difficult. "Searching for medieval manuscripts gets you millions of hits, most of which have nothing to do with manuscripts, and when they do, they usually feature only images of a single page rather than the entire book," says University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) professor Matthew Fisher.

The project is already finished, but has interesting possibilities such as the "cybercarpet"

Dryad lets you intuitively create beautiful trees for your virtual world or game. In Dryad, you create a tree by visually navigating to it through a design space: the space of all trees. This space has close to a hundred dimensions and Dryad lets you move around it as if it were a city map. To help you find your way, Dryads around the world communicate to share which trees were picked in the past.

3D Virtual Learning Platforms

Eureqa is a free program developed at Cornell University's Computational Synthesis Lab that takes raw data and derives mathematical laws in a matter of hours. Cornell researchers developed Eureqa as a successor to a series of robots that can repair themselves. The same algorithms used in earlier robots have been adapted for the analysis of any kind of data that can be presented in a spreadsheet. The algorithms may help scientists find complex equations and laws.

Enormous amounts of data are being generated every day in health care, computational biology, homeland security, commerce, and many other areas. Analyzing these massive and complex data sets is essential to achieve new discoveries, but extremely difficult.

Evaluating Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems is a notoriously hard problem: Unlike natural language interpretation, where annotated corpora may provide a gold standard against which a system can be measured, there are generally multiple equally good outputs that an NLG system might produce. On the other hand, access to human experimental subjects who could judge the quality of the system's output is usually too expensive for large-scale use. Nevertheless, there has recently been an increased interest in shared tasks and new methodologies for evaluating and comparing NLG systems.

GestureTek, creates interactive displays for TV weathermen, museums, and hotels using three-dimensional cameras that can distinguish the hand movements of users. From a soft punch up into the air to turn on the TV, to a twist of the hand to change channels, or raising the volume with an upward pat, these simple gestures can be detected by the cameras and interpreted by specially-designed computer chips.

EU Scientists Make Virtual Reality Touchable

CORDIS News (Belgium) (07/20/10)

The National Visualization and Analytics Center is a national and international resource providing strategic leadership and coordination for visual analytics technology and tools. NVAC supports the Department of Homeland Security's mission to secure our homeland and protect the American people.

Posey is a computationally enhanced poseable hub and strut construction kit that can be used as an interface to applications running on a host computer. Its optocoupled ball and socket joints transmit local topology information and determine the roll, pitch and yaw of connections. Zigbee transceivers in each hub communicate this data wirelessly back to the host computer.

You Are the Controller.

Introducing Project Natal, a revolutionary new way to play: no controller required.  See a ball? Kick it, hit it, trap it or catch it.  If you know how to move your hands, shake your hips or speak you and your friends can jump into the fun -- the only experience needed is life experience.

The RFID Ecosystem is a large-scale project with participants from various research groups at the University of Washington's Department of Computer Science and Engineering. The project investigates user-centered RFID systems in connection with technology, business, and society. Past research on user applications of RFID has been limited to short-term technology and user studies in restricted scenarios. In contrast, the RFID Ecosystem provides a living laboratory for long-term, in-depth research in applications, databases, privacy, security, and systems.

Computer-controlled (USB), eight-cartridge scent* machine uses compressed air** to project different scents on cue for a predetermined time followed by a burst of unscented air to clear for the next scent. System includes software to control the delivery and duration of scents from the SDS100 unit. Scents can be triggered from a virtual reality environment.

Skape provides B2B professionals with presentational 3D city and mapping data as well as high accuracy building data.

In order to help us give you the best possible service, we commissioned over 80 interviews with organisations using geo-information products (2D or 3D). These included:

European researchers are working on what they call a “tangible acoustic interface", which will allow users to convert virtually any tangible objects such as table tops, walls, and windows, into interactive surfaces. The advantage of these new techniques is that they are not limited to objects of a specific location or size like keyboards, mice, and touch screens, and can enable users to interact more intuitively with computers wherever they are.

This is the site for the Color Organ created by Jack Ox and David Britton with 3D modeling by Richard Rodriguez and Jack Ox.

You can watch the development of this visualization instrument by visiting our online "notebook" every so often.

World Wind allows any user to zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth, leveraging high resolution LandSat imagery and SRTM elevation data to experience Earth in visually rich 3D, just as if they were really there.

Microsoft researchers are using data mined from the Internet to develop Engkoo, an online Chinese-to-English dictionary and language-practice service. The technology could be used in similar tools to learn any language. Engkoo has a core of translation data drawn from Microsoft-licensed dictionaries. That content is mixed with data from Web sites with parallel Chinese and English versions. When an Engkoo user types a word or sentence into the Web site's input bar, in either Chinese or English, the site draws on statistics from its data to translate it.

Evaluating Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems is a notoriously hard problem: Unlike natural language interpretation, where annotated corpora may provide a gold standard against which a system can be measured, there are generally multiple equally good outputs that an NLG system might produce. On the other hand, access to human experimental subjects who could judge the quality of the system's output is usually too expensive for large-scale use. Nevertheless, there has recently been an increased interest in shared tasks and new methodologies for evaluating and comparing NLG systems.

Language Analysis Tool to Ascertain Age and Gender

The Engineer (United Kingdom) (06/22/10)

The Linguistic Data Consortium supports language-related education, research and technology development by creating and sharing linguistic resources: data, tools and standards.

Athree-year project focused on the problem of real-time understanding of spontaneous speech in the context of advanced telecom services.
The main objective of LUNA is the creation of a robust natural spoken language understanding toolkit for multilingual dialogue services, able to carry out human-computer communication with a good degree of user satisfaction.

SIL International Partners in Language Development SIL serves language communities worldwide, building their capacity for sustainable language development, by means of research, translation, training and materials development.

European researchers working on the Statistical Multilingual Analysis for Retrieval and Translation (SMART) project have developed technology that will enable machine translation using statistical analysis. SMART researchers were inspired by the Pascal Network of Excellence, which sought to develop cooperative ties among Europe's leaders in pattern analysis, statistical modeling, and computational learning.

RDF is a directed, labeled graph data format for representing information in the Web. This specification defines the syntax and semantics of the SPARQL query language for RDF. SPARQL can be used to express queries across diverse data sources, whether the data is stored natively as RDF or viewed as RDF via middleware. SPARQL contains capabilities for querying required and optional graph patterns along with their conjunctions and disjunctions. SPARQL also supports extensible value testing and constraining queries by source RDF graph.

University of Washington researchers have developed an automated information extraction software engine that mines meaning out of more than 500 million Web pages, contributed by Google, by analyzing fundamental relationships between words. The project expands the scale of the TextRunner application in terms of the number of pages and the breadth of topics it can examine.

The aim of the project is study and develop automated reasoning techniques for both offline and online tasks associated with ontologies, either seen in isolation or as a community of interoperating systems, and devise methodologies for the deployment of such techniques, on the one hand in advanced tools supporting ontology design and management, and on the other hand in applications supporting software agents in operating with ontologies.

We present a visualization of all the nouns in the English language arranged by semantic meaning. Each of the tiles in the mosaic is an arithmetic average of images relating to one of 53,464 nouns. The images for each word were obtained using Google's Image Search and other engines. A total of 7,527,697 images were used, each tile being the average of 140 images. The average reveals the dominant visual characteristics of each word. For some, the average turns out to be a recognizable image; for others the average is a colored blob.

CLRN makes it easy for you to find the standards-aligned software, video and Internet learning resources you need. CLRN experts have identified, reviewed and organized hundreds of Electronic Learning Resources (ELRs) in a searchable database that allows you to compare key features of selected resources. The Web Information Links (WILs) let you search or browse hundreds of free primary, secondary and reference resources.

Over the past decade, as many as 10,000 of the rarest and most important medieval manuscripts have been scanned into digital formats that could be studied on the Internet, but finding these documents online can be extremely difficult. "Searching for medieval manuscripts gets you millions of hits, most of which have nothing to do with manuscripts, and when they do, they usually feature only images of a single page rather than the entire book," says University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) professor Matthew Fisher.

eTBLAST is a unique search engine for searching biomedical literature. Our service is very different from PubMed. While PubMed searches for "keywords", our search engine lets you input an entire paragraph and returns MEDLINE abstracts that are similar to it. This is something like PubMed's "Related Articles" feature, only better because it runs on your unique set of interests.

Eureqa is a free program developed at Cornell University's Computational Synthesis Lab that takes raw data and derives mathematical laws in a matter of hours. Cornell researchers developed Eureqa as a successor to a series of robots that can repair themselves. The same algorithms used in earlier robots have been adapted for the analysis of any kind of data that can be presented in a spreadsheet. The algorithms may help scientists find complex equations and laws.

An online news source featuring the latest discoveries from North America's leading research universities.

No Longer Active

The iCampus Technology-Enabled Active Learning Project at MIT: An Interview With Phillip Long

Innovate (05/09) Vol. 5, No. 4, Morrison, James L.; Long, Phillip

Want to know how to write programs for the iPhone and iPod touch? Beginning this week, a Stanford computer science class on that buzzworthy topic will be available online to the general public for free.

The 10-week course, iPhone Application Programming, is a hot ticket. It begins today and videos of the classes will be posted at Stanford on iTunes U two days after each class meeting (http://itunes.stanford.edu). Copies of the slides shown in class will be available there as well.

It is conceivable that over the next ten years we will approach a point when all undergraduate students at all colleges and universities will have access to some form of Internet-enabled device. These devices will probably be far more powerful and contain far more functionality than what is available today, but undoubtedly their affordances will continue to include the capability to communicate, query and reflect.

A Science Fair gone wild

University of Michigan professor Elliot Soloway and University of North Texas professor Cathleen Norris have developed the Mobile Learning Environment, a suite of educational software that turns smart phones into personal computers for use in classrooms. The suite features programs that allow students to map concepts, animate drawings, surf related information on the Internet. The software also enables students to integrate their lessons and assignments. "The future is mobile devices that are connected," Soloway says.

The MOMO (Mobile Moodle) project is an Add-On to the popular Moodle Learning Management System. It brings the ability to implement mobile learning scenarios with Moodle as a backend.

Moodle is an Open Source Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It has become very popular among educators around the world as a tool for creating online dynamic web sites for their students. To work, it needs to be installed on a web server somewhere, either on one of your own computers or one at a web hosting company.

To create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning. When children have access to this type of tool they get engaged in their own education. They learn, share, create, and collaborate. They become connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter future.

Friends are fun, but they're only on some websites. OpenSocial helps these sites share their social data with the web. Applications that use the OpenSocial APIs can be embedded within a social network itself, or access a site's social data from anywhere on the web.

A computer programming language geared toward children ages eight to 16. Scratch users write code by connecting graphical blocks together.

Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

The project is already finished, but has interesting possibilities such as the "cybercarpet"

GestureTek, creates interactive displays for TV weathermen, museums, and hotels using three-dimensional cameras that can distinguish the hand movements of users. From a soft punch up into the air to turn on the TV, to a twist of the hand to change channels, or raising the volume with an upward pat, these simple gestures can be detected by the cameras and interpreted by specially-designed computer chips.

New Interface Technology Realizes 'Touchable' 3-D Images

You Are the Controller.

Introducing Project Natal, a revolutionary new way to play: no controller required.  See a ball? Kick it, hit it, trap it or catch it.  If you know how to move your hands, shake your hips or speak you and your friends can jump into the fun -- the only experience needed is life experience.

A scrapbook of illustrated examples of things that are hard to use because they do not follow human factors principles.

Integration of health monitoring tools into textiles brings the benefits of safety and comfort to the users. Instrumented clothes will provide remote monitoring of vitals signs, diagnostics to improve early illness detection and metabolic disorder and benefits to the reduction on medical social costs to the citizen. Ambulatory healthcare, isolated people, convalescent people and patients with chronic diseases are addressed.

Enormous amounts of data are being generated every day in health care, computational biology, homeland security, commerce, and many other areas. Analyzing these massive and complex data sets is essential to achieve new discoveries, but extremely difficult.

Evaluating Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems is a notoriously hard problem: Unlike natural language interpretation, where annotated corpora may provide a gold standard against which a system can be measured, there are generally multiple equally good outputs that an NLG system might produce. On the other hand, access to human experimental subjects who could judge the quality of the system's output is usually too expensive for large-scale use. Nevertheless, there has recently been an increased interest in shared tasks and new methodologies for evaluating and comparing NLG systems.

A recent article was on ACM TechNews about Prof. Patrick Baudisch of the Hasso Plattner Institute developing gesture based input devices.

The National Visualization and Analytics Center is a national and international resource providing strategic leadership and coordination for visual analytics technology and tools. NVAC supports the Department of Homeland Security's mission to secure our homeland and protect the American people.

European researchers are working on what they call a “tangible acoustic interface", which will allow users to convert virtually any tangible objects such as table tops, walls, and windows, into interactive surfaces. The advantage of these new techniques is that they are not limited to objects of a specific location or size like keyboards, mice, and touch screens, and can enable users to interact more intuitively with computers wherever they are.

The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.

  Instant summaries of user reviews from around the web

Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

Free online file conversion

Computers Intersect With Sociology to Sift Through 'All Our Ideas'

Princeton University (07/19/10) Emery, Chris

eTBLAST is a unique search engine for searching biomedical literature. Our service is very different from PubMed. While PubMed searches for "keywords", our search engine lets you input an entire paragraph and returns MEDLINE abstracts that are similar to it. This is something like PubMed's "Related Articles" feature, only better because it runs on your unique set of interests.

Eureqa is a free program developed at Cornell University's Computational Synthesis Lab that takes raw data and derives mathematical laws in a matter of hours. Cornell researchers developed Eureqa as a successor to a series of robots that can repair themselves. The same algorithms used in earlier robots have been adapted for the analysis of any kind of data that can be presented in a spreadsheet. The algorithms may help scientists find complex equations and laws.

Enormous amounts of data are being generated every day in health care, computational biology, homeland security, commerce, and many other areas. Analyzing these massive and complex data sets is essential to achieve new discoveries, but extremely difficult.

An online news source featuring the latest discoveries from North America's leading research universities.

Carnegie Mellon University researchers have developed the Gigapan, a robotic tripod that enables digital cameras to take gigapixel-size pictures. The Gigapan uses motors to capture a scene with a grid of hundreds or thousands of images with the camera set to full zoom. Photo-stitching software is used to combine the images into a single super-detailed image containing billions of pixels. The highly detailed image is called a gigapan.

The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.

A European research project aims to replace scientific papers and peer reviews with a process inspired by social networking. The LiquidPublication project seeks to revolutionize how scientists share their work and evaluate contributions from others. The current scientific publication paradigm leads to wasted time, a heavy load for peer reviewers, and too many papers that recycle already published research or dribble out results a bit at a time, says project leader Fabio Casati. The researchers are developing a new way to share scientific knowledge, which they call liquid publication.

A Science Fair gone wild

The MIT Media Lab applies an unorthodox research approach to envision the impact of emerging technologies on everyday life—technologies that promise to fundamentally transform our most basic notions of human capabilities. Unconstrained by traditional disciplines, Lab designers, engineers, artists, and scientists work atelier-style, conducting more than 350 projects that range from neuroengineering, to how children learn, to developing the city car of the future.

Monash University software engineer Steve Androulakis and biochemist Ashley Buckle have developed MyTARDIS/TARDIS, a tool designed to securely collect, store, and share research information.

The Voice of Semantic Web Business

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) invests in high-risk/high-payoff research programs that have the potential to provide our nation with an overwhelming intelligence advantage over future adversaries.

Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

Free Online Surveys for Basic Needs

Formal Concept Analysis is a theory of data analysis which identifies conceptual structures among data sets. It was introduced by Rudolf Wille in 1982 and has since then grown rapidly. Three well-established annual international conferences (ICFCA, ICCS and CLA) are dedicated to FCA and related methods. The FCA method of formal data analysis has successfully been applied to many fields, such as medicine and psychology, musicology, linguistic databases, library and information science, software re-engineering, civil engineering, ecology, and others.

The Semantic Web Made Easy

Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (Spain) (07/21/10) Martinez, Eduardo

The OWL Web Ontology Language is designed for use by applications that need to process the content of information instead of just presenting information to humans. OWL facilitates greater machine interpretability of Web content than that supported by XML, RDF, and RDF Schema (RDF-S) by providing additional vocabulary along with a formal semantics. OWL has three increasingly-expressive sublanguages: OWL Lite, OWL DL, and OWL Full.

The purpose of the Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) is to provide a means for individuals or organizations to describe a group of resources through the publication of machine-readable metadata, as motivated by the POWDER Use Cases [USECASES]. This document details the creation and lifecycle of Description Resources (DRs), which encapsulate such metadata. These are typically represented in a highly constrained XML dialect that is relatively human-readable.

Email addresses, like telephone numbers, are often hard to remember, and they change from time to time, making it difficult to send messages to the intended recipients. In some cases, we may not even know the identity of the recipients, as their roles and interests change.

Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) is a free extension of MediaWiki – the wiki-system powering Wikipedia – that helps to search, organise, tag, browse, evaluate, and share the wiki's content.

Semantic technologies appear to hold the promise of significantly enhancing formal and informal learning but issues such as building ontology consensus, the logistics of annotating large volumes of learning content and the underpinning pedagogy have been frequently questioned. However, recent developments in Web 2.0 tools and services for teaching and learning show that these concerns may be successfully addressed and benefit HE/FE, informal learning and exploratory learning.

The Voice of Semantic Web Business

In addition to the classic “Web of documents” W3C is helping to build a technology stack to support a “Web of data,” the sort of data you find in databases. The ultimate goal of the Web of data is to enable computers to do more useful work and to develop systems that can support trusted interactions over the network. The term “Semantic Web” refers to W3C’s vision of the Web of linked data.

RDF is a directed, labeled graph data format for representing information in the Web. This specification defines the syntax and semantics of the SPARQL query language for RDF. SPARQL can be used to express queries across diverse data sources, whether the data is stored natively as RDF or viewed as RDF via middleware. SPARQL contains capabilities for querying required and optional graph patterns along with their conjunctions and disjunctions. SPARQL also supports extensible value testing and constraining queries by source RDF graph.

We present a visualization of all the nouns in the English language arranged by semantic meaning. Each of the tiles in the mosaic is an arithmetic average of images relating to one of 53,464 nouns. The images for each word were obtained using Google's Image Search and other engines. A total of 7,527,697 images were used, each tile being the average of 140 images. The average reveals the dominant visual characteristics of each word. For some, the average turns out to be a recognizable image; for others the average is a colored blob.

A MediaWiki extension that computes the origin, author, and extent of revision of wiki text

WikiTrust is an open-source MediaWiki extension that computes the origin and author of every word of a wiki, as well as a measure of text trust that indicates the extent with which text has been revised.  To use WikiTrust, you click on a special wiktrust tab added by the extension.  In the resulting view:

Integration of health monitoring tools into textiles brings the benefits of safety and comfort to the users. Instrumented clothes will provide remote monitoring of vitals signs, diagnostics to improve early illness detection and metabolic disorder and benefits to the reduction on medical social costs to the citizen. Ambulatory healthcare, isolated people, convalescent people and patients with chronic diseases are addressed.

The project is already finished, but has interesting possibilities such as the "cybercarpet"

GestureTek, creates interactive displays for TV weathermen, museums, and hotels using three-dimensional cameras that can distinguish the hand movements of users. From a soft punch up into the air to turn on the TV, to a twist of the hand to change channels, or raising the volume with an upward pat, these simple gestures can be detected by the cameras and interpreted by specially-designed computer chips.

A recent article was on ACM TechNews about Prof. Patrick Baudisch of the Hasso Plattner Institute developing gesture based input devices.

The Falcon is an affordable force feedback device.

The OWL Web Ontology Language is designed for use by applications that need to process the content of information instead of just presenting information to humans. OWL facilitates greater machine interpretability of Web content than that supported by XML, RDF, and RDF Schema (RDF-S) by providing additional vocabulary along with a formal semantics. OWL has three increasingly-expressive sublanguages: OWL Lite, OWL DL, and OWL Full.

You Are the Controller.

Introducing Project Natal, a revolutionary new way to play: no controller required.  See a ball? Kick it, hit it, trap it or catch it.  If you know how to move your hands, shake your hips or speak you and your friends can jump into the fun -- the only experience needed is life experience.

Welcome to Robot Living. A love of mechanical things and David Macaulay’s fascinating building books, such as the book Castle, read at a young age helped prompt us to create this website. Also the love of science fiction, has prompted the creation of this website.

Computer-controlled (USB), eight-cartridge scent* machine uses compressed air** to project different scents on cue for a predetermined time followed by a burst of unscented air to clear for the next scent. System includes software to control the delivery and duration of scents from the SDS100 unit. Scents can be triggered from a virtual reality environment.

Email addresses, like telephone numbers, are often hard to remember, and they change from time to time, making it difficult to send messages to the intended recipients. In some cases, we may not even know the identity of the recipients, as their roles and interests change.

Skape provides B2B professionals with presentational 3D city and mapping data as well as high accuracy building data.

In order to help us give you the best possible service, we commissioned over 80 interviews with organisations using geo-information products (2D or 3D). These included:

A look at the designs of future technology including the "Naptkin PC"

and the Nextep Wearable Computer envisioned by Sony for 2020. Only time will tell.

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

Researchers at Trinity College and Wesleyan University have developed Collabbit, an emergency management program that enables emergency aid workers to communicate more effectively. Collabbit allows workers to post a call for backup or list a supply truck's estimated arrival time and share that information with other workers in real time, using any device with a Web browser. Collabbit is based on Sahana, another free, open source, all-in-one system for managing disaster-relief efforts. Collabbit's users emphasize how intuitive the software is, which was a main priority of the developers.

As the web is becoming ubiquitous, interactive, and multimodal, technology needs to deal increasingly with human factors, including emotions. The present draft specification of Emotion Markup Language 1.0 aims to strike a balance between practical applicability and scientific well-foundedness. The language is conceived as a "plug-in" language suitable for use in three different areas: (1) manual annotation of data; (2) automatic recognition of emotion-related states from user behavior; and (3) generation of emotion-related system behavior.

Eureqa is a free program developed at Cornell University's Computational Synthesis Lab that takes raw data and derives mathematical laws in a matter of hours. Cornell researchers developed Eureqa as a successor to a series of robots that can repair themselves. The same algorithms used in earlier robots have been adapted for the analysis of any kind of data that can be presented in a spreadsheet. The algorithms may help scientists find complex equations and laws.

Enormous amounts of data are being generated every day in health care, computational biology, homeland security, commerce, and many other areas. Analyzing these massive and complex data sets is essential to achieve new discoveries, but extremely difficult.

Carnegie Mellon University researchers have developed the Gigapan, a robotic tripod that enables digital cameras to take gigapixel-size pictures. The Gigapan uses motors to capture a scene with a grid of hundreds or thousands of images with the camera set to full zoom. Photo-stitching software is used to combine the images into a single super-detailed image containing billions of pixels. The highly detailed image is called a gigapan.

A recent article was on ACM TechNews about Prof. Patrick Baudisch of the Hasso Plattner Institute developing gesture based input devices.

Want to know how to write programs for the iPhone and iPod touch? Beginning this week, a Stanford computer science class on that buzzworthy topic will be available online to the general public for free.

The 10-week course, iPhone Application Programming, is a hot ticket. It begins today and videos of the classes will be posted at Stanford on iTunes U two days after each class meeting (http://itunes.stanford.edu). Copies of the slides shown in class will be available there as well.

Monash University software engineer Steve Androulakis and biochemist Ashley Buckle have developed MyTARDIS/TARDIS, a tool designed to securely collect, store, and share research information.

The National Visualization and Analytics Center is a national and international resource providing strategic leadership and coordination for visual analytics technology and tools. NVAC supports the Department of Homeland Security's mission to secure our homeland and protect the American people.

The Onion Routing program is made up of projects researching, designing, building, and analyzing anonymous communications systems. The focus is on practical systems for low-latency Internet-based connections that resist traffic analysis, eavesdropping, and other attacks both by outsiders (e.g. Internet routers) and insiders (Onion Routing servers themselves).

The OWL Web Ontology Language is designed for use by applications that need to process the content of information instead of just presenting information to humans. OWL facilitates greater machine interpretability of Web content than that supported by XML, RDF, and RDF Schema (RDF-S) by providing additional vocabulary along with a formal semantics. OWL has three increasingly-expressive sublanguages: OWL Lite, OWL DL, and OWL Full.

  Instant summaries of user reviews from around the web

The purpose of the Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) is to provide a means for individuals or organizations to describe a group of resources through the publication of machine-readable metadata, as motivated by the POWDER Use Cases [USECASES]. This document details the creation and lifecycle of Description Resources (DRs), which encapsulate such metadata. These are typically represented in a highly constrained XML dialect that is relatively human-readable.

Computer-controlled (USB), eight-cartridge scent* machine uses compressed air** to project different scents on cue for a predetermined time followed by a burst of unscented air to clear for the next scent. System includes software to control the delivery and duration of scents from the SDS100 unit. Scents can be triggered from a virtual reality environment.

Microsoft SearchTogether is a free Internet Explorer plug-in that allows groups of people to collaborate on Web searches.

Skape provides B2B professionals with presentational 3D city and mapping data as well as high accuracy building data.

In order to help us give you the best possible service, we commissioned over 80 interviews with organisations using geo-information products (2D or 3D). These included:

RDF is a directed, labeled graph data format for representing information in the Web. This specification defines the syntax and semantics of the SPARQL query language for RDF. SPARQL can be used to express queries across diverse data sources, whether the data is stored natively as RDF or viewed as RDF via middleware. SPARQL contains capabilities for querying required and optional graph patterns along with their conjunctions and disjunctions. SPARQL also supports extensible value testing and constraining queries by source RDF graph.

A resource of many project initiatives being researched at University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Useful for ideas and tools.

A European research team has developed a virtual laboratory designed to help doctors match drugs to patients and make treatments more effective. The ViroLab Virtual Laboratory uses machine learning, data mining, grid computing, modeling, and simulation technologies to convert the content of millions of scientific journal articles, databases, and patients' medical histories into knowledge that can be used for treatment.

A MediaWiki extension that computes the origin, author, and extent of revision of wiki text

WikiTrust is an open-source MediaWiki extension that computes the origin and author of every word of a wiki, as well as a measure of text trust that indicates the extent with which text has been revised.  To use WikiTrust, you click on a special wiktrust tab added by the extension.  In the resulting view:

Free online file conversion

The ZigBee Alliance is an association of companies working together to enable reliable, cost-effective, low-power, wirelessly networked, monitoring and control products based on an open global standard.

Free Online Surveys for Basic Needs

Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine - Instant Impersonal Assessment of Photo Aesthetics

Space Photography from the Planet Earth

Computer scientists at the universities of Hertfordshire and Southern Denmark are on track to finish building technology that would bring virtual reality to Europe's classrooms. Society has embraced 3D technologies for entertainment purposes, and it is now time to use 3D virtual worlds to enhance the learning experience, says David Lee of the Realtime3D team at Hertfordshire. "Education technology will no doubt follow suit in using these innovative technologies that would have a real benefit to everyday lives," Lee says.

Prototype intelligent garments that can respond to the physical and emotional state of the wearer have been developed by research teams led by Barbara Layne of Concordia University, and Janis Jefferies at Goldsmiths, University of London. The goal of the Wearable Absence project is to develop interactive textiles that can provide wearers with personalized memories. Layne and Jefferies have combined engineered adaptors and soft cabling systems with clothing designs. The wearable system uses wireless technologies and bio-sensing devices to access a database of image and sound.

Weird Universe explores every aspect of a human and natural cosmos that is not only "stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine."