New Artificial Material Paves Way To Improved Electronics

The new material, a superlattice, which has a multilayer structure composed of alternating atomically thin layers of two different oxides (PbTiO3 and SrTiO3), possesses properties radically different to either of the two materials by themselves. These new properties are a direct consequence of the artificially layered structure and are driven by interactions at the atomic scale at the interfaces between the layers.

“Besides the immediate applications that could be generated by this nanomaterial, this discovery opens a completely new field of investigation and the possibility of new functional materials based on a new concept: interface engineering on the atomic scale,” said Dr. Dawber.

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Wireless body sensing

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Nanotech initiative aims to reduce cost, power usage of embedded microchips

Houston’s Rice University and Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University announced on Sept. 4 an initiative dubbed, The Institute for Sustainable Nanoelectronics, morehere

Reboot 9

Reboot is a community event for the practical visionaries who are at the intersection of digital technology and change all around us…
2 days a year. 500 people. A journey into the interconnectedness of creation, participation, values, openness, decentralization, collaboration, complexity, technology, p2p, humanities, connectedness and many more areas.
Applied towards us as individuals, citizens, teachers, culture workers, entrepreneurs, creators and change makers.
See this years sessions, connect with the participants or join the conversations around this years sessions.
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Robotic age poses ethical dilemma

An ethical code to prevent humans abusing robots, and vice versa, is being drawn up by South Korea.
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Kodak Patents Edible RFID Tag

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A source document for Collective Intelligence

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Human Model Completed

Systems biologists have finished a comprehensive computer model of metabolism, providing an invaluable tool for drug discovery and disease research.
from here
the human metabolism see here and here

Engineer: GPS Shoes Make People Findable

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RFID “Tagged” Neighborhood Piloted in Tokyo

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NBICS and Social Cohesion

NBICS and Social Cohesion new column from me out

Wikipedia founder to create user-driven search engine (Ars Technica)

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‘Atom-chips’ research wins multi-million pound funding

Physicists at The University of Nottingham are to use refrigerators made from light that can cool atoms to the lowest temperature in the Universe to develop the next generation of ultra-small electronic devices.
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Smart Dust

new column by me is out

http://www.innovationwatch.com/choiceisyours/choiceisyours.2006.12.15.htm

Futurist: To fix education, think Web 2.0

Rather than treat pedagogy as the transfer of knowledge from teachers who are experts to students who are receptacles, educators should consider more hands-on and informal types of learning. These methods are closer to an apprenticeship, a farther-reaching, more multilayered approach than traditional formal education, he said.
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New software method for producing medical guidelines

Medical guidelines that lay down state-of-the-art rules for doctors are an important tool in modern medical practice. But though the number of guideline documents has proliferated in recent years, the quality, clarity and overall usefulness of the texts could be improved, resulting in even greater benefit to patients and medical practitioners.

A team of European researchers working on the IST-funded Protocure II project set out to do just that, developing a method to make guidelines not only more accurate and useful to doctors, but also far easier for national healthcare authorities to generate and update. Most strikingly, they did it by looking at guidelines not as simple texts, but as modular software programs that can be written in a programming language.
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KT offers affordable robot services

KT Corp. will today begin its so-called “Ubiquitous Robotic Companions” services on a trial basis. The operator has been selected as a main service provider by the state-funded National Computerization Agency, which intends to promote the use of URCs. URCs are network-based, intelligent robots priced below 1 million won.

They are operated by simply adding voice-recognition servers and networks onto the existing robots, with the aim of providing necessary services anytime, anywhere.

The trial service will continue till the end of this year in 1,000 households and public facilities such as airports and Seoul Station. About 1,020 robots will be in operation during the trial period. “Seven different kinds of robots will offer various services ranging from reading books to speaking foreign languages, singing songs and home-monitoring via KT’s broadband services Megapass and Nespot,” said an official at KT.

Home-monitoring enables watching the elderly or babies from outside the home.

Robots will also offer daily news, weather information and recipes, as well as clean homes. Users will only have to attach recognition codes to necessary locations in homes to direct the robots.

(siyoungh@heraldm.com)

By Hwang Si-young
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‘Tower of Babel’ translator made

A “Tower of Babel” device that gives the illusion of being bilingual is being developed by US scientists.

Users simply have to silently mouth a word in their own language for it to be translated and read out in another.

The researchers said the effect was like watching a television programme that had been dubbed.

The system, detailed in New Scientist, is not yet fully accurate, but experts said it showed the technology was “within reach”.

The idea is that you can mouth words in English and they will come out in Chinese or another language
Tanja Schultz

The translation systems that are currently in use work by using voice recognition software.

But this requires people to speak out loud and then wait for the translation to be read out, making conversations difficult.

But the new device, being created by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, is different.

Electrodes are attached to the neck and face to detect the movements that occur as the person silently mouths words and phrases.

Using this data, a computer can work out the sounds being formed and then build these sounds up into words.

The system is then able to translate the words into another language which is read out by a synthetic voice.

Within reach

The team currently has two prototypes: one that can translate Chinese into English and another that can translate English into Spanish or German.

If the prototypes used a small vocabulary of about 100-200 words they worked with about 80% accuracy, researcher Tanja Schultz said.

But, she added, a full vocabulary had a much lower level of accuracy.

Professor Schultz said: “The idea is that you can mouth words in English and they will come out in Chinese or another language.”

The ultimate goal, the researchers said, was to be in a position where you can just have a conversation.

Chuck Jorgensen, a researcher at Nasa’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, told New Scientist: “This is showing the technology is really within reach.”

Phil Woodland, professor of information engineering at the University of Cambridge, said: “This work sounds interesting. Most groups are working on translating audio data into different languages, but this is different to work I have come across before because they are not working from a real acoustic signal.”

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From the Labs: Information Technology

By Kate Greene
Ultrahigh-Resolution Signal Analysis
An obscure algorithm could lead to more precise radar and a better understanding of human hearing

Source: “Sparse Time-Frequency Representations”
Timothy J. Gardner et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103(16): 6094-6099
Next steps: The researchers plan to apply their understanding of re­assigned time-frequency representation in an investigation of human hearing. By testing their algorithms against artificial neural networks that represent auditory nerves, they will try to create better neurological models of the way the brain makes sense of sound.
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New Web tool may speed drug discovery

By Gareth Cook, Globe Staff | September 29, 2006

Local scientists have created what they hope will become the Google of drug discovery: a free, Web-based search engine that quickly finds potential new compounds to treat particular diseases.
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As the website went live yesterday, the team released three papers in top scientific journals, demonstrating the technique’s promise. In initial testing, the search engine identified a potential leukemia drug. A clinical trial for that drug, which is already approved for another use, is likely to begin in the next few months — a testament to the speed of the new approach.The new tool, dubbed the “connectivity map,” works by quickly matching drugs and diseases that have opposite effects on some of the genes inside a human cell — the set of instructions that, when turned on, tell the cell what to do. A match would indicate that giving the drug might reverse the effects of the disease, turning off genes the disease turns on, and vice versa.

The utility of the database needs to be verified with a larger study, but scientists said it promises to accelerate drug discovery at a time when developing a new drug is frustratingly slow and expensive.

“The industry is always going to be enthusiastic about any tool that helps in the discovery process, and this looks like a very exciting tool that has real potential,” said Janice Reichert , a senior research fellow at the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development .
Pop-up Speeding the search for cures

Scientists at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, which created the web site and search engine, said they have already begun work to expand the database to include more than 10 times as many compounds. And, they said, they were hopeful that other laboratories would eventually join in, creating a massive, cooperative venture similar to the Human Genome Project, allowing scientists from around the world to efficiently aggregate their genetic data and insights.

“It is a major intellectual and practical tool,” said Eric S. Lander, director of the Broad Institute. “I imagine a world, five years from now, where everyone who is working on a potential drug will, as the first thing they do, quickly look it up” to see what diseases it might work on.

The work, published by the journals Science and Cancer Cell, suggests that it is possible to dramatically simplify some aspects of biology, and thus speed the search for cures, according to Dr. Todd R. Golub , who led the research at the Broad Institute and is also a cancer researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children’s Hospital Boston. Different types of cells typically respond slightly differently to drugs, but the team found that analyzing just a few types of cells, such as skin cells, was enough to make connections to diseases that affect organs as diverse as the brain and the prostate.Continued...