Information Technology

Improving how decision-makers respond in the minutes and hours that follow the first reports of a natural disaster like the recent tsunami or a manmade incident, such as a chemical accident or a terrorist attack, is the focus of a research project at the University at Buffalo’s Center for Multisource Information Fusion.

“Responders immediately begin knitting together a picture that makes sense of what is happening based on the flow of reports they receive from the field,” said

Software behind the technology already finding its way into photo editing

Researchers are developing new technologies that may give robots the visual-sensing edge they need to monitor dimly lit airports, pilot vehicles in extreme weather and direct unmanned combat vehicles.

The researchers intend to create an imaging chip that defeats the harmful effects of arbitrary illumination, allowing robotic vision to leave the controlled lighting of a laboratory and enter the erra

Mount Desert Island Bio Lab unveils database

The Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory has publicly released a prototype of the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD: http://ctd.mdibl.org). CTD aims to advance understanding about the impact of environmental chemicals on human health. It is the first database to provide centralized, integrated, and curated molecular and toxicology data from diverse organisms for scientists worldwide.
“It is becoming increasingly well a

Correcting for a time lag built into current Global Positioning System satellites can significantly enhance the accuracy of highly detailed GPS observations that are increasingly used to study Earth systems. Choi et al. report that existing satellite techniques often slightly misjudge the location of ground changes, such as seismic activity, ice sheet flow, and volcanic deformation, because researchers used the wrong time delay in the GPS satellites. The authors show that the orbit period

Penn State engineers have developed a new model for high-speed broadband transmissions over U.S. overhead electric power lines and estimate that, at full data rate handling capacity, the lines can provide bit rates that far exceed DSL or cable over similar spans. Dr. Mohsen Kavehrad, the W. L. Weiss professor of electrical engineering and director of the Center for Information and Communications Technology Research, led the investigation. He says, “Although broadband power line (BPL) service tri

A quiet revolution is coming our way. Recent successful trials of European semantic-Web applications suggest that machine-readable data will soon usher in an improved Web that will facilitate information reuse, and provide for painless building and maintenance of community portals.

“Computers struggle to attach meaning to information written in common Web languages such as Hypertext Markup Language [HTML],” says Libby Miller, coordinator of the IST SWAD-Europe project. “One way to h