Information Technology

Researchers from the Virtual Reality Lab at the University at Buffalo have developed a new tool for transmitting physical touch to the virtual world.

Their virtual clay sculpting system enables users to replicate in real time on a personal computer the physical act of sculpting a block of clay or other malleable material. The resulting 3-D electronic shape shown on the computer screen then can be fine-tuned for product design using standard computer-aided design/modeling software.

ESA is one step nearer to establishing a Telemedicine via Satellite Programme thanks to a constructive meeting with telemedicine experts that took place at ESRIN early last week.

Last Monday the European Space Research Institute (ESRIN) hosted a one-day Road Map Symposium to report on the work that had been done since the last meeting a year ago and to decide on the way forward. At the meeting were representatives of WHO, industry, and doctors and administrators directly involved in the heal

The focal length of a lens means that a camera has to have a certain thickness – or so we might think. Insect eyes show that this need not be the case: A camera chip based on the compound-eye principle can be used for person recognition and is as thin as paper.

If people were insects, books on optics would certainly look different. The camera illustrated as the technical equivalent next to a cross-section of the eye with just one lens, one iris and one retina would not be of the conventiona

The CERN openlab for DataGrid applications, a partnership between CERN , the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and five leading IT companies – Enterasys Networks, HP, IBM, Intel and Oracle – has announced a series of server and storage technical results regarding the first global science Grid – the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid project, LCG. The announcement was made at the recent annual sponsors meeting of the CERN openlab.

The openlab partners have demonstrated that a

Police aim to ‘design out’ crime by equipping valuable items with tracking devices that sound an alert or record their movement. They are being helped by electronic engineers at the University of Leeds who are devising a way of locating objects using widely-available technology.

Using Bluetooth – a short-range communications technology incorporated into many mobile phones and computers – researchers are creating networks which locate devices in relation to each other and track them using mon

The answer is yes, and not only that: they can also evaluate what will be the most successful strategy for conflict resolution, including re-formulating their action, or evading confrontation. Argument is used by computer agents only as the last resort.
The effectiveness of argumentation-based negotiation (ABN) for computer agents operating in multi-agent systems is assessed in a new paper co-authored by Professor Nick Jennings of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University o