Information Technology

Video cameras are used to keep an eye on many indoor and outdoor locations, but to pinpoint suspicious activity, human security guards or intelligence analysts have the unenviable task of watching dozens of video monitors or many hours of recorded video.

Supported by an NSF award, Jezekiel Ben-Arie and his students at the University of Illinois at Chicago have developed a technique, much faster and more reliable than previous methods, that allows a computer to recognize a human action contai

Howard Bowman and Colin Johnson of the Computing Laboratory at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UKC) have been awarded a grant of £150,000 from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to construct computational models of human attention. The research will be undertaken in collaboration with the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, one of the UK’s leading centres for research into human attention.

We live in environments in w

A project between academia and industry is aiming to spark a world electronics revolution by producing faster, cheaper and more reliable microchips.

The University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, has joined forces with Amtel, on North Tyneside in the North East of England, to create ‘strained silicon’ microchips, which involves adding a material called germanium to the traditional silicon used in semiconductor manufacturing.

Atmel, whose silicon chips find applications in such diverse

It’s an all-too-common experience – the perfect photograph ruined by the demonic glow of the “red-eye” effect. Now, a researcher at the University of Toronto has developed a method that can automatically remove those unsightly scarlet spots from digital images.

“The technique will offer consumers a convenient, automatic tool for eliminating red-eye in digital photographs,” says Professor Konstantinos Plataniotis of the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Finnish Miotec has increased smartcard security through biometrics, which uses physical characteristics, such as fingerprint, retinal patterns, or voice to identify an individual.

Biometric technology uses physical characteristics, such as fingerprint, retinal patterns, or voice to identify an individual. In traditional biometric technology, the biometric information was stored in databases or readers. Not only was this exposing the secure information to hacking, but was considered a violati

Forget the robot child in the movie “AI.” Vanderbilt researchers Nilanjan Sarkar and Craig Smith have a less romantic but more practical idea in mind.

“We are not trying to give a robot emotions. We are trying to make robots that are sensitive to our emotions,” says Smith, associate professor of psychology and human development.

Their vision, which is to create a kind of robot Friday, a personal assistant who can accurately sense the moods of its human bosses and respond appropriate