Friday, October 5, 2012

Air Gestures for all Laptops ...sweet

Next Up in Kinect-Style Motion Sensing: Ultrasound?

Microsoft researchers have been developing a system called SoundWave that emits pulses in ultrasound ranges and detects Doppler-based changes to track human movements. Its creators hope their accidental discovery could improve gesture-based controls.

By Jon M. Chang

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Microsoft Research

May 25, 2012 10:00 AMTEXT SIZE: A . A . A

Gesture-based controls have become sowidespread they seem almost mundane. We casually flip through photos on our smartphones and have no problem swinging our arms back and forth in front of an Xbox Kinect. However, both touchscreens and camera-based recognition systems require specialty hardware. At Microsoft, researchers have created a program called SoundWave that needs only a speaker and a microphone.

Sound might seem like an unusual choice for gesture recognition—after all, moving hands need not make any noise. But SoundWave isn’t trying to detect the sound of your hands. Instead, the speaker plays an ultrasonic tone, one that is high-pitched enough to be inaudible to the user. The microphone then detects changes in the ultrasound and interprets those changes as movement.

Sidhant Gupta, a graduate student at the University of Washington, stumbled upon the idea while working on a different project. While measuring the frequency of a 40-kHz ultrasound wave, he noticed that the computer’s microphone was behaving oddly, picking up rogue signals at 39 and 41 kHz. "I thought it was a loose wire and that I should fix it."

Even after double-checking that all connections were secure, the abnormal signal persisted. He then realized that it wasn’t an equipment malfunction. The phantom ultrasound waves were the result of his leg idly bouncing up and down in his seat, produced by something out of high school physics: the Doppler effect. Think of an ambulance siren as it zooms down the street. The change in pitch that you hear is determined by the Doppler Shift formula. If the sound source is zooming toward you, you get more sound waves, resulting in a higher frequency and a higher-pitched siren. If it’s speeding away, the opposite happens.

When Gupta sits still, the sound waves bounce off his leg and back into the computer microphone, registering as 40 kHz. However, when he starts to fidget, the bounced sound waves appear to be moving toward and away from the microphone. The restless leg produces a small, but measurable, change in frequency. Based on the pattern of these changes, he wrote a program that recognized whether his leg was moving up or down and expanded it to detect other types of movement and gestures.

Though using the Doppler effect to track human gestures has been around for a decade, it had always required customized equipment. SoundWave eliminates the need for any specialized hardware, requiring only basic technology. Computers, cell phones, and other electronics already come equipped with a speaker and microphone.

Microsoft is not looking to revolutionize motion control with ultrasound. Dan Morris, another researcher involved with SoundWave, envisions the program more as a supporting actor than a one-man show. SoundWave wouldn’t replace Kinect, but it could work beside it and make it better by making gesture recognition more accurate in more directions. "Computer vision isn’t perfect, so anything you can do to provide more information will make [gesture recognition] more accurate."

If there’s one worry about SoundWave, it is that the technology relies on the limited hearing range of adults for the ultrasound pulses to go undetected; but not everyone’s hearing is so diminished. For instance, products like the Mosquito antiloitering device play similar tones to specifically target and irritate the more sensitive ears of teenagers, and Bhiksha Raj, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, worries about the side effects of SoundWave on young children and pets. "Don’t get me wrong, the premise is brilliant," he says, "but you know what happens when you hear a high-pitched tone. They have to take care of these issues first."

Morris says the team is aware of that concern, and early in the project’s development they tested SoundWave in crowded environments where both dogs and kids abound, and never received any complaints. "We tested it with a 4-kHz tone and it was about as loud as the sound effects that normally come out of a laptop."

NASA Scientists Develop New Way to Accurately Predict Tsunami Size

Scientists typically use estimates of an earthquake's location, depth and magnitude to determine how big a tsunami could be—but a JPL team of researchers have found a method that might change how the killer waves are predicted.

By Erin McCarthy

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NASA's GPS-based prediction of the tsunami coming from Chile's 8.8-scale earthquake was right on the money.

June 14, 2010 5:47 PMTEXT SIZE: A . A . A

A NASA-led research team may have come one step closer to accurately predicting the size of earthquake-induced tsunamis.

Tsunamis are generated when an earthquake or underwater landslide displaces a large amount of water; only when that displaced water reaches shore does it turn into large waves. When an 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Chile on Feb. 27, scientists predicted that waves as high as 12 feet could hit Hawaiian shores; only 12-inch waves actually materialized. "Magnitude is just a proxy for how big [an earthquake] is," says Brian Shiro, a geophysicist at NOAA's Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. "It's tough to say how that translates to movement on the seafloor."

Because of the sheer size of the earthquake, Shiro says, a Pacific-wide warning was issued right away, before the typical models that predict the size of a tsunami—which use combined readings from deep ocean monitoring buoys and shore-based sea-level gauges—could even be run. (Hawaii residents completely evacuated to higher ground.) The first models predicted the 12-foot waves; a second model, obtained when more data became available, was right on at 12 inches, Shiro says.

A prototype detection system developed by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory more accurately predicted the size of the tsunami much more quickly, without the need for buoy feedback. The system used data from JPL's Global Differential GPS (GDGPS) network, which measures the ground movements—down to a few centimeters—of hundreds of regional and local GPS sites every second. The method allows scientists to estimate the amount of energy an undersea earthquake transfers to the ocean to create a tsunami.

The ground motion of the Feb. 27 quake was captured by a GDGPS station 146 miles from the quake's epicenter. Based on the GPS data—provided to scientists within minutes of the quake—the system predicted that a moderate local tsunami would be generated by the quake, with minimal effects in the Pacific; the result was confirmed using sea surface height measurements from altimetry satellites.

"This successful test demonstrates that coastal GPS systems can effectively be used to predict the size of tsunamis," team leader Y. Tony Song said in a press release. "This could allow responsible agencies to issue better warnings that can save lives and reduce false alarms that can unnecessarily disturb the lives of coastal residents."

Yoaz Bar-Sever, manager of the GDGPS system, says that scientists were fortunate to have a station close to the epicenter, which helped them get accurate results quickly. "Broad international collaboration is required to densify the GPS tracking network," he said, "so that it adequately covers all the fault zones that can give rise to large earthquakes around the world."

NOAA's deep ocean buoys and shore-based sea-level gauges are no longer the most accurate tsunami-detectors in town.

Ultra Fast Computers - new thin tech is the key - Moore's Law continues

VISIONARY TRANSPARENT MEMORY A STEP CLOSER TO REALITY

3 October 2012

Using graphene as crossbar terminals, Rice researchers are following through on groundbreaking research that shows silicon oxide, one of the most common materials on Earth, can be used as a reliable computer memory. The memories are flexible, transparent and can be built in 3D configurations. Graphic by Jun Yao/Rice University

Rice University making reliable 3D memories from silicon oxide and graphene

Researchers at Rice University are designing transparent, two-terminal, three-dimensional computer memories on flexible sheets that show promise for electronics and sophisticated heads-up displays.

The technique based on the switching properties of silicon oxide, a breakthrough discovery by Rice in 2008, was reported today in the online journal Nature Communications.

The Rice team led by chemist James Tour and physicist Douglas Natelson is making highly transparent, non-volatile resistive memory devices based on the revelation that silicon oxide itself can be a switch. A voltage run across a thin sheet of silicon oxide strips oxygen atoms away from a channel 5 nanometers (billionths of a metre) wide, turning it into conductive metallic silicon. With lower voltages, the channel can then be broken and repaired repeatedly, over thousands of cycles.

That channel can be read as a “1″ or a “0″, which is a switch, the basic unit of computer memories. At 5 nm, it shows promise to extend Moore’s Law, which predicted computer circuitry will double in power every two years. Current state-of-the-art electronics are made with 22 nm circuits.

The research by Tour, Rice’s TT and WF Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science; lead author Jun Yao, a former graduate student at Rice and now a post-doctoral researcher at Harvard; Jian Lin, a Rice postdoctoral researcher, and their colleagues details memories that are 95 per cent transparent, made of silicon oxide and crossbar graphene terminals on flexible plastic.

The Rice lab is making its devices with a working yield of about 80 per cent, “which is pretty good for a non-industrial lab,” Tour said. “When you get these ideas into industries’ hands, they really sharpen it up from there.”

Manufacturers who have been able to fit millions of bits on small devices like flash memories now find themselves bumping against the physical limits of their current architectures, which require three terminals for each bit.

But the Rice unit, requiring only two terminals, makes it far less complicated. It means arrays of two-terminal memories can be stacked in three-dimensional configurations, vastly increasing the amount of information a memory chip might hold. Tour said his lab has also seen promise for making multi-state memories that would further increase their capacity.

Yao’s discovery followed work at Rice on graphitic-based memories in which researchers saw strips of graphite on a silicon oxide substrate break and heal when voltage was applied. Yao suspected the underlying silicon oxide was actually responsible, and he struggled to convince his lab colleagues. “Jun quietly continued his work and stacked up evidence, eventually building a working device with no graphite,” Tour said. “And still, others said, ‘Oh, it was exogenous carbon in the system that did it!’ Then he built it with no exposure to carbon on the chip.”

Yao’s paper detailing the silicon oxide mechanism appeared in Nature’s Scientific Reports in January.

His revelation became the basis for the next-generation memories being designed in Tour’s lab, where the team is building memories out of silicon oxides sandwiched between graphene – one-atom-thick ribbons of carbon – and attached to plastic sheets. There’s not a speck of metal in the entire unit (with the exception of leads attached to the graphene electrodes).

The marriage of silicon and graphene would extend the long-recognised utility of the first and prove once and for all the value of the second, long touted as a wonder material looking for a reason to be, Tour said. He noted the devices not only show potential for radiation-hardened devices – several built at Rice are now being evaluated at the International Space Station – but also withstand heat up to about 700 degrees Celsius. That means they can be mounted directly atop integrated processors with no ill effects.

The lab is also building crossbar memories with embedded diodes to better manipulate control voltages, Tour said. “We’ve been developing this slowly to understand the fundamental switching mechanisms,” he said. “Industries have flown in and looked at it, but we’re doing basic science here; we don’t package things nice and pretty, so what they see looks rudimentary.

“But this is now transitioning into an applied system that could well be taken up as a future memory system,” he said.

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Flywheel car power gets a super boost and 20% efficiency savings

VOLVO CLAIMS 20 % FUEL SAVING POTENTIAL WITH FLYWHEEL TECH

26 May 2011

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A light, cheap and eco-efficient solution that makes a four-cylinder engine feel like a six at the same time as cutting fuel consumption by up to 20 %: that's the forecast from Volvo about its proposed flywheel technology.

Later this year, Volvo will test the potential of flywheel technology on public roads. The company has received a grant of R7,3 million from the Swedish Energy Agency for developing next-generation technology for kinetic recovery of braking energy in a joint project together with Volvo Powertrain and SKF.

"Our aim is to develop a complete system for kinetic energy recovery. Tests in a Volvo car will get under way in the second half of 2011. This technology has the potential for reducing fuel consumption by up to 20 %. What is more, it gives the driver an extra horsepower boost, giving a four-cylinder engine acceleration like a six-cylinder unit," relates Derek Crabb, Vice President VCC Powertrain Engineering.

Flywheel assist is nothing new to Volvo: the company tested one in a 240 back in the 1980s. Others have tried out flywheels, most recently Porsche, which has taken the idea racing in its 918 RSR. Things have moved on since then, though, with steel flywheels giving way to light, efficient carbon fibre.

The new system, known as Flywheel KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System), is fitted to the rear axle. During retardation, the braking energy causes the flywheel to spin at up to 60 000 r/min. When the car starts moving off again, the flywheel's rotation is transferred to the rear wheels via a specially designed transmission.

The combustion engine that drives the front wheels is switched off as soon as the braking begins. The energy in the flywheel can be used to accelerate the vehicle when it is time to move off once again, or to power the vehicle once it reaches cruising speed.

"The flywheel's stored energy is sufficient to power the car for short periods. However, this has a major impact on fuel consumption. Our calculations indicate that the combustion engine will be able to be turned off about half the time when driving according to the official New European Driving Cycle," explains Crabb.

Because the flywheel is activated by braking and hence its spinning time is limited, the technology is at its most effective during stop-start driving such as busy urban conditions.

Combining the flywheel's stored energy with the combustion engine's full capacity equates to a 60 kW power boost. Thanks to the swift torque build-up this translates into rapid acceleration, Volvo says.

The Volvo flywheel weighs about six kilograms and measures 20 centimetres across. The carbon fibre wheel spins in a vacuum to minimise frictional losses.

"We are not the first manufacturer to test flywheel technology. But nobody else has applied it to the rear axle of a car fitted with a combustion engine driving the front wheels. If the tests and technical development go as planned, we expect cars with flywheel technology to reach the showrooms within a few years," says Crabb.

The technology is relatively cheap, Crabb says. "It can be used in a much larger volume of our cars than top-of-the-line technology such as the plug-in hybrid. This means that it has potential to play a major role in our CO2-cutting DRIVe Towards Zero strategy."

Source: Volvo