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Posts Tagged ‘Stanford’

Earthquake detection software gains foothold in California

Stanford’s Quake-Catcher Network has been up and running since early 2008, but it looks like it’s just now starting to reach the critical mass of users that’s essential for its success. As you may be aware, the software takes advantage of the accelerometers built into many new laptops to watch for any signs of shaking or vibration, which it then compares with data from other laptops in the same area — if they’re all shaking at the same time, that’s a pretty good indication there’s an earthquake happening. Until recently, however, there hasn’t been enough users in any particular area to produce reliable data, but Stanford now counts more than 450 users in California alone, which has provided it with its first truly viable testbed. Of course, more users would be even better, and you can sign up and download the software at the link below if you’re interested in helping out.

Earthquake detection software gains foothold in California originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sexist computers: male voices are apparently harder to recognize than female ones

Researchers up at the University of Edinburgh have determined that the male voice is harder for voice recognition software to pick up and understand than its female counterpart. This conclusion was reached after telephone conversation recordings were run through a battery of tests, which revealed that men seem to say “umm” and “err” more often, while also identifying that the greatest difficulties arise with words that sound similar and can arise in the same context, such as “him” and “them.” Equally troubling is the first word in a sentence, as it comes without context and therefore doesn’t benefit from any predictive assistance. Done in partnership with Stanford, the study was aimed at identifying and overcoming the major hurdles to producing usable and reliable voice recognition — something Google’s universal voice translator phone is also aiming to achieve. Let’s hope somebody figures out how to get around all our hemming and hawing, eh?

Sexist computers: male voices are apparently harder to recognize than female ones originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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IBM, Broadband up efficiency and drop costs with thin-film solar experiments

Recent advances in materials and design have resulted in thin-film solar modules that are more efficient and affordable than ever. Now IBM has developed its own thin-film product that uses common metals instead of pricey silicon. And a Stanford spinoff called Broadband Solar is using cheaper amorphous silicon coatings toward the same end.

Amorphous silicon coatings have been proven to up solar module efficiency by as much as 50 percent during advanced testing, according to Broandband. Containing nanoscale metallic particles, they actually absorb more sunlight, the company claims. Competitively priced with standard gallium-indium coatings, the amorphous silicon (which is more plentiful of a material) regularly increases module efficiency from 8 percent to 12 percent — a substantial change. Conveniently, the new coatings can be applied with the same machinery that has always been used in thin-film manufacturing plants.

It’s unlikely that Broadband will produce its own thin-film, or panels. It will probably make the bulk of its revenue by licensing its coating technology to other companies. By applying the company’s coatings, lesser-known thin-film makers could potentially achieve efficiencies equal to those reached by top dog First Solar at a reduced cost.

IBM’s alternative thin-film chemistry (pictured above), on the other hand, has a slightly lower efficiency rating — converting 9.6 percent of the sunlight absorbed into energy, compared to the 11 percent achieved by most commercial thin-film modules. However, similar metal films have hit efficiencies of nearly 20 percent during laboratory testing.

What makes IBM’s new product special is that it is 40 percent more efficient than typical common-metal modules, which are much cheaper than their silicon competitors. The computing giant plants to continue development of its copper, zinc, tin, sulfur and selenium concoction until it tops a 12 percent efficiency. At that point, its modules would be much more powerful and a lot cheaper than many of the market leaders.

In addition to being much cheaper, the materials in IBM’s pioneering thin-film are much greener too. Current technologies using cadmium, tellurium, gallium and indium aren’t easy to recycle, and have previously resulted in toxic contamination problems.

Like Broadband, IBM isn’t interested in manufacturing its own solar panels either — it will also be licensing its thin-film design to companies that are equipped to churn out utility-scale volumes of photovoltaics. Now if only Broadband’s coating could be applied to IBM’s eventual material, a veritable uber-film could result.

[Image via Inhabitat]

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BlockChalk Is Location-Based Sidewalk Chalk For Your Mobile Device

With its new geolocation API, Twitter has the potential to delve into the realm of messages that are relevant based on location. But right now, most geotagged tweets are simply regular tweets that are being tagged with location, and really don’t have much specifically to do with it. Enter BlockChalk, a new service built around the idea of leaving simple messages directly tied to a specific location.

The service, created by Stephen Hood, the former product team lead for Delicious, and Dave Baggeroer of Stanford’s Institute of Design, works because they keep it simple. You load up the application on your mobile device, it locates you, and you leave a message. This can be whatever you want: A note about a good cafe, a tip of something in the neighborhood to watch out for, a request to borrow something that someone else may have in the neighborhood, etc. When other people also using the app come upon the area that you’ve pinned your “Chalk” (their word for message) to, they’ll see it on their screen in a stream of Chalks.

And you can do a bit more with these Chalks. With the service’s new iPhone app, if you use the syntax “[here],” BlockChalk will put in your exact location. You can also attach a link to a location on a map by inserting an actual address in those same brackets. If you don’t do either of these, BlockChalk will hide your exact location, and keep your message pinned to the general area instead.

Once you drill down to a specific Chalk, you can choose to “Chalkback” (respond publicly to a message), “Reply Privately” (respond just to the user who left the Chalk), “Bury,” or “Share,” the chalk.

While I noted the service’s new iPhone app (which you can find in the App Store here as a free download), it’s already available on a number of other platforms thanks to some more advanced web technology. For example, you can use it on Android phones (or the mobile web of the iPhone, for that matter) because the web-based version of BlockChalk uses HTML5 to access location through the browser, Hood tells us. Obviously, that’s a vital part of the app. There is also a webOS BlockChalk app already that will work on the Palm Pre or Pixi. Hood notes that they are currently working on native apps for Android and BlackBerry as we speak.

Thanks to this mobile web usage, BlockChalk is already available in some 93 countries, 6751 cities and 10910 neighborhoods. And while the obvious integration with Twitter’s new location feature is pretty loose right now, Hood tells us that in the next release, it will be much tighter.

The company is in the process of raising a seed round of funding. And while obviously they’ve declined to say how much they’re looking to raise, we hear Hood’s old Delicious counterpart Joshua Schachter is interested. That shouldn’t be surprising given his recent location-based investments.

Learn more in the video below:

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Stanford wants to roll its own paper batteries

It was only a couple of months ago that MIT was wooing us with the energy-preserving properties of carbon nanotubes, and in a classic act of oneupmanship Stanford has now come out and demonstrated paper batteries, which work thanks to a carbon nanotube and silver nanowire “ink.” We’ve seen this idea before, but the ability to just douse a sheet of paper in the proper magical goo and make a battery out of it is as new as it is mindblowing. Battery weight can, as a result, be reduced by 20 percent, and the fast energy discharge of this technology lends itself to utilization in electric vehicles. The video after the break should enlighten and thrill you in equal measures.

Continue reading Stanford wants to roll its own paper batteries

Stanford wants to roll its own paper batteries originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Dec 2009 05:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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DFJ-Backed Clixtr Marries Photos With Location, Launches Website

Clixtr, a startup that first presented itself to a wide audience at this year’s TechCrunch50 Conference (our take), kicked off things with a relatively limited offering – a paid iPhone app – but is now upping its game with the launch of an accompanying location-aware photo sharing website.

It’s also dropping the price of its iPhone application to zero, so if you and the rest of the family will be taking pictures today over Thanksgiving dinner, take notice.

The fledgling company, founded by MIT and Stanford grads, aims to turn smartphones into what they refer to as ’smartcameras’ or ’social cameras’. The basic idea behind the service is that when you’re at an event, be it a birthday party at your home or at a massive rock concert, photos from multiple people attending could be turned into one single, centralized photo album for all to enjoy.

To make this work, even when pictures are taken by people you do not know, Clixtr uses location as the tying factor. The app essentially combines the capabilities of the iPhone’s camera and built-in GPS to geo-tag photos and determine when photos are being taken at the same location. Clixtr thus enables users to automagically create instant, location-aware, group photo albums in real-time (lots of buzzwords there, but that’s the way it works).

Before, Clixtr users could only add photos to albums using the now free iPhone application (which cost $2.99 at launch), but with the launch of the corresponding website at Clixtr.com anyone can now contribute to the group albums. Since the application can also detect which other events are happening around you based on where you’re taking photos, Clixtr can double as a discovery engine for other happenings going on around you.

No word on if and when the company plans to extend its service to include other smartphone platforms.

Clixtr founder and CEO Fergus Hurley waved goodbye to his PhD program in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT to incorporate the startup back in 2008, and went on to raise an undisclosed amount of seed financing from Silicon Valley VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson in March 2009.

What’s your take?

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YouTube Videos Get Automatic Captions

Google just announced that YouTube can now automatically generate captions and subtitles for videos in English. For now, this feature is only enabled on a handful of partner channels, but Google plans to make this feature available for all users in the future.

In the meantime, YouTube now also offers a new ‘automatic caption timing’ feature for all new uploads that makes it easier to add captions manually. You simply upload a text file with a transcript of the video and Google’s speech recognition technology will figure out when those words are spoken and create captions based on this information.

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As Google points out, YouTube’s users currently upload over 20 hours of video every minute – and most of this video isn’t accessible for users with hearing impairments. While uploaders could always add captions to their videos manually, only a very small minority of users ever did so.

YouTube’s speech recognition technology is based on the same speech-to-text algorithms that transcribe voicemails in Google Voice. You can also translate these captions into 51 languages.

As expected, these captions aren’t always perfect, but work surprisingly well on the videos that we have seen so far.

If you want to have a look at how these captions work, have a look at one of the videos in the UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Yale, UCLA, Duke, UCTV, Columbia, PBS, National Geographic, Demand Media, UNSW and Google & YouTube channels.

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ROS: a common OS to streamline robotic engineering

The biannual International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence has this year shed light on a new effort to standardize robot instructions around a common platform, so that designers won’t have to “reinvent the wheel over and over” with every project. Presently, robot design is undertaken in an ad hoc fashion, with both hardware and software being built from scratch, but teams at Stanford, MIT and the Technical University of Munich are hoping to change that with the Robot Operating System, or ROS. This new OS would have to compete with Microsoft’s robotics offering, but the general enthusiasm for it at the conference suggests a bright future, with some brave souls even envisioning a robot app store somewhere down the line. Video after the break.

Continue reading ROS: a common OS to streamline robotic engineering

Filed under: Robots

ROS: a common OS to streamline robotic engineering originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 Aug 2009 01:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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