research

Chimps smarter than humans?

Japanese researchers pitted young chimps against human adults in two tests of short-term memory, and overall, the chimps won. It was a five-year-old chimp named Ayumu who received the top score.

Read the full story at MSNBC.com.

Benefit Saturday for stricken Survival Research Labs crew member

In September, after the Survival Research Labs show at Amsterdam's Robodock festival, tragedy struck.

One of the group's crew members, Todd Blair, was involved in an accident, and ended up in a coma, where he lay for weeks.

Recently, he's had some improvement, according to a blog chronicling his recovery, but he still remains in very bad shape.

Additionally, his medical bills have added up, and so SRL is hosting a fundraising benefit Saturday in San Francisco.

Called the Blue + Green Ball, the benefit will be at 8pm at San Francisco's SOMArts gallery, the site of … Read more

Still many questions about software for mobile computers

PALO ALTO, Calif.The great thing about the development of future mobile computers is that no one school of thought has come to dominate the territory. Of course, that's also a problem.

A group of panelists from the world's leading mobile operating system developers, including representatives from Symbian, Microsoft, MontaVista, and newcomer Google, perused a wide number of topics Tuesday afternoon at the Palo Alto Research Center, birthplace of so many technologies that changed the world. The panel, which also included executives from Nokia and Research in Motion, would like to do the same, but the hard and exciting … Read more

New Mac Review: Keep Wikipedia research focused with Pathway

If you've ever done a search on Wikipedia.org, you know that as you read a particular article there are hundreds of links to related items that are incredibly hard not to click on. In my experience, I'll go into Wikipedia with a specific goal in mind only to find myself reading something completely different 20 minutes later. While this could be because of my desire to see it all, I'm pretty sure I'm not alone when I say some of the most interesting Wikipedia pages are the ones you stumble across you never would have known existed otherwise. Unfortunately, clicking around on links is not conducive to getting your originally planned research done.… Read more

Patent troll Acacia gets its first day in court...and loses

I failed to see this last week, but Acacia Research, the patent troll that recently went after Red Hat and Novell, got its first day in court with a Texas jury and lost. Big time. It was seeking $900 million in damages, as paidContent notes, and instead got 35 percent of its stock price chopped.

I weep for Acacia. OK. Maybe not. Looking at this stock chart, I will admit that a smile has played across my face:… Read more

'Seam carving' photo resizing now for video

MONTEREY, Calif.--In August, researchers unveiled a new way of shrinking or expanding photos called seam carving. Now it turns out the technique applies to video, too.

Ariel Shamir, a senior lecturer at the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science in Israel and a visiting scientist with Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, showed off the technique at the 6sight digital-imaging conference here last week. (Adobe Systems has hired another seam carving researcher, Shai Avidan.) The technology analyzes a picture for vertical or horizontal "seams"--the term the researchers use to describe a path traversing the photo where pixels are … Read more

New computer interface: Blow on the screen

Perhaps huffing at your computer might get you somewhere if research at the Georgia Institute of Technology comes to fruition.

Shwetak Patel and Gregory Abowd from Georgia Tech have published a paper that describes how to use a computer microphone to determine where on a screen a person is blowing. The technique, which they call BLUI for Blowable and Localized User Interaction, can distinguish between the different sounds air makes depending on where the breath is directed.

"BLUI supports blowing at a laptop or computer screen to directly control specific parts of an interactive application, such as blowing at … Read more

Up next: Cameras that know who you photographed

MONTEREY, Calif.--Get ready for a new era in which your camera knows not just when you took a picture but who's in it, too.

Many cameras today can detect the faces of those being photographed, which is handy for guiding the camera to set its exposure, focus, and color balance properly. But the more difficult challenge of face recognition is more useful after the photo has been taken.

That's because of a concept called autotagging, one of a number of technologies that make digital photography qualitatively different from the film photography of the past.

Tags of descriptive … Read more

Bill Bradley minces no words with tech elites

BOSTON--Bill Bradley cannot possibly be running for president.

The former senator did not sugarcoat any of his opinions at a keynote address that took place as a question-and-answer session led by AMR Research CEO Tony Friscia at the Executive Leadership Conference 2007 in Boston on Tuesday.

Friscia questioned Bradley's ideas put forth in his book, The New American Story and its message of collectiveness and necessary sacrifice if the U.S. is going to stay on top.

The topics discussed--while grounded in effects on technology companies globally--took many unusual turns. Bradley waned, waxed and warned on the sorry state … Read more