news 2020

Adding to the richness of virtual reality, EPFL researchers have created soft actuators that can simulate the feeling of touching a virtual object with your fingers. In the virtual world, the objects you pick up do not exist: you can see that cup or pen, but it does not feel like you're touching them.

By Susanne Eigner Researchers at TU Graz and AVL focus on software systems of autonomous driving systems. They developed a method for generating safety-critical simulation scenarios and an adaptive control procedure for compensating for internal errors. Additional can be found at the end of the message The future has already arrived.

Researchers at the University of Sussex have developed a system which can accurately predict a period of drought in East Africa up to ten weeks ahead. Satellite imagery is already used in Kenya to monitor the state of pastures and determine the health of the vegetation using a metric known as the Vegetation Condition Index.

Carnegie Mellon researcher develops instructional tool to combat information bubbles A Carnegie Mellon University researcher is proposing that students can learn to make their civil discourse more productive through an video game powered by artificial intelligence. The educational system targeted toward high schoolers adapts to students' specific values and can be used to measure - and in some cases reduce - the impact of bias.

In the Medical Image Processing Lab, Dimitri Van De Ville and Thomas Bolton have studied the impact that computational imaging has on cognitive and clinical neuroscience by reviewing more than one hundred articles. How are human behavior and brain activity linked? That question has been eating away at Thomas Bolton ever since he started his PhD.

By Christoph Pelzl The e-prop learning method developed at Graz University of Technology forms the basis for drastically more energy-efficient hardware implementations of Artificial Intelligence. The high energy consumption of artificial neural networks' learning activities is one of the biggest hurdles for the broad use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially in mobile applications.

Researchers have invented a way of automatically working out what data needs to be put into a complex system - such as a fiber optic network - in order to get the desired result. Their solution could prove especially useful in robotics, medicine and image projection. In any system, you need some kind of input and output, with an action taking place in between.

New research, based on earlier results in mice, suggests that our brains are never at rest, even when we are not learning anything about the world around us. Finding coherent patterns in this large assembly of cells is challenging, much like trying to determine the behaviour of a swarm of insects by watching a random sample of individuals Timothy O'Leary Our brains are often likened to computers, with learned skills and memories stored in the activity patterns of billions of nerve cells.

Carnegie Mellon University approach requires neither studio nor specialized cameras Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have demonstrated that they can combine iPhone videos shot "in the wild" by separate cameras to create 4D visualizations that allow viewers to watch action from various angles, or even erase people or objects that temporarily block sight lines.

To Achim Walter it's clear: the budding artificial intelligence will decisively advance agroecology. But before we can harvest the fruits of AI, computers still have a lot to learn. Over-fertilised fields, compacted soils, greenhouse gases and insect death - the list of problems in agroecology is both old and long.

Stanford scientists find the growth of phytoplankton in the Arctic Ocean has increased 57 percent over just two decades, enhancing its ability to soak up carbon dioxide. While once linked to melting sea ice, the increase is now propelled by rising concentrations of tiny algae. Scientists at Stanford University have discovered a surprising shift in the Arctic Ocean.

UCLA bioengineers have designed a glove-like device that can translate American Sign Language into English speech in real time though a smartphone app. The ir research is published Electronics. "Our hope is that this opens up an easy way for people who use sign language to communicate directly with non-signers without needing someone else to translate for them," said Jun Chen, an assistant professor of bioengineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and the principal investigator on the research.

An EPFL lab, has come up with a new type of logic diagram and related optimization methods, that can be used to design computer chips with a nearly 20% gain in energy efficiency, speed or size. The lab has just entered into a license agreement with Synopsys, a global leader in electronic design automation and chip fabrication software.

Researchers have demonstrated how machine learning could help design lithium-ion batteries and fuel cells with better performance. A new machine learning algorithm allows researchers to explore possible designs for the microstructure of fuel cells and lithium-ion batteries, before running 3D simulations that help researchers make changes to improve performance.

By giving women access to information they otherwise wouldn't have, mobile phones are transforming lives. Putting smart phones in women's hands could be a powerful tool to support sustainable development goals in the developing world, according to researchers from McGill University, University of Oxford and Bocconi University.

SwissCovid - a tracing app developed in part by EPFL - is being made available today to the general public, one month after the pilot tests began. The app will be a useful tool in stemming the spread of the disease as the number of cases in Switzerland is back on the rise. The World Health Organization was clear in its warning: the COVID-19 pandemic is not over, and in some places it's just as strong as ever.

New research at CMU maps how the brain represents a particular sequence of actions when tying a knot Robert Mason and Marcel Just' s new research at Carnegie Mellon University have decoded the step-by-step processing that takes place in the brain when various knots are tied. Their work was published online in the May issue of the journal Psychological Science.

83% of technology (tech) professionals would consider working in healthcare and pharma, with 72% more likely to consider it compared to six months ago   86% of tech professionals agree: the healthcare and pharma industry's "digital moment" has arrived   Report includes insights from Microsoft, MIT and Benevolent AI on the powerful pairing of science and technology to reimagine medicine.

By Birgit Baustädter She investigates black-box-systems, while he predicts the state of networked systems. Andrea Pferscher and Markus Tranninger are two of 11 young researchers in the TU Graz project "Dependable Things". Eleven young researchers are working as doctoral students or post-docs in the TU Graz lead project "Dependable Internet of Things in Adverse Environments" - "Dependable Things" for short.

By Christoph Pelzl New findings by researchers led by TU Graz computer scientists Wolfgang Maass and Robert Legenstein on neural information processing in the brain could enable more efficient AI methods. Additional can be found at the end of the message Specifically, the researchers have succeeded in mathematically modelling the emergence and interaction between so-called "assemblies".