A math lab in a mobile phone

by ZDNet’s Roland Piquepaille

As most of us are using cell phones today, Israeli scientists have decided to put a math lab in your pocket. They developed a library of math modules which can be installed on almost cell phones available today. So you’ll be able to see graphs or solve equations on your phone while on a train or a bus ride. You’ll also be able to send graphs or formulas by SMS to other students — and to send the results of your exercises to your teacher. Did I mention you can download these applications for free?

The Math4Mobile platform has been developed by a team led by Michal Yerushalmy, Professor of Mathematics Education at the University of Haifa.

You can see on the left a real example of one of the applications developed by Michal Yerushalmy with the help of software developers Arik Weizman and Zohar Shavit. This particular one is called Graph2Go, which is a special-purpose graphing calculator that operates for given sets of function expressions. You can test it online here. It’s very easy to use: it looks like you type on a real phone. (Credit for image: Math4Mobile)

But why develop this kind of applications when students and teachers have already access to computers?

“I believe that mathematics needs to be learned in creative ways, and not by memorization and repetition. Just as physics and biology labs teach through experimentation, I believe that there should also be math labs, where learning is experiential,” said Prof. Yerushalmy. According to Prof. Yerushalmy, computerized math labs like these have been developed in the past, but the cost of computers and the limited availability of computer classrooms limited their use. Cellular phone applications are accessible to both teachers and students on the school campus, on the way home or just about anywhere else.

The Math4Mobile site offers more information and describes how these applications could be used.

You are a 16-year old student, waiting at a bus stop for your school bus, trying to prepare for the PreCalc exam. You take out your cellular phone, open the Math4Mobile m-Book and start learning. You can explore concepts and test your understanding by doing some quizzes that your teacher stored on the class site. You are already on the bus when your friend calls and asks for help with an exercise. You exchange messages, attaching the diagrams you worked on and compare your attempts at solving the problem. When you feel ready, you send the exercises to your teacher to check them. In the meantime you have arrived home. You check your teacher’s comments on your PC and continue working from your PC.

You’ll need a Java enabled (J2ME) phone with a recommended screen resolution of 176 x 208 pixels to use these applications — also called ‘midlets’ — which are available for free. Just visit this page and put a math lab in your pocket.

Sources: University of Haifa news release, July 10, 2007; and various websites

Prosessor Kinerja Tinggi next-generation

Prototipe prosessor komputer ‘general-purpose’ baru dan revplusioner (yang mampu mencapai “trilions calculations” per detik), telag berhasil didesain dan dibuat oleh tim computer scientists dari Universitas Texas.

TRIPS Prototype Processor

Prosessor baru dikenal sebagai TRIPS (Tera-op, Reliable, Intelligently adaptive Processing System), dapat digunakan untuk mempercepat komputasi industrial, konsumer dan saintifik.

Prototipe TRIPS merupakan “first roadmap” menuju prosessor flexible dan ultra-powerfull yang diimplementasikan pada teknologi skala-nano. TRIPS merupakan sebuah demonstrasi kelas baru arsitektur prosessor yang biasa disebut Explicit Data Graph Execution (EDGE). Tidak seperti arsitektur konvensional yang memroses satu instruksi setiap waktu, EDGE dapat memroses blok-blok besar informasi sekaligus pada saat bersamaan dan efisien.

Teknologi multicore saat ini meningkatkan speed dengan menambahkan prosessor yang secara individual tidak menjadikan lebih cepat dari prosessor sebelumnya. Penambahan prosessor mengakibatkan masalah bagi programmer dalam kerangka menghasilkan software dengan kinerja yang baik. Mereka kesulitan dalam coding program yang akan berjalan pada jumlah prosessor yang banyak.

Teknologi EDGE menyediakan pendekatan alternatif apabila teknologi multicore gagal.

Masing-Masing chip TRIPS memuat dua core pemroses, dan masing-masing dapat melakukan 16 operasi per siklus dengan jumlah instruksi 1024 secara simultan. Tipikal prosessor kinerja tinggi saat ini didesain untuk mempertahankan laju eksekusi maksimum dari empat operasi per siklus.

Sumber : Universitas Texas

Manajemen Data dengan Spreadsheet Logical

Lebih dari 20 tahun spreadsheet, seperti excel, menjadi tool penting di suatu organisasi atau institusi. Namun desain spreadsheet yang ada masih terbatas, terutama jika menyangkut komputasi matematika. Kebanyakan spreadsheet tidak didesain dengan “formula logikal”.

Ilmuwan komputer dari Stanford telah berhasil mengembangkan prototipe spreadsheet dengan kemampuan matematik logik (lihat ini a logical spreadsheet using logic instead of math ) untuk membantu kita dalam hal manajemen data dengan suatu cara yang innovatif. US-Army ingin menggunakannya untuk mengorganisasikan penempatan dan pelatihan tentara. Dan Stanford telah menggunakan untuk menjadualkan perkuliahan, event-event dan ruangan. Langkah selanjutnya adalah mengintegrasikan teknologi ini pada web, guna menggantikan form-form yang biasa kita isi melaluu “websheets”.

Penelitian teknologi ini telah dilakukan sejak 2001, dibawah pimpinan Prof. Michael Genesereth , dari departement ilmu komputer Universitas Stanford, dan bersama Michael Kassoff, kandidat doktor pada grup risetnya (Logical Spreadsheets project).

Berikut dua catatan penting dari Genesereth mengenai proyek ini.

• “There are many cases where traditional spreadsheets are just not sufficient. Why not have a spreadsheet that looks just like a regular spreadsheet except it has the ability to encode and use logical formulas? That’s what you can’t do with Excel in any way today.”

• Genesereth gives the example of trying to use a logical spreadsheet to plan a meal. “You enter the main course, and let the spreadsheet suggest greens and carbohydrates that are gastronomically compatible and satisfy nutritional requirements,” he says. “Or you can do it in the other order.” Traditional spreadsheets fail in such applications because they are more rigid and cannot represent logical constraints.

Lebih detail lihat link berikut:
http://www.physorg.com/news96729652.html
http://logic.stanford.edu/spreadsheet/
http://logic.stanford.edu/people/genesereth/

10 Emerging Technologies 2007

the 10 technologies we find most exciting–and most likely to alter industries, fields of research, and even the way we live.

As always, Technology Review’s annual list of emerging technologies to watch comprises projects in a broad range of fields, including medicine, energy, and the Internet.

Some, such as:

1. optical antennas and meta­materials, are fundamental technologies that promise to transform multiple areas, from computing to biology.
2. Our reports on peer-to-peer video, personalized medical monitors, and compressive sensing reveal how well-­designed algorithms could save the Internet, simplify and improve medical diagnoses, and revamp digital imaging systems in cameras and medical scanners.
3. Nanohealing and quantum-dot solar power demonstrate the potential of ­nanotechnology to make a concrete difference in our daily lives by changing the way we treat injuries and helping solar energy deliver on its promises.
4. Precise neuron control could help physicians fine-tune treatments for brain disorders such as depression and Parkinson’s disease.
5. And single-cell analysis could not only revolutionize our understanding of basic biological processes but lead directly to predictive tests that could help doctors treat cancers more effectively.
6. Finally, by combining location sensors and advanced visual algorithms with cell phones, mobile augmented reality technology could make it easier to just figure out where we are.

View the 10 Emerging Technologies in a special section.

The New Face of Emoticons

Warping photos could help text-based communications become more expressive.

By Duncan Graham-Rowe

Computer scientists at the University of Pittsburgh have developed a way to make e-mails, instant messaging, and texts just a bit more personalized. Their software will allow people to use images of their own faces instead of the more traditional emoticons to communicate their mood. By automatically warping their facial features, people can use a photo to depict any one of a range of different animated emotional expressions, such as happy, sad, angry, or surprised.

All that is needed is a single photo of the person, preferably with a neutral expression, says Xin Li, who developed the system, called Face Alive Icons. “The user can upload the image from their camera phone,” he says. Then, by keying in familiar text symbols, such as “:)” for a smile, the user automatically contorts the face to reflect his or her desired expression.

see more :

http://www.techreview.com/Infotech/18438/

For more information, this research work has been published online on March 12, 2007, by the Journal of Visual Languages and Computing under the name “Face Alive Icons.” Unfortunately, the Elsevier group doesn’t even provide an abstract — you need to pay $30 to read the article. But here is a link to a previous paper about these Face Alive Icons (PDF format, 8 pages, 386 KB), which was presented at the Seventeenth International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE’05), Taipei, Taiwan, July 14-16, 2005. The above illustrations have been extracted from this paper.

“Propagasi Affinitas” memperpendek waktu komputasi

Canadian computer scientists have developed a new algorithm named ‘affinity propagation’ which can considerably speed up IT systems. One of the researchers said that ‘affinity propagation works by considering all possible interpretations of the data at once.’ This new algorithm is based on pairing up pieces of data instead of putting them through a process of elimination. As an example, the system was used for handwriting recognition by looking at thousands of images of hand-written numbers taken from postal codes. It took only five minutes to find pictures that accurately accounted for the various styles of handwriting while the standard computing approach would take about five million years(!!!). This ‘affinity propagation’ could be used in a wide range of applications, such as medical imaging, drug discovery, genetics, telecommunications or airline or automobile traffic planning.

see more: http://www.news.utoronto.ca/bin6/070215-2952.asp , http://www.psi.toronto.edu/affinitypropagation/

Computers mimicking the brain

Computers mimicking the brain by ZDNet’s Roland Piquepaille — Researchers at the MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Research have used a biological model to train a computer model to recognize objects in busy street scenes, such as cars or people. Their very innovative approach, which combines neuroscience and artificial intelligence with computer science, mimics how the brain functions to recognize objects in the real world. This versatile model could soon be used for automobile driver’s assistance, visual search engines, biomedical imaging analysis or robots with realistic vision. It also have many potential applications for neuroscientists, to design augmented sensory prostheses for example.