Top 5 Coolest Projects by MIT Researchers, Students

Top 5 Coolest Projects by MIT Researchers, Students

MIT, or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is known for its strong emphasis on scientific and technological education as well as research. So, it’s no surprise that many of the school’s students have created some cool projects over the years. Continue reading to see five of the coolest.

5. One Trillion FPS Imaging System

MIT Media Lab researchers have created a new imaging system that can acquire visual data at a rate of one trillion frames per second. That’s fast enough to produce a slow-motion video of light traveling through objects.

4. CityCar

The City Car. A concept proposed for dense urban areas, the City Car is a stackable car for two passengers. By placing stacks at key points of convergence, such as bus and subway lines, the system offers travelers the flexibility to combine mass transit with individualized mobility. Each stack receives incoming vehicles and electrically charges them, then users simply remove a fully-charged vehicle from the front of the stack just as they’d pick up a luggage cart at the airport.

3. Siftables

Siftables aims to enable people to interact with information and media in physical, natural ways that approach interactions with physical objects in our everyday lives. As an interaction platform, Siftables applies technology and methodology from wireless sensor networks to tangible user interfaces. Siftables are independent, compact devices with sensing, graphical display, and wireless communication capabilities. They can be physically manipulated as a group to interact with digital information and media. Siftables can be used to implement any number of gestural interaction languages and HCI applications.

2. Mouseless

Mouseless is an invisible computer mouse. It provides the familiarity of interaction of a physical mouse without actually needing a real hardware mouse. Mouseless consists of an Infrared (IR) laser beam and an Infrared camera. Both IR laser and IR camera are embedded in the computer. The IR camera detects those bright IR blobs using computer vision. The change in the position and arrangements of these blobs are interpreted as mouse cursor movement and mouse clicks. As the user moves their hand the cursor on screen moves accordingly. When the user taps their index finger, the size of the blob changes and the camera recognizes the intended mouse click.

1. BiDi Screen

The BiDi Screen is an example of a new type of I/O device that possesses the ability to both capture images and display them. This thin, bidirectional screen extends the latest trend in LCD devices, which has seen the incorporation of photo-diodes into every display pixel. Using a novel optical masking technique developed at the Media Lab, the BiDi Screen can capture lightfield-like quantities, unlocking a wide array of applications from 3-D gesture interaction with CE devices, to seamless video communication.

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Sprint’s HTC Evo 4G LTE launching June 2 (Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

Sprint’s HTC Evo 4G LTE launching June 2 (Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

After a patent-based delay, the HTC Evo 4G LTE is ready for its spotlight.

(Credit: CNET)

After a delay, Sprint and HTC have a launch date locked down for the HTC Evo 4G LTE, Sprint’s new flagship device: June 2.

A patent spat with Apple slowed down shipments of the Evo 4G LTE — and of the HTC One X — but Sprint assured customers last week that it would be able to fulfill pre-orders of the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich handset starting May 24.

The HTC Evo 4G LTE features a 4.7-inch screen, a dual-core processor, a great 8-megapixel camera and sells for $ 199.99. Despite its LTE-readiness, Sprint has yet to ignite its 4G LTE network.

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The Great Bandwidth Brawl

The Great Bandwidth Brawl

The Great Bandwidth Brawl

Wireless networks are scrambling to feed the growing hunger for mobile data and downloads.

• Wednesday, May 30, 2012
• By Tom Simonite

Flickr Creative Commons | Henry__Spencer

AT&T has a problem in Chicago. The city was one of the first to be upgraded to the wireless carrier’s next-generation LTE (long-term evolution) network, which packs more data into a radio signal and offers much faster download speeds. But independent tests published this month showed that AT&T downloads in Chicago are less than half the speed of those on Verizon’s LTE network there. The reason? A lack of radio spectrum. AT&T’s radio licenses allow it to use only a 10-megahertz chunk of the airwaves for its LTE network in Chicago, compared with the 20 megahertz it has in other cities

AT&T faces the same problem in Los Angeles, and it’s just part of a challenge confronting the whole mobile communications industry: how to reconcile consumer expectations of forever faster, cheaper downloads on mobile Internet devices with limited room in the airwaves.

Networks are not in danger of running out of capacity just yet. Carriers have spent large sums buying up rights to the radio spectrum, and they’re being creative about ways to squeeze more out of what they already have. (Exact speeds vary, but an LTE connection is typically 10 times faster than one provided by a 3G network.) The federal government licenses spectrum space, and wireless carriers and other companies have for many years bought up and hoarded licenses, anticipating the need to expand.

But the largely unforeseen explosion in demand for wireless bandwidth, driven by the appearance of tablets and smart phones, has made it more urgent to ensure a supply for future use.  AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel says network traffic and the company’s spectrum portfolio affect the kind of service that users receive in different areas. “We will continue to invest and innovate to make the best, most efficient use of available spectrum across our network,” he says.

Chances are it will be able to fix the problem before too long. The company is sitting on unused spectrum acquired in 2006 that it eventually plans to use for LTE. It recently paid $ 1.9 billion to mobile chipmaker Qualcomm for wireless spectrum to serve important markets including San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles. Verizon is simultaneously trying to sell off one chunk of spectrum it has owned for years and to buy anotherâ€"one it thinks is better suited to LTEâ€"from a consortium of cable companies. AT&T and T-Mobile both have plans to recycle some of their spectrum currently used for slower, 2G data connections, upgrading it to serve LTE connections so it can carry more data.

Carriers are increasingly looking for creative tactics that will relieve pressure on their networks. “Spectrum is certainly a limiting factor, but carriers are also constrained by a number of other things, too, particularly backhaul,” says Bill Moore of RootMetrics, which gathers data on cell-phone network bandwidth and other performance measures that are freely available online. Backhaul refers to the physical connections that link cell-phone towers to the Internet and phone networks. All carriers are working hard to upgrade their backhaul, replacing copper cable with high-capacity optical fiber.

Getting the necessary permissions to replace or install underground fiber is a slow process, says Bryan Darr, CEO of Mosaik Solutions, which collects data on wireless network coverage. That explains Verizon’s alliance with a consortium of major cable companies to connect their networks, announced late last year. “The cable operators have an awful lot of cable in the ground that’s capable of handling a lot of traffic,” says Darr. “They also know themselves that they need to be connected to the wireless industry because that’s where the future of content like TV is.”

A way to sidestep bottlenecks caused by constraints on spectrum and backhaul is to have smart phones and tablets make use of Wi-Fi as much as possible, says Darr. AT&T is investing heavily in that strategy by installing Wi-Fi hotspots in stadiums and busy city areas in Manhattan and San Francisco. Newer AT&T phones automatically switch to using Wi-Fi when in range, reducing the load on cell towers. “Once that can work more seamlessly for data and calls, it is going to be a huge help,” says Darr. This February AT&T reported that it had worked with other carriers, including China Mobile, on a successful trial of special Wi-Fi hotspots that can recognize an authorized device and take over its connection without dropping calls or interrupting downloads in progress.

Experts say that the major carriers are so far keeping pace with the demands of their customers. “Out of the four major national carriers, three are getting faster,” says Moore of RootMetrics; the fourth, Sprint, is due to introduce its first LTE networks this year, which should allow it to speed up too. He believes there is enough spectrum to go around but notes that carriers are caught in something of an arms race with their own customers. “All I see for now is that speeds go up,” says Moore, “and that will encourage consumer demands to go up as well.” Partly as a result, almost all wireless carriers phased out unlimited data plans last year. That means they can cap bandwidth use or charge more for it if they find demand for data outstripping their ability to supply it.

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Facebook Drops Google Chrome Recommendation, Replaces It With Opera (Vygantas/Web Browser)

Facebook Drops Google Chrome Recommendation, Replaces It With Opera (Vygantas/Web Browser)

More fuel to the rumor’s fire.

It looks like Facebook management decided not to bother with the Google Chrome anymore as their latest “unsupported web browsers” page has since then removed the search giant’s web browser.

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the last few days, chances are, you’ve heard about the social giant’s plans to acquire Opera.

Well, guess what, Facebook now recommends Opera over the Google Chrome and yes, let the speculations begin.

Cached Google Page Shows Interesting Changes

P.S. If the following page redirects you to the homepage, check the cached version.

[Thanks, Anonymous]

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Big Data For Higher Ed: With $4.1M From First Round, Floodgate, Former Kaplan Exec Launches Civitas Learning

Big Data For Higher Ed: With $4.1M From First Round, Floodgate, Former Kaplan Exec Launches Civitas Learning

As colleges and universities strain their resources to accomodate an ever-growing, diverse student body, it becomes increasingly difficult to track the progress of individual students and figure out what’s working in their curricula, coursework, testing, and teaching styles. An appalling number of students in the U.S. are still dropping out before they earn a degree, and despite Mark Zuckerbergian exceptions, attrition means sunk costs for students, difficulties finding jobs, and loan defaults.

To improve academic outcomes and keep students in school, teachers, learners and administrators need access to insight in realtime. Big data, predictive analytics, machine learning and recommendation engines are transforming the way we buy products, play games and watch movies, and Civitas Learning believes that the same should be true for education.

Historically, higher education has been anything but data driven, so this week the Austin-based startup came out of stealth to launch a service that combines student demographic, behavioral and academic info with next-gen analysis, recommendation and data modeling tech to let institutions build and make sense of their big data. The startup is working with community colleges, four-year universities, and proprietary schools to build what it claims is already the largest cross-institutional data set in the industry, with over one million student records and more than seven million course records on file.

To help the startup in its mission, Civitas has also announced that it has raised $ 4.1M in funding from Austin Ventures, First Round Capital, and Floodgate to help it bring big data insight to higher education.

With capital in tow, Civitas is looking to provide colleges and universities not only with smart learning tools but also the ability to create their own learning apps based on its “Learning Community’s” application programming interfaces. By doing so, Civitas is providing an alternative path for scaling tools and solutions across institutions, through supporting publisher-created apps as well as those built by startups that otherwise could never invest in the integrations with campus systems or the sales cycles necessary to establish relationships with higher ed institutions.

In turn, the startup’s participating institutions can identify trends across swaths of student learning data, including a realtime view of which students are at risk of dropping out (and why), the ability to identify specific courses and degree paths that are contributing to attrition, and, in turn, what specific resources and interventions are most successful and for what type of students.

Civitas, which was founded by Charles Thornburgh, a former executive at educational giant, Kaplan, who spent nine years as an in-house entrepreneur and launched a handful of edtech businesses for both K-12 and higher ed, is currently working with more than a dozen institutions to optimize their data sets. Student populations are becoming more diverse and learning modalities are expanding to include online and blended tools and platforms, and faculty responsibilities are changing (and growing) as a result. But leaving them without actionable data, crappy interfaces, and clunky reports as they take on more advising and student interventions is dangerous.

So, on the flip side, to help faculty channel the noise, Civitas allows them to flag which students are at risk based on realtime engagement data, providing informed intervention suggestions, examples of outreach resources that have helped similar students, and provide a glimpse into what techniques or curricular resources are working best. In turn, the service enables students to better choose degree and course selection, find better course combos, and recommend better ways to spend their time and get better grades.

As to how it’s making money? The startup plans to generate revenue by charging subscription fees to its member institutions based on how many administrators, faculty members and students are receiving its personalized reports and recs. Of course, institutions aren’t exactly rolling in cash, so the startup sees an opportunity to give a little bit back as its community grows by offering rev sharing apps made available through its learning network.

It’s a smart approach to yet another big problem in our educational system: Optimizing big data. As more schools join and its data set increases, its value to those institutions and their teachers and students will increase. Just as scores of startups and tech companies have done with their own data sets and technologies. Of course, its all about building that network of institutions and just how well its recommendations play among teachers and students.

It took Netflix years to find the right concoction of algorithms, data, and intelligence to best optimize recommendations for movie recommendations and discovery, and hopefully Civitas has learned from Netflix and the many other examples. If it has, it stands to make the educational experience far more effective.

For more, find Civitas Learning at home here.

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There Is No Digital Divide

There Is No Digital Divide

We all know poor people are on the wrong side of an uncrossable technological chasm known as the “digital divide.” Their lack of iPads and data plans and broadband is just one more way they’re doomed to stay poor right up until they become the shock troops of the zombie apocalypse, am I right?

Indeed, a recent New York Times piece, “Wasting Time Is New Divide in Digital Era” (or, as Gawker put it, “Poor People Are Wasting Time on the Internet!”) asserts that while all kids are spending more time with media, those with lower socio-economic status were spending even more of it, and on activities like Facebook that aren’t exactly conducive to learning. In other words: even when you give poor people access to technology, they don’t know what to do with it! Might as well give a paleolithic tribe access to a chip fab, pffft.

Jessie Daniels, Associate Professor of urban public health at Hunter College and CUNY and author of a forthcoming book on Internet propaganda, tweeted her displeasure at the piece. (There’s even a Storify of all her comments on it.)

Given her background in the subject, I asked Daniels to amplify her concerns about how the Times piece on the “New Digital Divide” missed the point. The results are an intriguing take on how our cultural biases inform how we look at access to technology, and could have implications for the hundreds of millions the Federal government plans to spend on closing the “digital divide.”

1. Many technology writers (myself included) take for granted that there is a “digital divide.” In your tweet, were you saying that there isn’t a “digital divide,” or that the framing of it is harmful? (Or both?)

Daniels: “Right, I think we’ve all sort of accepted the “digital divide” framework, but there are some real problems with that.  First of all, saying there is a “digital divide” presumes a shared understanding of that term and there’s not one.  The original NTIA report from 1998 defined “digital divide” as someone with a desktop computer with (dial-up) Internet access. Since that time, those technologies have faded, yet the terminology has persisted. What many people have done is to talk about “multiple divides” or, as the New York Times did today, “new divides.”  But I find this framing problematic.

“I would argue, and lots of others have too, that the framing of “digital divide” treats lots of complex ideas about access to and use of Internet technologies in a simplistic, “either or” kind of way.  Following that 1998 NTIA report I mentioned, there were lots of research and popular press stories that talked about “technology haves and have nots.”  That’s far too simplistic for adequately understanding what’s happening with technology access and use.  And, it leads people – both researchers and journalists – to start asking the wrong kinds of questions, such as: “what’s wrong with the technology have-nots?”  And, “why can’t the technology have-nots behave more like the technology haves?” Given that in the original research, the middle- and upper-classes, whites, and men were more likelyt to have access to technology, those sorts of questions about the characteristics of the “have-nots” just point us to old ways of thinking about class, about race, and about gender.”

2. It sounds like you’re saying that, because we’ve framed the internet / technology habits of (to simplify) white men as “normal” or desirable, we’re in some sense missing the point. While that makes us look like dopes for making such assumptions, does that suggest anything hopeful about the “digital divide” or whatever we should call it?

Daniels: “Yes, that’s definitely part of it. Once again, affluent white men (to vastly simply) and their habits of access and use end up being the standard against which everyone else is measured, so that when there’s any difference from that pattern, it ends up getting read as “bad” or pathological somehow. 

“The framework of “digital divide” also encourages us to assume that certain categories of people (everyone other than white males) are somehow less technologically adept.  

“So, for example, some of the work I do is with homeless LGBT youth, most of whom are Black or Latina/o.  These young people are struggling with some big life challenges, and they are – like other people their age – completely wired. My research finds that Black/Latina/o LGBT youth who are homeless – in other words, the very people who should be on the “other side” of so-called the “digital divide,” are in fact, quite adept at technology and most have smart phones. They use this technology to survive – to find work, social services, avoid police or report police misconduct. And, they use their smart phones like everyone else does, to listen to music, to connect with friends, lovers, family.  But, the “digital divide” framework has no way to explain this. 

“Instead of “digital divide,” other scholars have talked about “digital fluency,” or even “digital entitlements” which I like better.  Of course, these metaphors carry their own symbolic weight, but how we talk about these issues matter.”

3. It sounds like the Feds are going to drop $ 200 million on putting digital educators in schools. Given that kids are already so plugged in (to their own uses for these technologies) do you think this is a good idea?

Daniels: “Yes, I actually think this is a good idea and there are lots of ways to make this work well.  

“In my own research with adolescents surfing the web, I found that while they were very adept at some things (opening multiple browser windows, locating things online quickly), they weren’t very good at some other, important tasks. For example, they weren’t good at deciphering “cloaked” sites from legitimate ones.  Cloaked sites are ones that disguise a political agenda by hiding authorship (e.g., www.martinlutherking.org looks like a civil rights site, but is in fact, run by white supremacists;  www.teenbreaks.com looks like a ‘reproductive health’ site, but is a pro-life site).  The good news is that it’s fairly easy and straightforward to teach the skills necessary to parse the good from the bad online.  

“Here, I’d point to the work of my friend Howard Rheingold and his new book “Net Smart,” which is an excellent guide for how to be a digitally fluent user of all the technologies we have available to us now.  It’s an excellent book and I think the FCC should include it in their plan for training the digital educators going into schools!

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Judge: Oracle Java API elements not covered by copyright law, related claims against Google dismissed (Bryan Bishop/The Verge)

Judge: Oracle Java API elements not covered by copyright law, related claims against Google dismissed (Bryan Bishop/The Verge)

Things weren’t looking good for Oracle after the jury found that Google hadn’t infringed upon the company’s patents in the second phase of the trial, but the issue of infringement of the structure, sequence, and organization of 37 Java APIs was still up in the air. Judge William Alsup ended the discussion today, ruling that the SSO of the APIs is not covered under current copyright law â€" and dismissing Oracle’s related infringement claims outright. The judge had asked the jury to assume the SSO was in fact copyrightable when he sent them into deliberations; under those circumstances, the jurors found that Google had infringed, but was deadlocked on the question of whether Google was protected under fair use.

While Alsup’s ruling had been anticipated as one that might set sweeping precedents for the copyrightability of software in general, Alsup instead focused very narrowly on the specific factors involved in this case. Noting that 97 percent of the lines of code used in the 37 APIs came from Google, rather than Sun or Oracle, Alsup writes that Oracle’s only recourse to claim infringement had been to cite the structure of the APIs. Accepting such an argument, however, would be tantamount to letting a single company or programmer prevent others from creating any other software that replicated similar functionality:

In closing, it is important to step back and take in the breadth of Oracle’s claim. Of the 166 Java packages, 129 were not violated in any way. Of the 37 accused, 97 percent of the Android lines were new from Google and the remaining three percent were freely replicable under the merger and names doctrines. Oracle must resort, therefore, to claiming that it owns, by copyright, the exclusive right to any and all possible implementations of the taxonomy-like command structure for the 166 packages and/or any subpart thereof – even though it copyrighted only one implementation. To accept Oracle’s claim would be to allow anyone to copyright one version of code to carry out a system of commands and thereby bar all others from writing their own different versions to carry out all or part of the same commands. No holding has ever endorsed such a sweeping proposition.

With the ruling, the jury’s finding on the SSO infringement is now rendered moot, and after months of legal maneuvering Oracle now only has two things to show for its efforts: statutory damages for the use of nine lines of rangeCheck code and eight decompiled Java test files. At most, it will amount to a payout of just $ 300,000. Appeals are a certainty, however the specificity of Alsup’s ruling here will make it that much more difficult for his decision to be overturned (Alsup’s caution throughout the trial has indicated a real concern for making decisions that will be considered airtight when revisited later). Additionally, the judge is being smart in that he’s not claiming that APIs are not copyrightable under all circumstances â€" only that these particular elements, when matched with the specifics of the copyrights Oracle applied for, aren’t.

Nevertheless, it’s a vindicating end to this phase of the proceedings for Google. The company has provided us with the following statement in response to the ruling:

The court’s decision upholds the principle that open and interoperable computer languages form an essential basis for software development. It’s a good day for collaboration and innovation.

Matt Macari contributed to this report.

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